New-fic-with-no-name, second part
I'm still behind on comments - sorry, folks! - but at least here's the next part of the new fic. Eventually I'll come up with a title, and figure out how to cross-post to Dreamwidth, stuff like that. For disclaimers, etc. see Part 1.
2. GHOSTS
"Good morning, everyone!" The amplified voice of Sunnydale High School's newest principal's voice boomed over the PA system. "Welcome to opening day of the all-new Sunnydale High." The message repeated every few minutes, along with directions for arriving students to organize into orderly lines for ID checks as they entered the building.
It was probably meant to be a helpful, even cheerful instruction, but nearly everyone in the vicinity flinched each time the loudspeaker blared.
Teacher's assistants, with strained smiles on their faces, helped to direct the incoming students. Parents lingered over curbside goodbyes, snarling traffic with stopped cars. Crowds of students slow-marched through metal detectors with the approximate enthusiasm of prisoners on their way to their cells.
The general atmosphere on the ground was similar to that of refugees crowding into a bomb shelter after an air raid siren.
Mired in the traffic tangle of cars inching toward the school, Xander maneuvered his sedan with a combination of apologetic grin and friendly waves toward the other drivers, and a ruthless willingness to cut off anyone to get closer to the curb.
Buffy, in her Doublemeat Palace uniform, had the shotgun seat. She fiddled with the cow hat on her lap, adjusting its ears to a perkier position before settling it on her head.
"Remember, if anything goes wrong, call me," she said abruptly, craning her neck around to aim this message at her sister, in the back. "That's what the phone is for, okay? Emergencies."
"I will, I will." Head down, Dawn was fussing with her own outfit, a sweater that was actually too warm for the still-summery weather, but that she'd insisted had the proper back-to-school vibe. She surveyed the scene out the window and sucked in a tense breath. "Ohmigod, there's Brian. Lemme out, lemme out here. C'mon, you guys!"
Obligingly, Xander hit the brakes and waved another apology as horns blared in protest. Dawn clambered from the car and blew a kiss in their direction before vanishing in a flash of argyle and swinging brown hair.
"Call me later!" Buffy yelled, hanging out the passenger-side window. The ears of her cow hat flapped in the wind as Xander accelerated away from the curb with yet another friendly wave.
__________
"--have probably heard some strange stories, but if hope is worth anything in this world--" Dawn's homeroom teacher made eye contact with her as she entered late, and continued without even pausing his monologue. "--we'd like to think that our brand new building here will mark a fresh start for Sunnydale High."
Dawn eased herself into a seat and glanced around. Some of the students seemed worried. Most didn't, though, and were looking around at the rest of the class, just like she was.
Her gaze locked with a cute boy across the aisle to her left.
"Hey," he said quietly.
"Hey."
He leaned closer. "You believe any of that stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"About the school being haunted."
"I've... heard some things."
"So, as I was saying, there's nothing to worry about," the teacher continued. "I'm sure we'll have a perfectly normal, uneventful year of academic achievement." He ended this speech with a high-pitched, nervous laugh.
Now even the previously unruffled students looked uneasy.
A girl in the back of the room raised her hand. "Uh, I just moved here, so I don't... I mean, what kind of strange stories?"
"I heard there were voices," the boy sitting across from Dawn called out. "Like, whispering ghost voices."
"I heard monsters," a girl near the windows added. "Like, ten kids got killed."
"Oh, it was way more than ten," Dawn blurted before she could stop herself.
Blood rushing to her face, the sudden target of twenty awkward stares, she became very interested in the shiny surface of her new desk.
The teacher cleared his throat. "Uh, yes. There have been some unfortunate incidents here and a few... deaths. But nearly all of those had rational explanations." He fixed his gaze on the far wall then. "And it's true that some of us who were teachers in the previous building experienced some... odd occurrences, but--" He refocused on the class. "--I'd like to think that the destruction of the previous building laid all those old ghosts to rest."
He cleared his throat again and opened a notebook on his desk.
"So let's start the new year off right. Something nice and normal. Roll call. Atherton, Roger?"
__________
Buffy eased open the metal door at the back of the Doublemeat Palace. The usual draft of warm air scented with frying oil greeted her, as well as the sight of her fellow employees gathered in a circle near the drive-through window.
Dammit. An employee meeting in progress, and she was late. She clocked in as quietly as the punch-card machine would allow.
