Fic: See Noir Evil (8/?)
Seven: Deluded Delusions
Broken. Yes, that was the word for it. He was broken. A malfunctioning unit, missing parts and obeying faulty programming. He just wasn’t sure that it was the Initiative that had done it. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t been broken long before then.
After all, there was the video. The evidence. There was the way his one eye had looked so methodical, so self-assured as he had aimed down the sight of one of those great big guns. How could that be the action of a fully functional human being? No, he had been broken even then.
Maybe he’d always been broken.
And if he was broken, if he was truly an insane as he seemed to be, then didn’t that mean he wasn’t truly responsible for any of this? Didn’t it mean he could allow himself to believe the vision of her? Couldn’t he just go along with it? He would rather live in that delusion than face the truth. Besides, it would make her feel better. She seemed so miserable. So guilty. He couldn’t fix any of the real problems he’d caused, but maybe he could fix this illusory one.
“Okay,” he said finally. Long minutes had passed in the dark, punctuated only by Tara’s crying. She cried in pity. Pity for herself, but pity for him most of all. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
Tara sniffed and looked up. “W-what?”
“I’m the one who sees everything. You said that.”
She swallowed and sniffed again, and then nodded slowly. “Right. Yes. You’re the one who sees everything. T-That’s why you can see me.”
“Gotcha,” he said, doing his best to humor her. Or possibly humor himself, it was hard to tell. “And what I see is you?”
Wiping her face she nodded again, more enthusiastically this time. “Yes, me. B-because I went through the trials.”
“Oh, right. The trials.” He tried to remember what the trials were.
“You wouldn’t know them,” she said, and the tone in her voice told him she was worried about him. That she was afraid he really was crazy. Which he was, of course. Only she was a part of his crazy that didn’t want him to be crazy, so he’d pretend not to be for her sake. Make her - or him - feel better. Deluding his delusion. “T-they’re, um, part of the afterlife.”
“Oh,” he said slowly. “Okay. So you’re still dead, then?”
“Yes. I-I left the-” she paused for a moment, her breath catching in her throat. “I left the bliss. Only a few get the option. I never thought I would, I-I never even thought I would want to take it, but then...The Slayers started to die.”
He could see himself placing the barrel of the pistol to a girl’s temple. Could almost feel the tremor of the controlled explosion sending the bullet into her head with a wet packing sound. He saw it over and over again. He saw the detonations, the girls screaming, the blood, the smoke, the fire. How many times had he seen it on the video, and how many times had he seen it in his head?
“So I came,” she continued, and he was distantly impressed by how she could maintain her story even as his conscious mind was focused on the horror of what he’d done. His subconscious must have been cooking this up for a long time. “I went through the trials to try to help. B-but I was never supposed to, Xander. They said I shouldn’t have made it. I’m not strong enough.”
“You’re here now,” he pointed out.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I am. But too late to save you from- From what they did to you.”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. As if he could even face the memories of his cell, the interrogation, and the questions. As if he wasn’t struggling to keep from screaming at the mere thought of them.
“You didn’t kill them. Not you, Xander. Willow, Buffy, Giles, t-they’re alive, somewhere. A lot of them are. That’s why they said I could go back. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Alive,” he said, repeating her word. He tested it in his mouth, rolled it around, savored it, spat it out again, “Alive. Even the ones with the bullets in their brains? Cause that would be a neat trick.”
“No,” she whispered. “Not them. B-but you didn’t kill them either.”
“Right.” It was hard to keep up the pretense of believing she was real. It was harder than he’d expected; this business of deluding himself. Harder than he thought; proclaiming his own innocence. “Of course I didn’t.”
“We can find who did. A-And we can find them, find out what happened to them. We can save them, Xander. B-but you have to help me. Or, um, I have to help you. And I will, Xander, if I can. I-I’m so sorry.”
She kept saying that. Like she’d been the one to strap him down and press the tongs to his head. His whole body shuddered and he nearly jerked away from her. Instead, he closed his good eye and licked his scabbed lips. “So how do you help me?”
“With your vision. Y-your ability to see things.”
“Like angels? Hopscotching demons?”
The Priest, grinning at him?
Her bottom lip trembled before she spoke. “N-no. Um, magic things. Ghosts, sometimes. Auras, I think. I’ll be able to show you. To help you learn how to use it. I’m your guide.”
