Fic: Before the World Falls Down (BtVS/AtS)
f
Before the World Falls Down
I am fire, but I've been burned by prophecy.
And all the princesses line up for full confessions.
Maybe we'll all go down together.
Nine.
(Connor. Cordelia. Spike. Doyle. Wesley. Gunn. Darla.
When Angel closes his eyes to sleep, he doesn't fear for his soul.)
* * *
They go through the sewers, Buffy and Angel, Jill and Satsu, and it's like something in a lame movie about breaking into banks through the sewers. Buffy keeps The Scythe gripped between her hands and Satsu holds the light above their heads, looking for vampires, demons, guardians. Whoever might be lurking in the quiet places near Mr. Preacherman's building, above or below ground. But the silence is deafening, and along with the half-hearted squeak of rats, there is only their footsteps, and their breath.
Angel walks beside her, his trenchcoat stirring with every step. She sees it dance in the shadows thrown against the walls, and for a moment they're back in her bedroom, his lips on her throat, the cool touch of his hands. She shivers from every bit of her, the memory a tickle in the corners of her mind. But this is not the time, and she pushes it away.
Not that she'd rather be here, in the green and slimy corridors, assaulted with the stink of sewage, the cold air, the rats. The tunnel turns, then forks, and behind her, Jill looks over their maps. She's shaking with nerves. She's new.
"It's this way," Jill says, nodding a little to the left. Buffy follows, Angel's hand resting on the small of her back like something casual and ever-there. Like the world hasn't changed just by his being there, instead of in LA, in Hell. It's not really surprising. He's always been there, in his way.
When they reach the gratings beneath Park Avenue, Buffy stares up into dark empty space through the holes and the metal. Above their heads, she can hear something moving. Slithering. The weight of its body, sliding over cement floors, rubbing past the walls.
Next to her ear, Angel says, "Stay here," before he pushes the grating up and jumps into the space above them. And Buffy's never stood still through a fight. She's never let anyone battle instead of her. She shouts his name as she climbs above, into the heat and the dark. Beneath her, Satsu's light sways and flickers and Buffy feels thick skin, scaled or armored or something in between, as it slithers past her legs, tearing skin from her calf. In her head, the hissing begins. Somewhere, across the blank space of whatever basement hell they're in, she hears Angel shout her name just before claws sink into her back.
Buffy tumbles forward, and rolls out of the way of another flash of fur and claws. The space turns light with Satsu's arrival, her light flashing over long coils of body, the snake that encircled the world. On its side, an ancient gash scars its skin, chipped through scales as thick as plates, as hard as steel. The place where the Scythe connected months ago. Her wound burns. She knows it's the snake from Sunnydale, that thing she thought she'd killed.
"Satsu," she says, "Stay away from its face." And then the wolf is upon her.
It isn't a wolf, really. It isn't a man. It's something other, shifting from form to form without truly changing. Watching it move is like watching illusions through a trap of lenses and mirrors - from this angle, tall and slim, a canine of a man, handsome with his slicked back hair black as night. A lawyer, or politician. Flash, now he is fur and teeth, snout and claws. Flash, and back. A shifting mirage. Buffy's blood trickles down her back as she swings the Scythe at his head and behind her Satsu imbeds a sword in the wolf-thing's leg, but it doesn't slow, it doesn't stop. In its left eye, she sees the sad, subtle reflection of the swallowed moon. In its right, the burning glow of the blotted out sun.
The snake says, "We've waited for you." Its voice is a hissing sound as amorphous as the wolf's body, shifting from human to snake with different angles. It's like the snake-thing's body, too, in the light - angles and planes, a woman here and here, a serpent thing.
Satsu breaks a dagger against the wolf's back; it flinches then, barely. Quick, but slowly enough to allow Buffy to get to her feet again.
There are no easy quips, this time, just the struggle of fingers and claws, weapons and fur and skin. The wolf thing moves like quicksilver, and Buffy feels like she's in the alleyway in the last year of Sunnydale's life, again, fighting the Turok-han, this creature with skin like stone that breaks her to pieces without a thought. In the flash of metal, in the heaving of her own breath, she nearly misses the snake's teeth as they lunge for her gut.
Angel doesn't. He's in front of her, hands prying open the snake's jaws, his face all ridges and all demon. "Buffy," he says, "Get out of here. This thing can't poison me."
She wants to object, but the wolf-man disappears through the barely visible doorway across the basement floor, past washing machines and dryers and the scattered corpses of roaches and mice. She hears its growl as it runs through the hallways, its steps and its breath in the walls, in the air, and she follows. Yards away, Angel says, "I'll be right behind you."
Buffy jumps up flights of stairs three and four steps at a time, and Satsu shadows her footsteps. On the fourth floor, she sees its shadows two flights above their head in the endless stairwell, and mutters, "Why can't monsters ever use the elevator?" If it's heading to the penthouse, she knows, this will be a long run.
By the 20th floor, she hears the music.
At first, she thinks it's a dream. A hallucination - a memory. The mourning strains of the harp signaling the end of days. Then Satsu swears beneath her heaving breath and Buffy knows it's there. Growing louder as they ascend, mingling with their thoughts, moving their heart in its rhythm, with its time. And Buffy doesn't know when she stopped hearing the wolf-thing run, when its footsteps faded into harp strings, but now all she hears is music and the wheeze of her own inhalations.
On the 30th floor, she reaches the top of the staircase.
Behind her, Satsu's footsteps draw close, and then stop. The door is open into a black landscape of shifting shapes and emptiness. In the room beyond, if it is a room, she can hear the scrape of claws against... something. Concrete, perhaps, or something else. Stone.
Buffy narrows her eyes. "Jill," she says, "Call for back up." And then she steps into the darkness.
Inside, the door disappears. The walls are gone. Around her, she feels the movement of something else - something large. The wolf-thing, probably, circling her in rhythm with the music that wells up out of the blackness. All around her, the click of claws and paws and the pull, the strum, of strings. Buffy tracks the wolf's movements, or she tries, but the world shifts around her like a mirage, and one moment it's here and then there, and then nowhere at all.
But she feels changes. Somewhere in her blood, the demon-bound thing that she is, responding to the darkness. And in the distance, footsteps drawing closer - from behind, the light steps of Satsu, and from ahead heavier steps, but unmistakably human.
Satsu appears from nowhere and grips Buffy's arm, a little squeeze. "They're on their way." Hopefully, the door will still be there when they arrive.
