Fic: See Noir Evil (67/?)
So I was going to post about this ridiculous article I read that the Boston Globe had about how global warming is clearly not real since 2007 wasn't the hottest year on record like the scientists predicted (it was only the second hottest, those stupid scientists!) in the beginning of the year, and how because there were record colds in some parts of the world (average means nothing to them) that must mean global warming is false.
Then I remembered that I don't feel like arguing why this is idiotic over and over again for the next few days, so I decided against it. Instead, here is more See Noir Evil, completely lacking in any kind of scientific or political merit whatsoever, much like the above mentioned article.
Sixty Six: A Little Help
She screamed as she came awake. She screamed from the core of herself. She screamed from the soul she had thought was gone forever.
Illyria screamed and rose into the air, her body slicing through it with a speed and grace that was unmatched by any. Her hair floated eerily around her head as she landed silently on the floor. She surveyed the room. It was empty, save for the bed she’d been on. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred.
Nothing, except for the strange sensation within her. The desperate, urgent need to do something was boiling inside of her. She clenched her fists and watched the air ripple away from her as she did so. Time was at a near stand-still. All was silent and motionless.
She could not wait. He was dying, and she would not allow that to occur. She made a silent demand to the universe that it would not be so. She was Illyria. She would not permit it. This time, she would listen to the thing inside of her that ached to save a simple human life.
Illyria flew out of the door and into the street. She bounded down it, nothing more than a streak of blue lightning to any with the power to see her. Gravity could not hold her as she skipped across the asphalt like a pebble across a pond, touching down for the briefest of instants before propelling herself forward.
People stood like statues all around her as she went, and they were nearly a blur, even to her enhanced senses. They were living their lives, some laughing, some crying, some smiling, some scowling. All of them were simple. All of them were human. All of them together were less than what she was alone.
Yet she envied them.
She could feel him as she ran. She could feel his eyes on her, and the way the hatred that simmered there always gave way to the tiniest flicker of caring, despite his best efforts. She could feel him watching her. Judging her, from wherever pitiful human souls went when their true existence was over. She imagined that he was smirking at her. She imagined he was smiling at her. She imagined that he might have somehow forgiven her.
She ran, but she didn’t know why, or even where she was going. Something drove her onward, and she obeyed it. The voice inside of her, the tiny, weak, pathetic little human voice urged her forward. It urged her to help. Help him.
Except she could never help him. Not Wesley. He was gone. He was lost to her, and she was lost to him. All that was left was the shell. She was nothing more than a shell. There was no purpose to her existence. There was no destiny for her to reclaim. That which she was, was gone, and in more ways than one. She was the shell. She was empty. She was meaningless.
And yet she pressed on.
Cars and bright lights flashed by her in a dizzying blur as she ran, twisting around corners and bounding up walls. She weaved in, out, and over the traffic, hardly even disrupting the beams of light that emerged from their headlights. She was a blur; a force of nature. Shell she might be, but she was also Illyria, and she would not relinquish her mastery over all things. Angel had shown her that. Meaningless as it all was, she would still exert her will. To do otherwise was unthinkable. To do otherwise meant she could never imagine his smile ever again.
These thoughts sickened her. These thoughts enraged her. These thoughts inspired her.
She ran.
There was blood all over her, but it wasn’t hers, so she didn’t care. It was getting hard to hold the kukris with the slickness of the blood coating the handles, but she just tightened her grip and pressed on anyway. The lobby to the building had looked like a bomb had gone off in it, and there were demons and Wolfram and Hart employees scattered everywhere in various stages of injury and death. Those that weren’t, those that tried to stop her, they were cut down without so much as a thought.
If these were the people that had hurt Xander, they deserved so much worse.
Buffy had torn through everything they’d thrown at her, which was probably a lot less than they’d had before whatever had happened in the lobby had gone down. She couldn’t believe it might be Xander to have caused that destruction. At least, she didn’t want to believe that she could believe it. After recent events, and after the stories she’d heard from some of the surviving Slayers, Xander might actually have been capable of slaughtering half a building full of demons. It was insane.
Then again, so was he.
Tears stung at Buffy’s eyes as she took the stairs three a time. Willow and the others were somewhere behind her, but they couldn’t move as fast as she could, and she wasn’t about to wait for them. Not after she’d heard the gunshots.
Buffy knew she had reached the correct floor when she saw the bullet holes that had ripped through the door and the splatter of blood that had sprayed out from them. She froze for a fraction of a second at the sight of that blood, and then grit her teeth and yanked the door open, diving through it into a roll in case someone thought to shoot at her from the other side.