Of course that wasn't very quiet at all. Everyone turned around at the sound.
Lorraine, the manager, beckoned to her. "When you have a minute, Buffy, if you could join us, please?"
"Of course. Sorry." Buffy smoothed her uniform and beamed an apologetic smile. "I, uh, had to drop off my sister at school."
Lorraine's only answer to this was a tight smile. "Good morning, everyone!" she said, turning to address the whole group.
Aware that she was likely to get lectured as soon as the meeting was over, Buffy sulked and tried to pretend interest. The Doublemeat was debuting some "healthy" options, including a vegetarian Garden Burger and a salad. Huh.
One of Buffy's coworkers raised a hand. "Is the Garden Burger vegan?"
Lorraine looked briefly baffled. "Probably not," she said. "But I'll check."
The meeting dispersed, and Buffy made a beeline for the front counter, hoping to avoid the inevitable lecture from Lorraine.
Gina, the retiree, was already there, staring out the front window with her usual spaced-out expression. Buffy readied her front-counter smile, but the restaurant was thankfully empty.
"Nervous?" Gina asked. Her gaze stayed fixed on the window.
"Excuse me?"
"About your sister. At the high school. First day." Gina paused. "I used to teach there, you know," she said slowly. "In the old school."
That definitely would explain a few things. "I didn't know."
Gina turned then, and looked directly at Buffy. It was the first time Buffy could ever remember her doing so.
"It was a bad place," she said. "They shouldn't have built it again."
Buffy swallowed hard. "Yeah. I know."
__________
Class was uneventful for the first hour. The second hour had been going pretty well too. Until the screaming started.
The whole class crowded to the door and spilled out into the hallway to see what was wrong. Other classes within earshot had the same idea, and in moments the corridor was full of gawking bystanders.
The screaming was coming from a male student who was batting the air with his hands as if swatting invisible bugs.
"They're everywhere! They're everywhere!" he shrieked. "Can't you see them? CAN'T YOU SEE THEM?"
A school nurse came on the run and led him away.
The crowd slowly dispersed, strangely quiet. Dawn lingered, staring at the empty sapce on the floor where the student had stood. Had there really been something there? Or did the school just drive him crazy? Neither was a comforting thought.
I wonder if this even counts as an emergency?
It didn't matter, she decided. Even if this was business-as-usual for Sunndale High, Buffy should probably know. She got a hall pass from the teacher and made a beeline for the bathroom to give her sister a call.
The bathroom was so welcoming that it brought her up short for a moment. Instead of the crumbling post-war facilities she was used to in her old Junior High, the High School bathroom was all earth-toned tile and polished chrome, filled with slanting golden light from the high windows.
It's like a musuem, she thought, then shook off the faint spell brought on by good interior design and leaned back against the first in the long row of shiny sinks to make her call.
While she was dialing, the faucet came on.
She leapt away, heart pounding. The faucet stopped.
Oh. Right. One of those new faucets. The kind with a sensor. I get it. Her breathing evened out, and she studied herself in the long, wall-length mirror over the sinks while her call went through to Buffy's voicemail. Typical.
"Hey, Buffy. There's some weird stuff happening here. Thought you should know. Call me." She hung up.
There. That didn't sound too panicked. She could keep her cool. She could. And if she couldn't, she could always run out of the building and find Xander. Easy-peasy.
The faucet started up agin. She stared at it, then slowly stepped back, waiting for it to stop.
It didn't. Instead, it was joined by all the other faucets.
Then the toilets started flushing too. All of them.
Trembling, and fairly sure that this probably wasn't a case of simultaneous flushes by a row of people occupying every stall, she turned to look anyway, just to be sure that she'd covered every possible rational explanation--
--and found Spike standing right behind her.
__________
"Hey," Buffy said as she stepped outside for her break. The alley was hardly a garden spot, but at least it had fresh air. Fresh-ish. David, one of the grill workers, was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.
He nodded to her and blew out a stream of smoke. "Hey. They're not looking for me, are they?"
"Not that I know of. Should they be?"
"Sort of. This isn't really my break." He scuffed the ground with the toe of his greasy shoe. "I just needed a smoke, y'know?"
She nodded. She knew. "I won't tell." She stretched, touched her toes, and then studied her smoking coworker. "Can I... have one of those?"
He looked surprised, but extracted a cigarette from the pack in his jacket and handed it to her. "Didn't know you smoked."