“Oh,” he said, ever-so-pleasantly. “My guide. Right.”
Like it was perfectly natural. He’d just keep on playing along until...
Until what? Until he killed again? Until he gave in completely to his psychosis?
Until he believed her? No, no the truth of it was that some part of him had already decided to believe her. The alternative was too painful, and he liked her idea much better. Someone had framed him. Someone who looked like him, talked like him, had his DNA, his magical signature, who was him in every single way that the Initiative could determine. Why not? What could be more plausible than that?
“Please believe me,” he heard Tara whisper. Not to him. Just to the air around her. To the stars, to the heavens, to the place where she had come from. To the paradise she had left behind to come to him. And who was he? Just some boy, some half-man thing that had screwed up beyond screwing up. “Please.”
“I believe you,” he lied.
She moved like she was going to hug him, but then realized it couldn’t be. Instead she put her hands to her face, her fingers steepled against her nose. Her eyes smiled at him, wet and full of worry. “You do?”
He shrugged. “Sure. I see ghosts. I’m seeing you, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She sounded so relieved. He hated himself a little for lying to her, but then again she didn’t really exist, so there was no reason to be upset about it. He was really only lying to himself.
“So what do we do? What do I do? They’re going to come after me, right?”
“Yes. And soon. Th-they’ll be confused for a little while because of the route we took, but they’re going to sweep out in circles from the base and then down every major highway nearby. You can’t stay here.”
Convenient that she would mirror his own thoughts. He nodded. “Okay. Away, then. To where?”
“Um, w-well I don’t know, really. M-maybe Las Vegas?”
“Vegas? You want to shoot some craps or something?”
“N-no, but it’s busy, and crowed, and easy to get lost in. And it’s close.”
“How close? Where are we?”
“A few hours. We’re in Nevada.”
“Nevada.” He wondered how he knew that. If she knew it that must have meant he knew it somehow. Maybe he’d seen some sign when he’d been in the manager’s office. That must be it. Or maybe he wasn’t even in Nevada. Maybe he was in Utah or Arkansas or India or Mars, for all he knew.
Or his cell. Maybe he was in his cell. Maybe he was bleeding, groaning, and staring up at the white light. That was truly terrifying.
He shook his head, banishing the thought. “Nevada,” he repeated. “Okay. I’m in Nevada. Las Vegas. I can hide out there.”
“Not just hide,” she interjected.
“What?”
“W-well, we have to find out who really did it,” she said, as if that were obvious. “We have to find Buffy and Willow and Giles and everyone.”
“We do,” he said slowly, not a question, but not an agreement either. Just testing the words.
“You’re the only one who can do it,” Tara said. “The only one who can see enough. The only one who can find them.”
“Right.” She didn’t know where they were, assuming they weren’t just little bits of Buffy-pieces and Willow-chunks and Giles-bits that had been blasted into a million pieces. It was impossible to identify all the dead. You just had to assume it. Technically they were missing, but everyone knew the truth. They were dead. Of course she couldn’t tell him where they were. They were no place. “A-and why me, again? Why am I the one who sees?”
He asked it out of a kind of sick curiosity of what his mind could come up with. How imaginative was his subconscious, anyway?
“I-I don’t know. You just are.”
Not very. He tried not to grimace at how many holes were in this stupid fantasy of his. He’d just ride it out. There was nothing else he could do. Better to believe they were alive somewhere, somehow, in some miraculous way where they’d survived the the bullets, the explosions, and the outright carnage. He could cope with living for just a little while longer, safe and secure in his delusions that he was not a killer.
“So you don’t know where they are. You don’t know why I see you. What do you know?”
“You can’t stay here,” she said, and then slowly got to her feet. She seemed embarrassed and would not look him in the eye. Maybe it was just that looking him in the eye meant seeing the grotesque scarring all over his left eye, and she was too squeamish to handle it. “They’re looking for you.”
“Don’t blame them,” he muttered, then got up as well. The water bottle was empty, but he suspected the faucet would not be. He could drink all he wanted. He could drink until his stomach burst if he wanted to, and some part of him truly did want to. The little light in the bathroom made a brief humming sound as it came on, then bathed the white-and-yellow decor in a soft golden light. The color of it was wonderful, and he was glad it was not an all-white bathroom. Once he’d twisted on the cold side of the faucet, he splashed his face a little and then winced at how it made all his cuts sting. Then he placed the bottle under the water and turned to look at her while it filled. “So Vegas, huh?”