When no one did, she sprang back up to her feet and raced down the hallway, trying not to stare at the far-too-much blood that was staining the walls. She squeezed her eyes and let the tears of anger that had built up there trail away behind her. When she opened them again, she saw them.
Xander, her Xander, his eye-patch gone and the full grotesque horror of his missing eye visible to all, was up against the wall. The other Xander, the twisted, evil, smooth-skinned Xander was standing in front of him. One hand was around Xander’s throat. The other was held back in a fist. The evil-Xander’s muscles were bulging with stolen power. His veins were pulsing grotesquely all over his body. His eyes were nearly popping out of his head. He was breathing heavily through his teeth, and looked as wild and demonic as anything she had ever seen.
He was going to kill Xander. There was blood everywhere, from wall to wall. A pool of it had formed under Xander, and the front of his shirt was soaked in it. Buffy paled.
The bullet holes. That was Xander’s blood out there.
His face was covered in it, and what bare skin was visible on his face was as pale and sickly as any vampire she had ever seen. The scarring all around his eye was almost completely white. Stark white. Just white.
He was going to die.
The other Xander plunged his fist forward. With the speed of it, with the strength of it, it would cave in Xander’s head. Buffy screamed and tried to stop him, running forward with one arm raising to throw one of her kukris. She wasn’t fast enough.
“No!” she screamed as the fist impacted with...
A blue lightning bolt.
Xander crumpled lifelessly to the floor. It was hard to breathe. It was hard to see. It was hard to think, but it was almost always hard to think, these days.
He tried anyway. He opened his good eye and blinked slowly, trying to figure out why his head hadn’t been Gallaghered by evil-him. It took a moment for the room to stop spinning before he could figure out why.
Evil-him had been thrown through the opposite wall. Plaster and metal was crashing down around the hole he’d created when he went through, and standing in front of it, taking heaving, angry breaths, was Illyria. Her fists were clenched and she stood proud and tall with her back to Xander. Her blue streaked hair was very nearly glowing with power. It was transfixing. He tried to reach out to touch it.
“Xander, no, Xander, don’t try to move,” came a soft voice. Xander let his head loll to one side. Tara was there. Wasn’t she? It was so hard to see her now. She was so faint. He blinked and tried to focus on her. He reached out for her.
And she reached back for him. Her fingers closed around his and he smiled. “It’s okay, Xander. I’m here. It’s g-going to be okay.”
She was so faint. He could...
He blinked again. He squeezed the hand holding his. It was not Tara’s.
“Buffy?” he asked. He could have sworn it was Tara. He looked around, desperate to find out where she’d gone. He could not see her. “Buffy? Where is she?”
“No, Xander, stay still!” Buffy pleaded, pressing a firm hand against his good shoulder. “Please, don’t move. Y-you’ve lost a lot of blood, okay? You have to stay still until the others arrive.” She set her weapons down beside him and ripped the midriff of her shirt off and then used the makeshift bandage to try and stop the flow of blood from his midsection. Tears were rolling down her face. “Oh God, Xander...”
There was a crash, and Xander looked up to see Illyria grunting as she pushed herself off of the wall. Her eyes were blue fire as she stared back at the other Xander. Xander smiled at the sight of her. She was awake. That was good.
“You can’t win this,” the other Xander said as he stepped closer to Illyria. The two of them were glaring at each other, each circling the other like a predator. “It’s already over. This is meaningless, you know that, right?”
Wesley stood by Illyria, one of him on either side of her. On her left was the Wesley in the immaculate white suit. On her right was the Wesley with the scar across his throat and the disheveled, wild appearance. They spoke as one. “All the more reason to fight.”
Illyria screamed and surged forward. Evil-Xander reacted by grinning and dropping his hands to his side. Thousands of tiny suction cups popped up on his face. Xander knew what those suction cups could do. He was going to soul-scrape Illyria. Xander raised a weary hand and rasped, “No! Don’t!”
Illyria’s fist connected solidly with evil-Xander’s face. Instead of absorbing the blow and becoming all the stronger for it,evil-Xander was sent flying backwards into one of the workstations along the wall, sending sparks flying and shards of the monitors exploding in an arc all around him. He groaned as he blinked up at Illyria.
“W-what? H-how?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Illyria said, in a mischievously innocent and breathy voice. “I’ve already had my soul scraped. It’s like the chicken pox. You only get it once.”