When Mr. Preacherman emerges from the darkness, he's smaller than Buffy thought he would be. And then he isn't. He's blond, and he's slim, like the man on television, and then he's muscles, he's dark haired, his eyes burn. At his side, the wolf-thing shakes and clings, on four legs or on two.
One look at him, and Buffy understands.
"So," she says, "You're the god setting up shop around here."
Mr. Preacherman smiles with his teeth like fangs, they're perfect and white and sharp like little nails, like vampire's teeth, for the moment before they're perfect again. "It took you too long to find me."
And the Ragnarok myth spoke of the end of days, heralded by the return of Loki, the great trickster, harbinger of doom, Eris the goddess of discord, Coyote the prankster spirit. The Old Ones, Buffy knows, they had no sex, only magic and eyes and sprawling bodies the size of cities and power that made the world tremble when they moved like how the ground shivers under her feet when he moves. And his movements are music, his voice is a melody. From the shadows, the whisper of harp strings.
"You think you can stop this?" he says, from in front of her, or from behind. "This is the changing of the world, little slayer. " Somewhere nearby, unseen, he says "The Old Ones are returning... to remake the world in our image."
(Buffy squeezes her eyes closed, listening... to the echo of his voice, to the beating of her heart in her ears, and the music seeping through her veins like snake venom.)
"Every era," he says, "Must come to an end, in time."
(He circles behind her. Satsu whispers her name.)
"Every world must return to its parents, in the end."
(Buffy opens her eyes.)
"Not on my watch."
The Scythe is a swirl of crimson metal and it finds Mr. Preacherman's flesh with a twist of Buffy's body. And with that, the wolf-thing leaps. Satsu blocks it, sword flashing, and Buffy pushes her quarry away, farther from Satsu, trying to break the battle apart.
Mr. Preacherman's eyes glow a sickly green, like the blood trickling through his pale fingertips from the wound in his side. "Impressive, little girl. And yet, not enough." He grabs the blade between his hands when she strikes again, pushing her away.
"Aren't you supposed to be out of town?" She kicks her foot into his gut and he stumbles back two steps.
Grinning, he says, "I am."
"Great. Leave it the Slayerbrigade to misjudge the location of a transdimensional demon. I'll have to talk to Giles about that."
"You won't talk at all."
Buffy rolls her eyes, swings the Scythe. "Do you guys have a big book of boring bad guy lines? Because I swear, the next time I hear that one--"
His hand collides with her face, his fingers digging into her cheekbones, her skin. She inhales, and the smell of his skin is sulfur and music, and her flesh burns with the fire of a thousand gazes. Something, she doesn't know what (him?), it's in her body, in her brain, searching. Flipping through the book of her soul, a leisurely perusal that that takes a thousand years inside a single breath. When he lets go, she stumbles backwards, and falls.
"You are righteous," he says, "But you are not innocent."
And Buffy can't breathe, can barely move. Above her, Mr. Preacherman looms like a mountain, and now his skin is white like the mountainside too, his hair long and heavy and black like Satsu's. She wants to scream, but there's heat in her mouth, in her tongue. From somewhere far away, she hears the cracking, the shattering, of wood and glass.
Buffy looks up.
She says, "The Cavalry," as the room is flooded with slayers.
When the wolf-thing falls, the world shakes with its shuddering howl. Mr. Preacherman turns, his blond hair swishing, his demon-red skin glistening in the strange, surreal light of the abstract landscape. "Fenrir." His voice breaks apart like china as he starts in the direction of the wolf's cry. Buffy pushes herself to her feet and hacks across his back, the Scythe parting flesh and skin and bone. But Loki, Coyote, Eris, the faceless creator of destruction whatever he is, he snarls and shoves her aside as he pushes through the smoke and the gathered army of women.
In Buffy's mind, the music shifts, and Preacherman shouts, "My son!"
But in the path he carves through the slayers, in the center of their war, there is no wolf with the sun and the moon in its eyes. There is no creature shifting between forms, no everchanging prism. There is only the broken form of a well-coiffed man, his black hair slicked back, and his fingers red with blood.
Preacherman screams, and they're upon him.
Buffy screams, "Don't touch his skin," as she passes the Scythe from slayer to slayer as they strike at his most vulnerable places - his tendons, his groin, but his body changes, it shifts beneath them, quicksand, and where one wound opens another vanishes. His hands are quick too, and Buffy's face is splattered with the blood of friends, of allies. Soon, it's covered in her own as well, when his newly formed claws rake through her shoulder and chest. She moves behind him, pinning an arm.
Next to her, Satsu grabs his other arm, and Buffy shouts, "Someone--"
Angel says, "Gladly," as he strikes Preacherman in the face.
Buffy doesn't have the time to tell him to stop.
And there is a reason for slow-motion in films. That strange, unnatural approximation of a feeling - the feeling of the world slowing to a crawl, of the universe growing silent. Buffy understands it well, she's seen it so many times, she's felt it, too. Like the moment she watched Angel fall into Hell. Like watching him disappear into the fog, before heading to LA. Riley on the helicopter. Spike as the Hellmouth died around him. And now. Now, as Angel stumbles backwards, and his skin pulses with light. His eyes burn, and his hands shake. She remembers it too, that feeling, eyes in her blood. She remembers how she couldn't move.
Preacherman pulls away from her, and Satsu. Buffy screams, and she can't move fast enough to grab him, to stop him before-- He pulls away from the slayers trying to hold him down. And he is a mountain again, now, deep brown and black haired for a moment before he's fur, before he's black feathers, a raven. He grabs Angel's shoulders, and his voice, a high shriek, says, "You are a sinner," before he pushes forward, dragging Angel with him, and disappears into the shadows.
From miles away, the shatter-sound of breaking glass. Buffy squeezes her eyes shut against burning tears for no more than a fraction of a second. When she opens them, the mist has faded, and so has the music. Around them there is nothing -- simply the trashed remnants of a once beautiful penthouse apartment, its windows broken, its doors smashed down, a murdered man that was once a wolf lying in the center of a crimson-stained rug.
Buffy screams Angel's name and runs to the shattered windows, staring down at the empty streets below.
Ten.
(Preacherman says, "This is the beginning," and Angel wants to tell him that's a cliché. A nonsense line spouted by every cheesy villain in every lame movie Buffy's ever made him watch.
He'd say it, if he could talk.