She looked vivid in the light. She looked real. He was no longer as exhausted as he had been before, when all of life had seemed like a hallucination. Now he was at least somewhat lucid, and the sight of her was too starkly real. There was no sense of unreality about her. She still had that sense of ethereal peace about her, but that had been true of the real Tara as well. If he didn’t know better, he’d say she was the genuine article.
Xander reached forward and passed his hand through her upper chest. There was nothing there. Not even the sensation he might have expected to feel. No chill, no warmth, no feeling like someone just stepped on your grave, no deja-vu, no pain, no pleasure, no nothing. Just air. Afterwards he flexed his fingers, examining them for some sign that they were in some way wrong, something that might explain why she was not there when his every sense screamed at him that she was.
They were still his fingers. Blistered, scabbed, bruised, and calloused, but they were still his fingers. One was bent a little to one side now, the little finger on his left hand. They’d broken it once. Maybe twice, it was hard to remember. It all kind of blurred. They’d done the same with a few other fingers, but those had managed to heal up straight. They creaked and cracked sometimes, however. He clenched his right hand into a fist, and sure enough, one of his fingers popped at him painfully. He didn’t wince. Just noted it and moved on.
He looked back to her. She hadn’t answered him. His attempt at touching her had her silent and pale. All she did was watch him quietly, her eyes sparkling wetly. Always wetly. Was there ever a time she was not crying, or at least on the verge of it?
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, frowning. The bottle behind him started to overflow, so he turned to move it.
The mirror caught his attention. His face. The scarring of his eye, the way his hair was growing in short and spiky from the constant buzz-cutting they’d subjected him to, the bruising, the swelling, the cuts and scrapes and gashes that still oozed blood even as he stared at it. He was a complete mess.
And there she was behind him, looking as sad as ever. A reflection of a hallucination. What did that prove, anyway? Nothing at all, except maybe that she wasn’t a hallucination of a vampire.
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “I wish you didn’t have this burden. You didn’t deserve any of this.”
“Shouldn’t wish,” he said, and now he did feel deja vu.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She was always sorry. Maybe that’s what she was. Maybe she was the personification of his guilt. Maybe his guilt was appearing to him in the most sympathetic and forgiving person he had ever known. Now that made sense. It made so much sense that it made his heart hurt a little to realize it. Now he knew what she was.
She - his guilt - was right, however. The Initiative was coming after him, and no matter how much he might deserve it, he couldn’t go back to the cell. He was too cowardly to kill himself, so all that left him was his delusions. Maybe if he just really focused on them for a while he’d start to believe them. Maybe he’d build a happy little dream world for himself, and when they found him drooling and giggling on a street corner somewhere they could do whatever they wanted to him, and he wouldn’t care because his mind would be so far away.
Yeah. That was a plan.
“I don’t suppose,” a voice said. “That you’ve considered the possibility that she’s not a hallucination. What if she’s right? What if you really didn’t do it? Wouldn’t that just be all manner of intriguing?”
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce stepped behind Tara, dressed in the pale white suit Xander remembered he’d so often favored. He stood straight and tall, hair slicked back, glasses perched on his nose, eyes narrowed at Xander with that expression of distaste and arrogance that he’d always given Xander. “No, of course you haven’t. I shouldn’t have expected anything different. You lack the education and training of the truly inquisitive mind.”
“You’re dead,” Xander whispered, staring at Wesley through the reflection in the mirror.
Tara spoke quietly. “We talked about this, Xander.”
“Not you,” he hissed. “Him!”
Tara looked slowly behind her. She swallowed nervously. Then she looked back to Xander. “Who, Xander?”
Wesley shook his head in disapproval. “I suppose you had better hope she’s not real,” he said, looking rather disgusted with Xander. “If you’re the only hope the Slayers have, well then I daresay they’re quite doomed.”
And then he was gone. Just like that. There was only him and Tara, who stared at him with big, sad, tear-filled eyes. It was as if he’d never been.
“No one,” Xander whispered. “No one at all.”