Evil-Xander blinked at her, and then he screamed and barreled towards her. He threw a fist at her face while she swung a kick at his midsection. The two blows impacted simultaneously, and they were both knocked in other directions. Illyria slid out into the hallway while the other Xander collided into another workstation. Xander felt a tiny smile slide across his face. All was as it should be. The bad guy was getting beaten up by his friends. He could rest now.
“Xander!”
His eye snapped open, and Tara was indeed kneeling beside him now. She was faded and translucent, but she was there. Buffy was beside her, solid and alive, working desperately to stop Xander from bleeding out completely.
“Don’t fall asleep, Xander,” Tara whispered. “You have to warn Buffy. You have to get her to turn off the portal.”
“Port hole?” Xander asked, frowning. All around him came the sounds of fists impacting against flesh, grunts and screams of exertion, and the crashing of bodies slamming into the equipment all over the lab. “Whaddya mean?”
It was hard to talk. It hurt to breathe. Hurt almost as much as the tongs used to. This was a new one. They’d never crushed his lungs before. Maybe now he’d remember what they wanted him to remember.
Another voice spoke. “Xander! Buffy! Oh God, is he okay!?”
He knew that voice. It was Willow’s voice. He smiled and looked up at her. She was kneeling right beside Tara. “Hiya, Wills.”
“He’s bleeding bad,” Buffy said. “He needs a doctor.”
“Xander, you have to warn them,” Tara’s voice cried. It was distant and quiet. She seemed so far away.
“It may not be safe to move him,” another voice. Giles. Xander smiled at hearing it. “But we’ll have to risk it. Now, while Illyria’s distracting him. We’ll get him to a hospital. Illyria seems to have this well in hand.”
As if to punctuate his point, the other Xander cried out in pain as Illyria bashed his head against the wall several times before he managed to twist free of her. She grabbed his leg and swung him back towards the wall Faith was secured against, and he thudded against it with a loud smacking sound. When he hit the ground he spat out blood.
“Xander! The portal!”
“Riley, see if you and Spike can get to Faith while we get Xander out of here,” Buffy said, sliding to one side so that Giles could take over in the impromptu first aid for Xander. Her hands were covered in blood. Xander hoped it wasn’t hers.
“Right,” Riley said simply. He gave Xander a tiny pat on his good shoulder. “Hang in there, buddy.” Then he was gone.
“Xander, I know it’s hard, but you ha-”
The explosion came an instant later.
Then I remembered that I don't feel like arguing why this is idiotic over and over again for the next few days, so I decided against it. Instead, here is more See Noir Evil, completely lacking in any kind of scientific or political merit whatsoever, much like the above mentioned article.
Sixty Six: A Little Help
She screamed as she came awake. She screamed from the core of herself. She screamed from the soul she had thought was gone forever.
Illyria screamed and rose into the air, her body slicing through it with a speed and grace that was unmatched by any. Her hair floated eerily around her head as she landed silently on the floor. She surveyed the room. It was empty, save for the bed she’d been on. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred.
Nothing, except for the strange sensation within her. The desperate, urgent need to do something was boiling inside of her. She clenched her fists and watched the air ripple away from her as she did so. Time was at a near stand-still. All was silent and motionless.
She could not wait. He was dying, and she would not allow that to occur. She made a silent demand to the universe that it would not be so. She was Illyria. She would not permit it. This time, she would listen to the thing inside of her that ached to save a simple human life.
Illyria flew out of the door and into the street. She bounded down it, nothing more than a streak of blue lightning to any with the power to see her. Gravity could not hold her as she skipped across the asphalt like a pebble across a pond, touching down for the briefest of instants before propelling herself forward.
People stood like statues all around her as she went, and they were nearly a blur, even to her enhanced senses. They were living their lives, some laughing, some crying, some smiling, some scowling. All of them were simple. All of them were human. All of them together were less than what she was alone.
Yet she envied them.
She could feel him as she ran. She could feel his eyes on her, and the way the hatred that simmered there always gave way to the tiniest flicker of caring, despite his best efforts. She could feel him watching her. Judging her, from wherever pitiful human souls went when their true existence was over. She imagined that he was smirking at her. She imagined he was smiling at her. She imagined that he might have somehow forgiven her.
She ran, but she didn’t know why, or even where she was going. Something drove her onward, and she obeyed it. The voice inside of her, the tiny, weak, pathetic little human voice urged her forward. It urged her to help. Help him.