"It's the beginning of evolution. The ancients understood this world far better than you children do. So blinded by science. So blinded by reason." Just inches from Angel's face, Preacherman says, "Oh, I know. You think you aren't a child. You think you're rather old, correct? Two hundred years on Earth, and countless centuries in timeless lands. But everything is relative." Preacherman's pale fingers wrap around Angel's shoulder. "You understand."
Angel's skin burns. And gazes, metaphorical or real, they can be like razor blades in his skin - the gaze of judgment, the gaze of his own self-evaluations. Preacherman whispers, "You are the sinner," and its like insects under his skin, crawling, cutting, burning.
He has been to Hell. He's inhaled the brimstone air that seared his useless lungs like wildfire. He's fought the demons, their clawed hands and endless coils, tentacles, their insect faces. He's felt the lash and the claw and watched the streets flicker with the red light of dimensions he would never have wished on the worst of enemies or the greatest of foes.
And it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to compare torments. Torment of the body, torment of the mind. The unhealing rake of claws in his skin, and the tear at his mind, the weight of his guilt.
It's been said that one tends to privilege whichever is most recent.
This, then, is the most recent of all.
Preacherman circles him, a vulture, eyes burning. Angel doesn't know where he is. It isn't Hell, he knows that - he knows the smell of Hell dimensions and the taste of their sulfur air. It isn't Hell, but it's dark, and his wrists ache with the press of metal cuffs against his skin.
Preacherman touches him, the inferno of his gaze, and says "Show me your sins."
Angel closes his eyes, tries not to let Connor's face come to mind, Cordelia's. Darla's. Drusilla. His father. His sister. A flood of images, sketches of Buffy made while she slept, and the knife twisted in her gut when he told her --
He opens his eyes in the inky darkness, and stares into the air, but his mind still screams.)
* * *
Buffy's room is empty without him, and cold. It doesn't make sense, because it isn't as though he brought in any heat (except the heat, she thinks with a tiny smile) and yet somehow she needs two blankets for every one she used to use. She keeps the lights low and the shadows are hollow inside.
* * *
At 1:06 in the morning, Willow arrives and whenever she opens doors these days, Buffy feels like there should be fairy dust, or tinkling bells. It's the whiff of magic that hangs around Willow - something tangible, tickling her nose and tingling her skin. Buffy's pretty straight, and even if she weren't it's Willow, but even so there's something weird and intoxicating in that presence.
Willow sits on the edge of the bed, her dress draping long and swaying against her ankles. She says, "I thought you'd need someone to talk to. You know, get girlfriendy with. Girlfriendy in the non-gay, best friendy sense."
And Buffy wants to say she can be such a little girl lost. It's not happy-making, it's not fun or empowering or any of that good, slayer commander stuff. Maybe it's the Angel thing. Somehow, things are always circular, with them. She always manages to lose him in the end. Ten years later, and...
Willow says, "I get it. You finally got him back, and now he's gone." She looks down, those red locks in her eyes, framing her face. "And you keep thinking, maybe if you did something different you could have stopped it, or saved him. Or maybe if you didn't do something that made him leave to begin with he would have been over there instead of all where he was, and then there wouldn't have been all the mojo."
"It's the risk you take," Buffy says, knees against her chest. "Look what's happened to us, Will. Me, and Xander, and you..."
"Original Variety Scoobs. I know. We've all lost people, Buffy. But you're right, it's the risk." Willow's fingers are little and pale on the edge of her knee. "But you can still get Angel back. And no one you loved has really died, died. I mean in a permanent way."
Buffy looks at her, and Willow widens her eyes, just slightly. "Oh! Spike. I mean, I didn't know if you--"
"No, that's okay, Will. I don't know if that was ever a love." She looks down. "He might have been." In another world, another time. Centuries ago, for him, years for her. For a while, there had been that sharp, timeless promise of eternal devotion, yes, his to her if not hers to him, and she would have been his new Drusilla, the center of his world, remaking him from the inside out in her image, a hero for her the way he was the big bad for Dru. But in the end, that hadn't held up, even for him. The last time she saw him, there wasn't much left of the them that was. If there was a them.
Willow says, "We'll find him. And we'll stop the bad things from happening, Buffy, it's what we do."
Buffy wants to believe it.
But it's the day before graduation again, and there's blood on her hands and demons rising in her mind. The world is ending again, and he's disappeared another time. And Buffy, as always, balancing the hero and the woman, she's holding onto the memory of him, hoping it will still be there when she opens her eyes. Trying to keep in perspective - save the world. Save him, too.
Willow says, "If the prophecies are right, he'll try to open the gate to Hell soon. Or his sister will. Someone will! It's just like old times, right? With the library?" (Like old times in loss, in stakes, in grief...) "Giles thinks he has a lead on which Hellmouth it will be." Willow's smile is just a little thin, around the edges. She has lines around the edges of her eyes, now. "It'll be okay, Buffy. You'll see."
When Angel left, the first time, Giles told her that time heals everything. That he knew she felt like she could never breathe again, but that she would, one day.
It was true, in a way. But it was never the same.
* * *
Mythology is never literal. That's what Giles has taught her. It's never literal, and it never behaves. You call on Zeus, you get Jupiter, and no they're not the same thing, no matter what the storybooks and history classes say. They might be the same being, but they're not the same personality. Names have power, they say, especially in the world of magic. Use a new name, split the spirit. Something like that. She can never keep all of the rules straight. That's why she's not a witch.
The myth of Ragnarok goes as follows:
The portents begin with the birth and death of several gods, and extend to the endless winter. Wolves will devour the sun and moon, and floods and earthquakes will free Loki and Fenrir from their bindings, while the herdsman of the giants plays his harp in celebration of the end of days.
Then the battle will be begin.
But of course, Gods never behave. Or perhaps it's simply that legends are never, really, true. Even Hansel and Gretel weren't innocents, when she met them. Or, well, "them." Of course, the myth also says that, in the end, the world will be reborn, greener and sunlit, the survivors rebuilding. Buffy hopes that part, at least, stays intact.
It doesn't say "Loki will kidnap someone's boyfriend," though. That's notable, she thinks.
Giles is the one who suggests the obvious. "This... little variation claims that Hela will open the mouth to Hell, and the end shall come." Glasses off, eyes lowered, he says, "I gather this demon-goddess intends to open a Hellmouth."
And Buffy says, "Probably a really toothy one." There aren't many in the world. Giles says there are only a few more than a dozen. Buffy would have thought there'd be one in New York, but no - just California, New Jersey and Ohio, in the United States, anyway. At least, those are the ones they've found. "And they've got Angel there."