"I don't." She leaned closer to him as he lit her cigarette and predictably started coughing on the first drag. He laughed.
"You're such a good girl."
"Really not," Buffy scoffed, and took another drag. She fared a little better this time, but only managed a few seconds of dignity before the coughing started again. "Although being a bad girl may not be my thing either." She handed the cigarette back.
Inside the building, in Buffy's purse, her cell phone blinked mutely to let her know she had a new voicemail.
__________
Dawn let out a piercing shriek and backed away in terror, her arms leaping to cover her chest, wrapping herself tight in a crossover hug.
He was... ohmigod, if she wasn't imagining things, he was there. If he wasn't a ghost. If--
It didn't matter what he was. Real or not, and he was standing right in front of her.
Xander's voice echoed in her memory. He tried to rape your sister.
Heart pounding, nerves leaping, she stared at him, unable for a moment even to speak.
He looked terrible.
Rail-thin. Pale. Beyond pale. Nothing at all like the Spike she remembered and at the same time too much like him. Just the sight of his face made her skin crawl.
Like she was touching something gross. Like something smelled bad.
He did smell bad, in fact. Sort of like a homeless person, now that she was noticing how a weird, warm unwashed smell was filling the room. That had to be him, right? Because he totally looked the part, too -- dirty, dressed in dirty clothes that didn't fit, and his hair was all grown out and shaggy... like a bum, one of those guys on the street that talked to themselves.
Or those crazies in the hospital who'd known right away that she was the Key.
He wasn't saying anything, though. Just... staring at her. Blank-faced. Brow a little knit, like he couldn't quite figure something out, or understand what she was saying.
She finally found her voice. "What are you doing here?" she shouted at him, and hugged herself even tighter. "This is the girls' bathroom! I-I'll scream!"
"You are screaming," he murmured.
She ignored his weirdly rational observation. "Get--get out of here!"
He wasn't listening. He was just looking around like... like...
God, she was stupid. Her purse! There was a stake in it. Breathless, she took a risk; snatched the bag off her shoulder and rumaged through it until she found the stake, braced it in her hand at shoulder height, refocused on Spike.
He hadn't moved. At all. He was just... there. Like something out of a nightmare.
The whole scene felt unreal; she was suddenly unsure that she wasn't just imaginging things.
"Are you real?" she whispered.
Finally, a reaction. His brows drew in; he looked thoroughly confused.
"Not sure," he said, and his head turned in a wobbly arc, taking in their surroundings. "Don't know how I got here. Wasn't where I was a minute ago."
She gritted her teeth. "Get out."
His head swivelved back toward her, and his eyes narrowed. "How'd you get here then, Bit? Hell's no place for little girls." He lifted his chin. "Gonna use that?"
Oh. The stake. "I will if you come any closer. Or, or--"
"Or what?" He sounded different now, not so much confused and lost. More... angry. More black-hat evil.
"Big bad vampire here, yeah?" he snarled at her, lips drawing back from his teeth, although his face remained human. "You just gonna let me walk away? Go sink my fangs into other sweet things like you?" His mouth twisted into a sneer and he turned away from her, as if to go do just that.
Something broke inside Dawn. She lunged. And drove the stake as hard as she could into his back.
It was a few seconds before she realized he wasn't turning to dust.
Horror-frozen, she watched as he straightened, left arm reaching up and over his shoulder to pull the stake free. He studied the blood-streaked object for a moment, then craned around to look back at her with something like pity.
"Shouldn't try it through the back, Dawn," he said. "You're not your sister. Not strong enough to get through all that bone."
He turned all the way around to face her, and reversed his hold on the stake to offer it to her hilt-first. She automatically stepped back.
He advanced. One step. Two.
"You want to aim here," he whispered, placing the point of the stake on a spot high on his own stomach just as her back hit the far wall.
A final step brought him right up into her face. Way too close.
"Just below the breastbone," he whispered. She let out a startled squeak as he grabbed her right wrist and brought her hand up to the stake, forced her fingers around it. Then he repositioned the stake on his chest at an extreme upward angle, his own hand wrapped around hers.
"Like that," he said. "Come in from underneath. Drive it up into the heart."