Except she could never help him. Not Wesley. He was gone. He was lost to her, and she was lost to him. All that was left was the shell. She was nothing more than a shell. There was no purpose to her existence. There was no destiny for her to reclaim. That which she was, was gone, and in more ways than one. She was the shell. She was empty. She was meaningless.
And yet she pressed on.
Cars and bright lights flashed by her in a dizzying blur as she ran, twisting around corners and bounding up walls. She weaved in, out, and over the traffic, hardly even disrupting the beams of light that emerged from their headlights. She was a blur; a force of nature. Shell she might be, but she was also Illyria, and she would not relinquish her mastery over all things. Angel had shown her that. Meaningless as it all was, she would still exert her will. To do otherwise was unthinkable. To do otherwise meant she could never imagine his smile ever again.
These thoughts sickened her. These thoughts enraged her. These thoughts inspired her.
She ran.
There was blood all over her, but it wasn’t hers, so she didn’t care. It was getting hard to hold the kukris with the slickness of the blood coating the handles, but she just tightened her grip and pressed on anyway. The lobby to the building had looked like a bomb had gone off in it, and there were demons and Wolfram and Hart employees scattered everywhere in various stages of injury and death. Those that weren’t, those that tried to stop her, they were cut down without so much as a thought.
If these were the people that had hurt Xander, they deserved so much worse.
Buffy had torn through everything they’d thrown at her, which was probably a lot less than they’d had before whatever had happened in the lobby had gone down. She couldn’t believe it might be Xander to have caused that destruction. At least, she didn’t want to believe that she could believe it. After recent events, and after the stories she’d heard from some of the surviving Slayers, Xander might actually have been capable of slaughtering half a building full of demons. It was insane.
Then again, so was he.
Tears stung at Buffy’s eyes as she took the stairs three a time. Willow and the others were somewhere behind her, but they couldn’t move as fast as she could, and she wasn’t about to wait for them. Not after she’d heard the gunshots.
Buffy knew she had reached the correct floor when she saw the bullet holes that had ripped through the door and the splatter of blood that had sprayed out from them. She froze for a fraction of a second at the sight of that blood, and then grit her teeth and yanked the door open, diving through it into a roll in case someone thought to shoot at her from the other side.
When no one did, she sprang back up to her feet and raced down the hallway, trying not to stare at the far-too-much blood that was staining the walls. She squeezed her eyes and let the tears of anger that had built up there trail away behind her. When she opened them again, she saw them.
Xander, her Xander, his eye-patch gone and the full grotesque horror of his missing eye visible to all, was up against the wall. The other Xander, the twisted, evil, smooth-skinned Xander was standing in front of him. One hand was around Xander’s throat. The other was held back in a fist. The evil-Xander’s muscles were bulging with stolen power. His veins were pulsing grotesquely all over his body. His eyes were nearly popping out of his head. He was breathing heavily through his teeth, and looked as wild and demonic as anything she had ever seen.
He was going to kill Xander. There was blood everywhere, from wall to wall. A pool of it had formed under Xander, and the front of his shirt was soaked in it. Buffy paled.
The bullet holes. That was Xander’s blood out there.
His face was covered in it, and what bare skin was visible on his face was as pale and sickly as any vampire she had ever seen. The scarring all around his eye was almost completely white. Stark white. Just white.
He was going to die.
The other Xander plunged his fist forward. With the speed of it, with the strength of it, it would cave in Xander’s head. Buffy screamed and tried to stop him, running forward with one arm raising to throw one of her kukris. She wasn’t fast enough.
“No!” she screamed as the fist impacted with...
A blue lightning bolt.
Xander crumpled lifelessly to the floor. It was hard to breathe. It was hard to see. It was hard to think, but it was almost always hard to think, these days.
He tried anyway. He opened his good eye and blinked slowly, trying to figure out why his head hadn’t been Gallaghered by evil-him. It took a moment for the room to stop spinning before he could figure out why.
Evil-him had been thrown through the opposite wall. Plaster and metal was crashing down around the hole he’d created when he went through, and standing in front of it, taking heaving, angry breaths, was Illyria. Her fists were clenched and she stood proud and tall with her back to Xander. Her blue streaked hair was very nearly glowing with power. It was transfixing. He tried to reach out to touch it.
“Xander, no, Xander, don’t try to move,” came a soft voice. Xander let his head loll to one side. Tara was there. Wasn’t she? It was so hard to see her now. She was so faint. He blinked and tried to focus on her. He reached out for her.