Glasses in hand, Giles says, "The Mayans believed that in order for the Earth to renew itself, there must be a sacrifice of sinners."
Buffy's gut twists and burns. "They're going to kill him."
"And probably any number of other ne'er do wells. Or perceived ne'er do wells, as the case may be."
"They're going to kill him and open the gate to Hell." Somehow that seems so repetitive.
Buffy rubs the exhaustion from her burning eyes. And maybe it's not surprising that, right now, all she wants is Angel at her side, stroking her hand in that unremarkable, casual way they'd taken to doing once they learned not to fight... destiny, or desire, whatever it is between them. That string that holds them together when they're apart, that pulls them together again when time and death and centuries and even their own hearts have pushed them away from each other.
She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. We've got a world to save."
(And maybe it does matter. Maybe she really will always have that touch of seventeen in her heart when she thinks of him, looks at him. But she isn't a teenager now, and this is bigger than that, bigger than her feelings, his life. It's the world, and it's everything.)
Giles watches her, reaches across the table to rest his palm on the back of her hand. Buffy sits up straighter, a little.
(Besides. Nothing has managed to hold them apart yet. Maybe it's right to trust that.)
Buffy says, "Let's look at Hellmouths."
Giles slides his glasses back onto his face. "The Pine Barrens, in New Jersey. The Island of Surtsey. Vatican City--"
Buffy blinks. "Vatican City?"
Willow nods. "Duh. Why do you think they put the pope there?"
And Xander pauses, coffee mug in hand. "Holy... moly! I always knew there was something fishy about that hat."
Giles clears his throat. "Yes well, I'm sure we could discuss the ramifications of holy men living on Hellmouths for the rest of the night, but it doesn't bring us any closer to finding this... ah, this--"
"Preacherman?" Buffy says.
"Yes. This Preacherman. There is another in the Valley of Kings, in Egypt, and Ganghwa Island. Also, in Balleyboley Forest. And--"
Xander frowns at the map for a moment before he says, "Wait a minute. Did you say Surtsey?"
Giles looks at him. "Ah. Yes, I do believe I did. Rather a while ago, actually. Really, Xander, your power of observation are--"
"Very funny, library guy. You said Surtsey. That's your guy." Xander taps the island on the map. "It's called... Surtsey? Surtur's Island! I read about it. In a back issue of Thor." He says it with a grin, and a bit of pride.
Willow says, "Yay for high class literature," with a little nod.
Xander throws a yellow highlighter at her. "Surtur? The fire giant?"
Buffy bites her bottom lip. There's a certain grace to the suggestion - the critical role played by a tiny island named for the Giant once expected to ravage the world. A place built from the rage of the Earth, lava and ash, the fire of the Gods, or so it's been said. The Ancients must have thought volcanoes were the mouths of Hell anyway.
Buffy says, "We'll look into it."
Xander grins. He says, "The return of key guy."
* * *
The world is ending, they say, on December 20th, 2012.
It's a little scary, except... Buffy hears that kind of thing all the time.
Eleven.
Created by a three year long volcanic eruption, Surtsey has been dying since the day it was born. Once almost three kilometers, now it's just barely one, at least according to Giles. The island is fifty years old, and already going back home. It's sad, in a way - even islands have a limited lifespan. Like mountains, or oceans. One day the ocean will dry up, too. Pretty soon if they don't stop it from boiling. Not that's it's boiling now, but she wouldn't suggest anyone go swimming.
Buffy keeps the Scythe balanced between her two hands, her feet pushed against the helicopter floor. Outside the window, Willow is flying with the helicopter light dancing in her hair and the air on her face. Theirs isn't the only helicopter, of course - Buffy tries not to march into a war without an army, these days. Next to her, Satsu, shifts her blade from one hand to another, and Buffy knows she's trying not to look too long, trying not to yearn too much. Love's first kiss, it's one of those things that never really fades. Buffy knows that feeling well. First loves, they say, never really go away.
On the ground beneath them, the island smokes, and Buffy hears the churning of water, the harp strings, calling. She hears it in her head, or maybe in the air, in her ears. It's impossible to tell, anymore.
Speaking of her ears, Xander says "All right, what do you see?" into her earpiece, and Buffy jolts before she brings herself back to where she is.
"Um, steaming island," she says. "Hellmouth under it. Your typical doomsday scenario, but without the buildings and things." She leans forward, looking down. "Sorry you had to sit this one out."
"I'm not sitting it out, Buffy. Buff-buff. Buffster. I'm general-guy. General-guy does general stuff from very far away, lest he have his other eye poked out by another crazy preacher."
"Yeah, you do have baddish luck with those." She pushes her foot down, harder, against the floor. "Um, is there a read on Angel?"
Xander is quiet, and Buffy tries not to feel the seconds moving. "No. But we're getting heavy readings from the Hellmouth itself. If he's anywhere near it--"
"You couldn't really pick the hay strand out of the hay barrel. Yeah, I get it."
"He could still be down there." Tortured, tormented, strung up, bled dry, like with Drusilla, like with Spike, like with so many demons and vampires and things, things that wanted his blood or at least to use it against her. It's been a week since Preacherman took him - seven days, and hours, and minutes on top of that. She's not sure whether it would be kinder to find him dead than alive.
Well, "alive."
Buffy checks her watch.
It's 10:46pm. December 21st, 2012.
She adjusts her parachute, her earpiece.
Showtime.
They arrive as the hour turns to 11pm, and the air is thick with smoke and green light; ash and the smell of sulfur, like something rotting, like something wrong. Buffy drops from the sky; around her, slayers follow in twos and threes, filling the sky with their silhouettes and their parachutes blooming against the sky. Buffy feels the ground when she lands, the pulsing heat racing through the rocks and dirt, withering the plants and leaving scattered insect bodies strewn over the earth.
"There's definitely something unnatural here," she says, wrinkling her nose as she unstraps the parachute from her back. "What do you say we do a little lookaround?"
The Scythe rests against her belly, its length balanced between her hands, and she feels that pulsing, too - the power of the Slayer responding to the power of the Hellmouth gaping open under their feel, or around them, or... wherever it is. Buffy's seen three, now, and she hates how they never look the same way from city to city. It's like the Wizard of Oz, she thinks, you go in and you never know what to expect. They could be standing in it, now.
In her ear, Xander says, "Buff, we're getting heavy readings from the middle of the Island. Riiight where that fun dormant volcano is hanging out."
Buffy looks around, her gaze penetrating the trees. "Yay. Nothing I love more than lava dancing."