She couldn't move. The wall was cold at her back and his hand was on hers, and the stake was between them and he was right there, ohgod, leaning forward like he was gonna... like he was... but he couldn't do that, not to her, not--
"LET GO OF ME!" she shrieked. She wrenched away from him, shoved at his shoulders with both hands, kicked out with her feet, knees, everything she'd ever heard about self-defense, ever. She didn't think she actually hurt him at all but he let her go anyway, his arm holding the stake dropping uselessly to his side.
She stumbled backwards toward the door in a panic, arms crossed over her breasts again in a protective pose. If he came at her again, she was gonna... she would...
He wasn't coming after her. His whole posture was slumped, like some parody of a zombie instead of a vampire. Then he lifted his head, and she saw his eyes.
They were lifeless, empty. His whole face was slack with non-expression. Nobody home.
The zombie idea didn't seem like such a parody anymore.
"Where do you think you are, Dawn?" he said, and this time he sounded tired instead of sinister. "This is Hell, do you understand? Don't know how you got here, but you're going to have to be a lot tougher than this to survive."
"This isn't hell! This is--" Okay, the irony was hitting her already. "--high school," she finished, lamely.
He made a chuffing sound; it might've been a laugh. "Yeah? Funny how no-one's come to your aid, though, isn't it? What with the screaming and all." His face rearranged then, took on the monster's fangs, and she was suddenly very scared.
"Run," he snarled. And she did.
Out through the swinging bathroom door with a bang, his voice following close behind her.
"Run, little girl! RUN! BIG BAD WOLF'S ON YOUR HEELS!"
And then she was out in the hallway, which was... totally different than it had been when she'd come through it only a few minutes ago. The walls were only half there, burnt and crumbled, and the broken roof was open to the night sky, and it had been daytime only a second ago, what was--?
There were sounds. Slithering, growling, snarling. And shadowing passing by her. Insubstantional, icy drifts of fog that were shaped like--
Like her sister. Like Xander and Willow. She could even hear their voices, faint and distorted, like sounds from a far-away car stereo. And there were... things. Too many of them to register individually, but they drifted and swam all around her like ghosts.
She ran. And didn't stop until she found her classroom door and threw herself inside--
--where everything looked just as she'd left it, right down to class full of students who seemed to be waiting for something exactly like this. Nobody even jumped when the door slammed. The expresion on most faces was a sort of unhappy resignation.
The teacher let out a heavy sigh. "Some things never change," he muttered, and turned back to the chalkboard.
2. GHOSTS
"Good morning, everyone!" The amplified voice of Sunnydale High School's newest principal's voice boomed over the PA system. "Welcome to opening day of the all-new Sunnydale High." The message repeated every few minutes, along with directions for arriving students to organize into orderly lines for ID checks as they entered the building.
It was probably meant to be a helpful, even cheerful instruction, but nearly everyone in the vicinity flinched each time the loudspeaker blared.
Teacher's assistants, with strained smiles on their faces, helped to direct the incoming students. Parents lingered over curbside goodbyes, snarling traffic with stopped cars. Crowds of students slow-marched through metal detectors with the approximate enthusiasm of prisoners on their way to their cells.
The general atmosphere on the ground was similar to that of refugees crowding into a bomb shelter after an air raid siren.
Mired in the traffic tangle of cars inching toward the school, Xander maneuvered his sedan with a combination of apologetic grin and friendly waves toward the other drivers, and a ruthless willingness to cut off anyone to get closer to the curb.
Buffy, in her Doublemeat Palace uniform, had the shotgun seat. She fiddled with the cow hat on her lap, adjusting its ears to a perkier position before settling it on her head.
"Remember, if anything goes wrong, call me," she said abruptly, craning her neck around to aim this message at her sister, in the back. "That's what the phone is for, okay? Emergencies."
"I will, I will." Head down, Dawn was fussing with her own outfit, a sweater that was actually too warm for the still-summery weather, but that she'd insisted had the proper back-to-school vibe. She surveyed the scene out the window and sucked in a tense breath. "Ohmigod, there's Brian. Lemme out, lemme out here. C'mon, you guys!"
Obligingly, Xander hit the brakes and waved another apology as horns blared in protest. Dawn clambered from the car and blew a kiss in their direction before vanishing in a flash of argyle and swinging brown hair.
"Call me later!" Buffy yelled, hanging out the passenger-side window. The ears of her cow hat flapped in the wind as Xander accelerated away from the curb with yet another friendly wave.