And she reached back for him. Her fingers closed around his and he smiled. “It’s okay, Xander. I’m here. It’s g-going to be okay.”
She was so faint. He could...
He blinked again. He squeezed the hand holding his. It was not Tara’s.
“Buffy?” he asked. He could have sworn it was Tara. He looked around, desperate to find out where she’d gone. He could not see her. “Buffy? Where is she?”
“No, Xander, stay still!” Buffy pleaded, pressing a firm hand against his good shoulder. “Please, don’t move. Y-you’ve lost a lot of blood, okay? You have to stay still until the others arrive.” She set her weapons down beside him and ripped the midriff of her shirt off and then used the makeshift bandage to try and stop the flow of blood from his midsection. Tears were rolling down her face. “Oh God, Xander...”
There was a crash, and Xander looked up to see Illyria grunting as she pushed herself off of the wall. Her eyes were blue fire as she stared back at the other Xander. Xander smiled at the sight of her. She was awake. That was good.
“You can’t win this,” the other Xander said as he stepped closer to Illyria. The two of them were glaring at each other, each circling the other like a predator. “It’s already over. This is meaningless, you know that, right?”
Wesley stood by Illyria, one of him on either side of her. On her left was the Wesley in the immaculate white suit. On her right was the Wesley with the scar across his throat and the disheveled, wild appearance. They spoke as one. “All the more reason to fight.”
Illyria screamed and surged forward. Evil-Xander reacted by grinning and dropping his hands to his side. Thousands of tiny suction cups popped up on his face. Xander knew what those suction cups could do. He was going to soul-scrape Illyria. Xander raised a weary hand and rasped, “No! Don’t!”
Illyria’s fist connected solidly with evil-Xander’s face. Instead of absorbing the blow and becoming all the stronger for it,evil-Xander was sent flying backwards into one of the workstations along the wall, sending sparks flying and shards of the monitors exploding in an arc all around him. He groaned as he blinked up at Illyria.
“W-what? H-how?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Illyria said, in a mischievously innocent and breathy voice. “I’ve already had my soul scraped. It’s like the chicken pox. You only get it once.”
Evil-Xander blinked at her, and then he screamed and barreled towards her. He threw a fist at her face while she swung a kick at his midsection. The two blows impacted simultaneously, and they were both knocked in other directions. Illyria slid out into the hallway while the other Xander collided into another workstation. Xander felt a tiny smile slide across his face. All was as it should be. The bad guy was getting beaten up by his friends. He could rest now.
“Xander!”
His eye snapped open, and Tara was indeed kneeling beside him now. She was faded and translucent, but she was there. Buffy was beside her, solid and alive, working desperately to stop Xander from bleeding out completely.
“Don’t fall asleep, Xander,” Tara whispered. “You have to warn Buffy. You have to get her to turn off the portal.”
“Port hole?” Xander asked, frowning. All around him came the sounds of fists impacting against flesh, grunts and screams of exertion, and the crashing of bodies slamming into the equipment all over the lab. “Whaddya mean?”
It was hard to talk. It hurt to breathe. Hurt almost as much as the tongs used to. This was a new one. They’d never crushed his lungs before. Maybe now he’d remember what they wanted him to remember.
Another voice spoke. “Xander! Buffy! Oh God, is he okay!?”
He knew that voice. It was Willow’s voice. He smiled and looked up at her. She was kneeling right beside Tara. “Hiya, Wills.”
“He’s bleeding bad,” Buffy said. “He needs a doctor.”
“Xander, you have to warn them,” Tara’s voice cried. It was distant and quiet. She seemed so far away.
“It may not be safe to move him,” another voice. Giles. Xander smiled at hearing it. “But we’ll have to risk it. Now, while Illyria’s distracting him. We’ll get him to a hospital. Illyria seems to have this well in hand.”
As if to punctuate his point, the other Xander cried out in pain as Illyria bashed his head against the wall several times before he managed to twist free of her. She grabbed his leg and swung him back towards the wall Faith was secured against, and he thudded against it with a loud smacking sound. When he hit the ground he spat out blood.
“Xander! The portal!”
“Riley, see if you and Spike can get to Faith while we get Xander out of here,” Buffy said, sliding to one side so that Giles could take over in the impromptu first aid for Xander. Her hands were covered in blood. Xander hoped it wasn’t hers.
“Right,” Riley said simply. He gave Xander a tiny pat on his good shoulder. “Hang in there, buddy.” Then he was gone.
“Xander, I know it’s hard, but you ha-”
The explosion came an instant later.