They split up, covering more area, but she keeps Satsu at her side as they move through the branches, stepping over the dead birds, dead tree branches. Underfoot, the ground is hot, like the streets of New York and the water in Venice. Buffy's rubber soled boots seem slippery, like the soles are melting. She tries not to think about that, and she doesn't check. Over her, Willow floats like a goddess of the air, her long skirts drifting in waves over her legs. It's comforting, in a way. Hell, Buffy figures, if it gets too bad Willow can always magic them out.
Of course, if it gets too bad, there probably won't be anywhere to magic them away to. And anyway, it's not like Buffy is ever going to run. Never surrender, never give up. Never put down your sword, or, well, in this case your Scythe. She hears Angel in her head, telling her that. Telling her she'll never fail; she never does.
(And if she wins, if this ends, they could disappear, go to Florida. And the sun would still be living there, and the air would be warm and the water blue like crystal, and he could sleep all day, and all night he'd have his fingers in her hair and his mouth on her mouth. She would watch the fish swim around her ankles, and lay down her weapons at last.)
Buffy hums under her breath as she moves through the trees, a little tune from childhood. Satsu watches her in the shadows. She says, "What are you humming?"
"Down by the riverside." Buffy whisper-sings, "I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside..."
(She'll never do it. Still, it's nice to think of it, sometimes.)
Glancing at Satsu, Buffy says, "At this point, you're kind of supposed to clap."
Satsu shakes her head. "I don't really feel like clapping."
In her hands, the Scythe pulses. "Yeah. Neither do I."
And the island is so dark, so hot, that Buffy feels like she's walking into Hell already. Still, she hums as she goes.
* * *
The slayers find each other again in a clearing surrounding a cave. It's not a clearing, really, Buffy has to admit, it's more like a minor break from the thick vegetation. Of course, while she's being picky, she's pretty sure the cave isn't a real cave. Carved into the side of a steep hill, it yawns like the jaw of a demon, and Willow says it's leaking magic. She says the walls are made of it, and in that sense it's probably more a construct than a geological feature. Buffy presses her lips together and wonders why evil beings can't just have a house these days. Maybe shack up in a nice warehouse. Things used to be so reliable.
Buffy shivers when she steps inside, swallowed by the sudden onslaught of cold, the prickle of ice on her skin. At her side, Satsu draws a sword with one hand, a dagger with the other. And inside is dark, a shadow inside a shadow; Buffy feels strange and swallowed, and like the walls are closing on her, though they're invisible in the black. Staying quiet, she listens to the footsteps beside her, Satsu's breath, and the pairs of feet following her as well.
The caverns are long and narrow, and Buffy feels they're going on forever. Even so, she doesn't want to turn on a flashlight, or even spark a match - it's unpredictable, what happens in a place like this. You never know when there might be fire demons, or darkness demons, or... actually, Buffy decides, it's definitely light time.
"Willow, can we light a spark in here?" Buffy takes six steps, and then stops. "Willow?"
And there's nothing surrounding her but silence.
Somewhere on her belt, there's a mini-flashlight; she scrambles for it, even as she hears the thickness of nothing - no footsteps, no breath. "Satsu?" She says as she pills the flashlight free. "Renee?" In her hear, her headphones crackle with static - no Xander, no Giles, no Willow, no friends.
She flips on the flashlight.
...the cavern, it's not like a tunnel at all. It's a wide mouth, a gaping wound of stalactites and stalagmites and dripping limestone, and red streaked walls, and Buffy can't see the whole in the moving pinprick glow of her tiny light, but she sees the parts, and how the stone looks like it's bleeding, and how there's nothing around here but air. She doesn't know where her companions have gone, or whether it's them or her that's left the other behind.
Reality warping demons and gods are always frustrating. She's been dealing with them a lot, these days.
The magic Willow leaves her blood is screaming, but there's nothing around... or at least nothing that she can see. Somewhere nearby, there is the drip-drip-drip of water from the cavern ceiling falling in trickles and splashing on her shoes, her face. Buffy turns the flashlight downward at her feet. There in her shadow, mixed with the dewdrops collected on the stone ground, is the red-streaks of blood mingling with the water. Buffy's heart clenches, her stomach tightens, because she's been here before, lived these same situations in life and in nightmares and she knows what she'll see when she turns the flashlight up. But she does anyway.
He is there, her Angel, suspended, chest open, eyes closed. Buffy fights down the urge to scream.
That's when she hears Mr. Preacherman, whispering in her ears.
"You mourn for the sinner?" This close, Preacherman smells like sulfur, like brimstone. He says, "But the sinner leads the way to heaven."
Buffy closes her eyes. "I've been to heaven. You don't get there like this."
When she opens them, Preacherman is in front of her, his blond-haired, middle-American face an inch away. His eyes are burning, ice blue. He says, "Not heaven for you."
Buffy ducks his first strike and armors her body in Willow's mojo; Preacherman's hands glaze off the magic, and it tingles, ripples, and yet it stays intact. Around her, in the blackness, there's the sound of steel and screaming, and she knows her friends are here, now. Separated and then together again, and of course somewhere in this room, this cavern, she knows there are demons too - Preacherman's slithering snake of a child with it venomous bite, and whatever other god-forsaken creatures have crawled from the Hellmouth. Wherever that is.
"You're just like every other lame demon I've ever killed," Buffy says, and the Scythe streaks beneath his feet as he jumps. "You talk a good game. Maybe bring darkness on the world for a few months. But in the end you have no followthrough. They just didn't have the endurance to go through a true Armageddon!" (She feels the give of flesh under the blade of her weapon, and Preacherman grunts in pain.) "Oh wait. It's not that they couldn't stick it out." (She swings again, and the impact of the blade with his body shakes her all over.) "It's that I killed them."
Buffy doesn't know why, but now she can see. She sees in floods of red light and gold, she sees in glows. It takes a moment to realize it's the light glowing inside the rock on the opposite end of the cavern. All around her, silhouetted in hell-light, there are her sister-slayers, scattered on the ground, or still standing with the blood of demons on her hands. The demons are there too, small and large, in the air and on the ground. Stretched across the cavern, a dead snake lies motionless, and in front of Buffy, Mr. Preacherman is still smiling.
"I'm no demon, girl." He steps back, off of the blade that's embedded in his chest. "I am--"
"I know, I know. You're destruction and death and all that yummy goodness." Buffy swings again. "Been there, done that, too."