__________
"--have probably heard some strange stories, but if hope is worth anything in this world--" Dawn's homeroom teacher made eye contact with her as she entered late, and continued without even pausing his monologue. "--we'd like to think that our brand new building here will mark a fresh start for Sunnydale High."
Dawn eased herself into a seat and glanced around. Some of the students seemed worried. Most didn't, though, and were looking around at the rest of the class, just like she was.
Her gaze locked with a cute boy across the aisle to her left.
"Hey," he said quietly.
"Hey."
He leaned closer. "You believe any of that stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"About the school being haunted."
"I've... heard some things."
"So, as I was saying, there's nothing to worry about," the teacher continued. "I'm sure we'll have a perfectly normal, uneventful year of academic achievement." He ended this speech with a high-pitched, nervous laugh.
Now even the previously unruffled students looked uneasy.
A girl in the back of the room raised her hand. "Uh, I just moved here, so I don't... I mean, what kind of strange stories?"
"I heard there were voices," the boy sitting across from Dawn called out. "Like, whispering ghost voices."
"I heard monsters," a girl near the windows added. "Like, ten kids got killed."
"Oh, it was way more than ten," Dawn blurted before she could stop herself.
Blood rushing to her face, the sudden target of twenty awkward stares, she became very interested in the shiny surface of her new desk.
The teacher cleared his throat. "Uh, yes. There have been some unfortunate incidents here and a few... deaths. But nearly all of those had rational explanations." He fixed his gaze on the far wall then. "And it's true that some of us who were teachers in the previous building experienced some... odd occurrences, but--" He refocused on the class. "--I'd like to think that the destruction of the previous building laid all those old ghosts to rest."
He cleared his throat again and opened a notebook on his desk.
"So let's start the new year off right. Something nice and normal. Roll call. Atherton, Roger?"
__________
Buffy eased open the metal door at the back of the Doublemeat Palace. The usual draft of warm air scented with frying oil greeted her, as well as the sight of her fellow employees gathered in a circle near the drive-through window.
Dammit. An employee meeting in progress, and she was late. She clocked in as quietly as the punch-card machine would allow.
Of course that wasn't very quiet at all. Everyone turned around at the sound.
Lorraine, the manager, beckoned to her. "When you have a minute, Buffy, if you could join us, please?"
"Of course. Sorry." Buffy smoothed her uniform and beamed an apologetic smile. "I, uh, had to drop off my sister at school."
Lorraine's only answer to this was a tight smile. "Good morning, everyone!" she said, turning to address the whole group.
Aware that she was likely to get lectured as soon as the meeting was over, Buffy sulked and tried to pretend interest. The Doublemeat was debuting some "healthy" options, including a vegetarian Garden Burger and a salad. Huh.
One of Buffy's coworkers raised a hand. "Is the Garden Burger vegan?"
Lorraine looked briefly baffled. "Probably not," she said. "But I'll check."
The meeting dispersed, and Buffy made a beeline for the front counter, hoping to avoid the inevitable lecture from Lorraine.
Gina, the retiree, was already there, staring out the front window with her usual spaced-out expression. Buffy readied her front-counter smile, but the restaurant was thankfully empty.
"Nervous?" Gina asked. Her gaze stayed fixed on the window.
"Excuse me?"
"About your sister. At the high school. First day." Gina paused. "I used to teach there, you know," she said slowly. "In the old school."
That definitely would explain a few things. "I didn't know."
Gina turned then, and looked directly at Buffy. It was the first time Buffy could ever remember her doing so.
"It was a bad place," she said. "They shouldn't have built it again."
Buffy swallowed hard. "Yeah. I know."
__________
Class was uneventful for the first hour. The second hour had been going pretty well too. Until the screaming started.
The whole class crowded to the door and spilled out into the hallway to see what was wrong. Other classes within earshot had the same idea, and in moments the corridor was full of gawking bystanders.
The screaming was coming from a male student who was batting the air with his hands as if swatting invisible bugs.
"They're everywhere! They're everywhere!" he shrieked. "Can't you see them? CAN'T YOU SEE THEM?"
A school nurse came on the run and led him away.
The crowd slowly dispersed, strangely quiet. Dawn lingered, staring at the empty sapce on the floor where the student had stood. Had there really been something there? Or did the school just drive him crazy? Neither was a comforting thought.
I wonder if this even counts as an emergency?