Inside the light, Buffy can see the silhouette of a woman standing inside, like the star of a shadow puppet show. Preacherman's last kid, she knows. Opening the Hellmouth to let the darkness out. Buffy sets her mouth in a thin line. It's not going to happen.
She swings again.
It's not.
The next time Mr. Preacherman hits her, it sends shocks through her body and her armor splinters and falls - pieces of solid magic lying like shattered glass on the cavern floor. Buffy barely avoids his touch. Her heart beat drums a tune in her ears, and music seeps from the walls - the sound of the world's death cry played back on harp strings. She catches a glimpse of Willow's dress fluttering overhead, and something inside her unclenches. Willow's going to get Angel. He'll be all right. He'll be fine.
Then, Mr. Preacherman's hand grips her throat, and her body is aflame.
The first trickle of demons begin to emerge from the opening wall - small ones, at first, the foot soldiers of Hell. Preacherman's touch of gazes tears her, cuts her, but in the distance she hears Satsu take command, shouting orders even as her voice grows closer to Buffy.
And Buffy wants to shout, to tell her to get away, but she can't speak, can't breathe.
(Satsu. She knows she's hurt Satsu. She knows too well how it feels to wake up without the one you love; to dream of a future and wake up without one. She feels her mistakes crawling in her flesh. And she knows she's hurt Faith, although not always without cause. She knows the envy cuts both ways, sometimes, and maybe that it started with her first. Just a little. His fingers cut into her skin, and she knows she's hurt Xander. Years ago, but even so, it's true - he loved her, and she was oblivious, until it was too late, and then she was awkward and strange. And Preacherman breathes in her struggling, and Angel. She knows she hurt--)
Buffy's eyes widen, and something deep inside her clicks.
"...if the Mayans were correct, the rebirth of the world will happen only in the pain of sinners, and the sacrifice of the righteous."
She reaches up and slowly begins to pry his fingers from her skin.
"You are righteous. But you are not innocent."
She understands.
"The sacrifice of the righteous. Satsu!" Buffy clutches the Scythe in between her hands, and only feet away, Satsu stares at her with her wide, accepting eyes. Buffy kicks Preacherman in the chest, sending him flying back two yards. It will be ineffective, she knows, but it buys her time. Enough time to look back, and she has to look back. She has to see...
Behind her, Angel has drawn his tattered coat close around his bleeding chest. Leaning on Willow, he's pale and drawn, but still there. He hasn't crumbled to dust just yet.
She smiles, and Angel's eyes darken. "Buffy," he says, "Don't."
"A sacrifice of the righteous," she says again, louder this time, and her voice carries through the cavern as the Scythe pulses in her hands. Around her, the slayers hesitate only for a moment before they begin to form ranks, maneuvering their enemies.
Buffy runs.
She runs at Mr. Preacherman, Scythe positioned against her chest, and beside her, she hears the stampede of a dozen girls, all strong, all brave. Born special but for once, not born alone.
Before them, the Hellmouth yawns. Behind them, there is everything they know, and they run driving the demons ahead of them, pressing against hot and scaly skin, the flash of blonde hair and green eyes just before they reach the wall.
And it's strange, passing from Earth into... somewhere else. She feels the air shift, and thicken. She feels the heat and cold mingling and dancing in patterns over her. She feels Preacherman's gaze touch too, searching her for long moments before everything goes black.
Epilogue
The cavern is empty when he arrives, and it echoes with his every step. On the ground, at his feet, his blood still stains the rock. It's warm here, though the heat lives in the air, instead of the ground now that the Hellmouth is gone. The caress of it warms his skin, but somehow the cavern still feels cold, to him.
It's just a state of mine, he thinks. A perspective. Who wouldn't find this place cold, after all he's lost here.
The shadows scatter in front of him as he walks, sunlight by his side, trickling over the rocks, over the walls. He stands in the dark places, away from its touch, until he sees her. She's sitting, perched, on a rock and she's golden, like she always was. Golden and smiling at him with her hair in her face, and the sunlight makes her skin glow.
Angel smiles back, and wonders if she's always been so small, so strong.
He sits on a rock opposite her, separated by the sunlight spilled across the grey stone floor. He says, "Buffy," with his hands in his lap and his coat pooled behind him, gathering near his feet.
And Buffy says, "Angel," with her warm eyes and little voice. "I didn't know if you'd come."
"Of course I came. I didn't really have a choice."
"You always have choices." Her hair is in two little braids lying by the side of her face, and her eyes are so big, so wide. Angel wants to say it's true, and that he believes in free will, but he doesn't, not always. He's never had much choice when it came to her. She says, "Is it gone?"
Angel nods. "It's gone. All of it. The magic, the demons. Even the slayers."
"It'll come back one day. It always does." She grins, shifting her foot against the ground. "Or maybe it won't. Maybe it's the end of an era for real. Wouldn't that be cool?"
Angel glances down. Her feet are wrapped in strappy white leather shoes - so fashionable, even now. "What are you going to do?"
She shrugs. "Hold the gate. Me, and the other slayers. Plus we've decided to make some changes down here. We spent the past few days messing with Wolfram and Hart; we tore up some of their contracts, burnt down one of their hangouts... it was full of bones and stuff. Pretty gross. But I thought we'd start there, just for you."
"That was sweet of you, Buffy."
"Yeah, I'm a regular Miss Sunshine with a Scythe." Watching him, she says, "What about vampires?"
"No more of those, either." He can't quite meet her eyes. "We'll find a way to bring you back, Buffy." They'll find a way. And he'll hold her hand in the golden light and kiss her, and they'll finally be...
"There's no magic, Angel. That means no gate opening. That means no me." She smiles again, sadly, face down. "It's okay, I've come to terms with it. Lots of fighting and guarding, but hey, that's what I did even before the big boom. Except here there aren't any coffee breaks. I miss the coffee breaks." She looks up. She doesn't say, I miss you.
"Magic can't be gone completely." Angel reaches across the sunlight fence and runs his fingertips down the side of her body, over her smooth neck, the soft cloth of her clothes, and the cut of her jutting hipbones. He wonders when she got so thin. "After all, it's not normal to meet in dreams."
"Maybe," Buffy whispers, "Or maybe this is just a normal dream. Something you've cooked up in your spiky haired head because..."
"Because I miss you so much." Angel clenches his fingers, just for a moment. "Yeah. Maybe."
"Yeah. I mean, this isn't really gate-holding apparel. I'm not even wearing comfortable shoes." She looks down, and her hair tumbles into her eyes, over her face like a veil. "Either way, I think it's time to wake up."
Angel doesn't want to wake up. He doesn't want to leave. He wants to stay with her forever in the sunlit cavern and touch her skin and kiss her lips and feel her heart beating under his palm and listen to her breathe at night. He wants to stroke her hair and wrap her in blankets and laugh with her at stupid sitcoms, badly acted dramas. He wants to feed her chocolate chip ice cream and dream with her and watch her sleep.
But the world shifts around him, like it's changing into something else, and the cave is filled with light. Angel closes his eyes to shut out the sun. "Buffy. The dream I told you about. It wasn't a dream."
"Yeah, I see that now." Her voice is soft, trembly. "And just so you know? It sucked. But it was the right choice."
(He has so much to say, and there's not enough time.)
He opens his eyes just in time to see her smile, and the quickness of her breath when she pulls him close, kisses him, and he inhales deep, breathes her in. She's warm, and soft, and he feels her pulse under his fingertips, he feels every movement, every heartbeat.
And then she's gone, and his world ends as quickly as it came, that day when he saw her outside her school, young and full of hope, full of dreams, a thousand years ago.
(Angel opens his eyes in the cool light of morning, sheets twisted around his feet and arms, hands holding nothing. His own heartbeat thumping in his ears.)
I tiptoe softly to the timberline
Where part of me is waiting
On the other side.
* * *
Author's Notes: Originally meant for the IWRY ficathon, which I have clearly missed by about five months. Which is okay. There are like three Buffy fans on my flist, so no one's going to care, but I'm done and I care, so go me.
All lyrics are by Terami Hirsch, and come the following songs: Back to the Start, Waking the Dream, Chains of Andromeda, Witches' Brew and Timberline.
Thanks (much) to britfacexx and booboosheep for betas/looksover/telling me it doesn't suck.
Before the World Falls Down
I am fire, but I've been burned by prophecy.
And all the princesses line up for full confessions.
Maybe we'll all go down together.
Nine.
(Connor. Cordelia. Spike. Doyle. Wesley. Gunn. Darla.
When Angel closes his eyes to sleep, he doesn't fear for his soul.)
* * *
They go through the sewers, Buffy and Angel, Jill and Satsu, and it's like something in a lame movie about breaking into banks through the sewers. Buffy keeps The Scythe gripped between her hands and Satsu holds the light above their heads, looking for vampires, demons, guardians. Whoever might be lurking in the quiet places near Mr. Preacherman's building, above or below ground. But the silence is deafening, and along with the half-hearted squeak of rats, there is only their footsteps, and their breath.
Angel walks beside her, his trenchcoat stirring with every step. She sees it dance in the shadows thrown against the walls, and for a moment they're back in her bedroom, his lips on her throat, the cool touch of his hands. She shivers from every bit of her, the memory a tickle in the corners of her mind. But this is not the time, and she pushes it away.
Not that she'd rather be here, in the green and slimy corridors, assaulted with the stink of sewage, the cold air, the rats. The tunnel turns, then forks, and behind her, Jill looks over their maps. She's shaking with nerves. She's new.
"It's this way," Jill says, nodding a little to the left. Buffy follows, Angel's hand resting on the small of her back like something casual and ever-there. Like the world hasn't changed just by his being there, instead of in LA, in Hell. It's not really surprising. He's always been there, in his way.
When they reach the gratings beneath Park Avenue, Buffy stares up into dark empty space through the holes and the metal. Above their heads, she can hear something moving. Slithering. The weight of its body, sliding over cement floors, rubbing past the walls.
Next to her ear, Angel says, "Stay here," before he pushes the grating up and jumps into the space above them. And Buffy's never stood still through a fight. She's never let anyone battle instead of her. She shouts his name as she climbs above, into the heat and the dark. Beneath her, Satsu's light sways and flickers and Buffy feels thick skin, scaled or armored or something in between, as it slithers past her legs, tearing skin from her calf. In her head, the hissing begins. Somewhere, across the blank space of whatever basement hell they're in, she hears Angel shout her name just before claws sink into her back.
Buffy tumbles forward, and rolls out of the way of another flash of fur and claws. The space turns light with Satsu's arrival, her light flashing over long coils of body, the snake that encircled the world. On its side, an ancient gash scars its skin, chipped through scales as thick as plates, as hard as steel. The place where the Scythe connected months ago. Her wound burns. She knows it's the snake from Sunnydale, that thing she thought she'd killed.
"Satsu," she says, "Stay away from its face." And then the wolf is upon her.
It isn't a wolf, really. It isn't a man. It's something other, shifting from form to form without truly changing. Watching it move is like watching illusions through a trap of lenses and mirrors - from this angle, tall and slim, a canine of a man, handsome with his slicked back hair black as night. A lawyer, or politician. Flash, now he is fur and teeth, snout and claws. Flash, and back. A shifting mirage. Buffy's blood trickles down her back as she swings the Scythe at his head and behind her Satsu imbeds a sword in the wolf-thing's leg, but it doesn't slow, it doesn't stop. In its left eye, she sees the sad, subtle reflection of the swallowed moon. In its right, the burning glow of the blotted out sun.
The snake says, "We've waited for you." Its voice is a hissing sound as amorphous as the wolf's body, shifting from human to snake with different angles. It's like the snake-thing's body, too, in the light - angles and planes, a woman here and here, a serpent thing.
Satsu breaks a dagger against the wolf's back; it flinches then, barely. Quick, but slowly enough to allow Buffy to get to her feet again.
There are no easy quips, this time, just the struggle of fingers and claws, weapons and fur and skin. The wolf thing moves like quicksilver, and Buffy feels like she's in the alleyway in the last year of Sunnydale's life, again, fighting the Turok-han, this creature with skin like stone that breaks her to pieces without a thought. In the flash of metal, in the heaving of her own breath, she nearly misses the snake's teeth as they lunge for her gut.
Angel doesn't. He's in front of her, hands prying open the snake's jaws, his face all ridges and all demon. "Buffy," he says, "Get out of here. This thing can't poison me."
She wants to object, but the wolf-man disappears through the barely visible doorway across the basement floor, past washing machines and dryers and the scattered corpses of roaches and mice. She hears its growl as it runs through the hallways, its steps and its breath in the walls, in the air, and she follows. Yards away, Angel says, "I'll be right behind you."
Buffy jumps up flights of stairs three and four steps at a time, and Satsu shadows her footsteps. On the fourth floor, she sees its shadows two flights above their head in the endless stairwell, and mutters, "Why can't monsters ever use the elevator?" If it's heading to the penthouse, she knows, this will be a long run.