It didn't matter, she decided. Even if this was business-as-usual for Sunndale High, Buffy should probably know. She got a hall pass from the teacher and made a beeline for the bathroom to give her sister a call.
The bathroom was so welcoming that it brought her up short for a moment. Instead of the crumbling post-war facilities she was used to in her old Junior High, the High School bathroom was all earth-toned tile and polished chrome, filled with slanting golden light from the high windows.
It's like a musuem, she thought, then shook off the faint spell brought on by good interior design and leaned back against the first in the long row of shiny sinks to make her call.
While she was dialing, the faucet came on.
She leapt away, heart pounding. The faucet stopped.
Oh. Right. One of those new faucets. The kind with a sensor. I get it. Her breathing evened out, and she studied herself in the long, wall-length mirror over the sinks while her call went through to Buffy's voicemail. Typical.
"Hey, Buffy. There's some weird stuff happening here. Thought you should know. Call me." She hung up.
There. That didn't sound too panicked. She could keep her cool. She could. And if she couldn't, she could always run out of the building and find Xander. Easy-peasy.
The faucet started up agin. She stared at it, then slowly stepped back, waiting for it to stop.
It didn't. Instead, it was joined by all the other faucets.
Then the toilets started flushing too. All of them.
Trembling, and fairly sure that this probably wasn't a case of simultaneous flushes by a row of people occupying every stall, she turned to look anyway, just to be sure that she'd covered every possible rational explanation--
--and found Spike standing right behind her.
__________
"Hey," Buffy said as she stepped outside for her break. The alley was hardly a garden spot, but at least it had fresh air. Fresh-ish. David, one of the grill workers, was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.
He nodded to her and blew out a stream of smoke. "Hey. They're not looking for me, are they?"
"Not that I know of. Should they be?"
"Sort of. This isn't really my break." He scuffed the ground with the toe of his greasy shoe. "I just needed a smoke, y'know?"
She nodded. She knew. "I won't tell." She stretched, touched her toes, and then studied her smoking coworker. "Can I... have one of those?"
He looked surprised, but extracted a cigarette from the pack in his jacket and handed it to her. "Didn't know you smoked."
"I don't." She leaned closer to him as he lit her cigarette and predictably started coughing on the first drag. He laughed.
"You're such a good girl."
"Really not," Buffy scoffed, and took another drag. She fared a little better this time, but only managed a few seconds of dignity before the coughing started again. "Although being a bad girl may not be my thing either." She handed the cigarette back.
Inside the building, in Buffy's purse, her cell phone blinked mutely to let her know she had a new voicemail.
__________
Dawn let out a piercing shriek and backed away in terror, her arms leaping to cover her chest, wrapping herself tight in a crossover hug.
He was... ohmigod, if she wasn't imagining things, he was there. If he wasn't a ghost. If--
It didn't matter what he was. Real or not, and he was standing right in front of her.
Xander's voice echoed in her memory. He tried to rape your sister.
Heart pounding, nerves leaping, she stared at him, unable for a moment even to speak.
He looked terrible.
Rail-thin. Pale. Beyond pale. Nothing at all like the Spike she remembered and at the same time too much like him. Just the sight of his face made her skin crawl.
Like she was touching something gross. Like something smelled bad.
He did smell bad, in fact. Sort of like a homeless person, now that she was noticing how a weird, warm unwashed smell was filling the room. That had to be him, right? Because he totally looked the part, too -- dirty, dressed in dirty clothes that didn't fit, and his hair was all grown out and shaggy... like a bum, one of those guys on the street that talked to themselves.
Or those crazies in the hospital who'd known right away that she was the Key.
He wasn't saying anything, though. Just... staring at her. Blank-faced. Brow a little knit, like he couldn't quite figure something out, or understand what she was saying.
She finally found her voice. "What are you doing here?" she shouted at him, and hugged herself even tighter. "This is the girls' bathroom! I-I'll scream!"
"You are screaming," he murmured.
She ignored his weirdly rational observation. "Get--get out of here!"
He wasn't listening. He was just looking around like... like...
God, she was stupid. Her purse! There was a stake in it. Breathless, she took a risk; snatched the bag off her shoulder and rumaged through it until she found the stake, braced it in her hand at shoulder height, refocused on Spike.
He hadn't moved. At all. He was just... there. Like something out of a nightmare.
The whole scene felt unreal; she was suddenly unsure that she wasn't just imaginging things.
"Are you real?" she whispered.
Finally, a reaction. His brows drew in; he looked thoroughly confused.
"Not sure," he said, and his head turned in a wobbly arc, taking in their surroundings. "Don't know how I got here. Wasn't where I was a minute ago."
She gritted her teeth. "Get out."
His head swivelved back toward her, and his eyes narrowed. "How'd you get here then, Bit? Hell's no place for little girls." He lifted his chin. "Gonna use that?"
Oh. The stake. "I will if you come any closer. Or, or--"
"Or what?" He sounded different now, not so much confused and lost. More... angry. More black-hat evil.
"Big bad vampire here, yeah?" he snarled at her, lips drawing back from his teeth, although his face remained human. "You just gonna let me walk away? Go sink my fangs into other sweet things like you?" His mouth twisted into a sneer and he turned away from her, as if to go do just that.
Something broke inside Dawn. She lunged. And drove the stake as hard as she could into his back.
It was a few seconds before she realized he wasn't turning to dust.
Horror-frozen, she watched as he straightened, left arm reaching up and over his shoulder to pull the stake free. He studied the blood-streaked object for a moment, then craned around to look back at her with something like pity.
"Shouldn't try it through the back, Dawn," he said. "You're not your sister. Not strong enough to get through all that bone."
He turned all the way around to face her, and reversed his hold on the stake to offer it to her hilt-first. She automatically stepped back.
He advanced. One step. Two.
"You want to aim here," he whispered, placing the point of the stake on a spot high on his own stomach just as her back hit the far wall.
A final step brought him right up into her face. Way too close.
"Just below the breastbone," he whispered. She let out a startled squeak as he grabbed her right wrist and brought her hand up to the stake, forced her fingers around it. Then he repositioned the stake on his chest at an extreme upward angle, his own hand wrapped around hers.
"Like that," he said. "Come in from underneath. Drive it up into the heart."
She couldn't move. The wall was cold at her back and his hand was on hers, and the stake was between them and he was right there, ohgod, leaning forward like he was gonna... like he was... but he couldn't do that, not to her, not--
"LET GO OF ME!" she shrieked. She wrenched away from him, shoved at his shoulders with both hands, kicked out with her feet, knees, everything she'd ever heard about self-defense, ever. She didn't think she actually hurt him at all but he let her go anyway, his arm holding the stake dropping uselessly to his side.
She stumbled backwards toward the door in a panic, arms crossed over her breasts again in a protective pose. If he came at her again, she was gonna... she would...
He wasn't coming after her. His whole posture was slumped, like some parody of a zombie instead of a vampire. Then he lifted his head, and she saw his eyes.
They were lifeless, empty. His whole face was slack with non-expression. Nobody home.
The zombie idea didn't seem like such a parody anymore.
"Where do you think you are, Dawn?" he said, and this time he sounded tired instead of sinister. "This is Hell, do you understand? Don't know how you got here, but you're going to have to be a lot tougher than this to survive."
"This isn't hell! This is--" Okay, the irony was hitting her already. "--high school," she finished, lamely.
He made a chuffing sound; it might've been a laugh. "Yeah? Funny how no-one's come to your aid, though, isn't it? What with the screaming and all." His face rearranged then, took on the monster's fangs, and she was suddenly very scared.
"Run," he snarled. And she did.
Out through the swinging bathroom door with a bang, his voice following close behind her.
"Run, little girl! RUN! BIG BAD WOLF'S ON YOUR HEELS!"
And then she was out in the hallway, which was... totally different than it had been when she'd come through it only a few minutes ago. The walls were only half there, burnt and crumbled, and the broken roof was open to the night sky, and it had been daytime only a second ago, what was--?
There were sounds. Slithering, growling, snarling. And shadowing passing by her. Insubstantional, icy drifts of fog that were shaped like--
Like her sister. Like Xander and Willow. She could even hear their voices, faint and distorted, like sounds from a far-away car stereo. And there were... things. Too many of them to register individually, but they drifted and swam all around her like ghosts.
She ran. And didn't stop until she found her classroom door and threw herself inside--
--where everything looked just as she'd left it, right down to class full of students who seemed to be waiting for something exactly like this. Nobody even jumped when the door slammed. The expresion on most faces was a sort of unhappy resignation.
The teacher let out a heavy sigh. "Some things never change," he muttered, and turned back to the chalkboard.