By the 20th floor, she hears the music.
At first, she thinks it's a dream. A hallucination - a memory. The mourning strains of the harp signaling the end of days. Then Satsu swears beneath her heaving breath and Buffy knows it's there. Growing louder as they ascend, mingling with their thoughts, moving their heart in its rhythm, with its time. And Buffy doesn't know when she stopped hearing the wolf-thing run, when its footsteps faded into harp strings, but now all she hears is music and the wheeze of her own inhalations.
On the 30th floor, she reaches the top of the staircase.
Behind her, Satsu's footsteps draw close, and then stop. The door is open into a black landscape of shifting shapes and emptiness. In the room beyond, if it is a room, she can hear the scrape of claws against... something. Concrete, perhaps, or something else. Stone.
Buffy narrows her eyes. "Jill," she says, "Call for back up." And then she steps into the darkness.
Inside, the door disappears. The walls are gone. Around her, she feels the movement of something else - something large. The wolf-thing, probably, circling her in rhythm with the music that wells up out of the blackness. All around her, the click of claws and paws and the pull, the strum, of strings. Buffy tracks the wolf's movements, or she tries, but the world shifts around her like a mirage, and one moment it's here and then there, and then nowhere at all.
But she feels changes. Somewhere in her blood, the demon-bound thing that she is, responding to the darkness. And in the distance, footsteps drawing closer - from behind, the light steps of Satsu, and from ahead heavier steps, but unmistakably human.
Satsu appears from nowhere and grips Buffy's arm, a little squeeze. "They're on their way." Hopefully, the door will still be there when they arrive.
When Mr. Preacherman emerges from the darkness, he's smaller than Buffy thought he would be. And then he isn't. He's blond, and he's slim, like the man on television, and then he's muscles, he's dark haired, his eyes burn. At his side, the wolf-thing shakes and clings, on four legs or on two.
One look at him, and Buffy understands.
"So," she says, "You're the god setting up shop around here."
Mr. Preacherman smiles with his teeth like fangs, they're perfect and white and sharp like little nails, like vampire's teeth, for the moment before they're perfect again. "It took you too long to find me."
And the Ragnarok myth spoke of the end of days, heralded by the return of Loki, the great trickster, harbinger of doom, Eris the goddess of discord, Coyote the prankster spirit. The Old Ones, Buffy knows, they had no sex, only magic and eyes and sprawling bodies the size of cities and power that made the world tremble when they moved like how the ground shivers under her feet when he moves. And his movements are music, his voice is a melody. From the shadows, the whisper of harp strings.
"You think you can stop this?" he says, from in front of her, or from behind. "This is the changing of the world, little slayer. " Somewhere nearby, unseen, he says "The Old Ones are returning... to remake the world in our image."
(Buffy squeezes her eyes closed, listening... to the echo of his voice, to the beating of her heart in her ears, and the music seeping through her veins like snake venom.)
"Every era," he says, "Must come to an end, in time."
(He circles behind her. Satsu whispers her name.)
"Every world must return to its parents, in the end."
(Buffy opens her eyes.)
"Not on my watch."
The Scythe is a swirl of crimson metal and it finds Mr. Preacherman's flesh with a twist of Buffy's body. And with that, the wolf-thing leaps. Satsu blocks it, sword flashing, and Buffy pushes her quarry away, farther from Satsu, trying to break the battle apart.
Mr. Preacherman's eyes glow a sickly green, like the blood trickling through his pale fingertips from the wound in his side. "Impressive, little girl. And yet, not enough." He grabs the blade between his hands when she strikes again, pushing her away.
"Aren't you supposed to be out of town?" She kicks her foot into his gut and he stumbles back two steps.
Grinning, he says, "I am."
"Great. Leave it the Slayerbrigade to misjudge the location of a transdimensional demon. I'll have to talk to Giles about that."
"You won't talk at all."
Buffy rolls her eyes, swings the Scythe. "Do you guys have a big book of boring bad guy lines? Because I swear, the next time I hear that one--"
His hand collides with her face, his fingers digging into her cheekbones, her skin. She inhales, and the smell of his skin is sulfur and music, and her flesh burns with the fire of a thousand gazes. Something, she doesn't know what (him?), it's in her body, in her brain, searching. Flipping through the book of her soul, a leisurely perusal that that takes a thousand years inside a single breath. When he lets go, she stumbles backwards, and falls.
"You are righteous," he says, "But you are not innocent."
And Buffy can't breathe, can barely move. Above her, Mr. Preacherman looms like a mountain, and now his skin is white like the mountainside too, his hair long and heavy and black like Satsu's. She wants to scream, but there's heat in her mouth, in her tongue. From somewhere far away, she hears the cracking, the shattering, of wood and glass.
Buffy looks up.
She says, "The Cavalry," as the room is flooded with slayers.
When the wolf-thing falls, the world shakes with its shuddering howl. Mr. Preacherman turns, his blond hair swishing, his demon-red skin glistening in the strange, surreal light of the abstract landscape. "Fenrir." His voice breaks apart like china as he starts in the direction of the wolf's cry. Buffy pushes herself to her feet and hacks across his back, the Scythe parting flesh and skin and bone. But Loki, Coyote, Eris, the faceless creator of destruction whatever he is, he snarls and shoves her aside as he pushes through the smoke and the gathered army of women.
In Buffy's mind, the music shifts, and Preacherman shouts, "My son!"
But in the path he carves through the slayers, in the center of their war, there is no wolf with the sun and the moon in its eyes. There is no creature shifting between forms, no everchanging prism. There is only the broken form of a well-coiffed man, his black hair slicked back, and his fingers red with blood.
Preacherman screams, and they're upon him.
Buffy screams, "Don't touch his skin," as she passes the Scythe from slayer to slayer as they strike at his most vulnerable places - his tendons, his groin, but his body changes, it shifts beneath them, quicksand, and where one wound opens another vanishes. His hands are quick too, and Buffy's face is splattered with the blood of friends, of allies. Soon, it's covered in her own as well, when his newly formed claws rake through her shoulder and chest. She moves behind him, pinning an arm.
Next to her, Satsu grabs his other arm, and Buffy shouts, "Someone--"
Angel says, "Gladly," as he strikes Preacherman in the face.
Buffy doesn't have the time to tell him to stop.
And there is a reason for slow-motion in films. That strange, unnatural approximation of a feeling - the feeling of the world slowing to a crawl, of the universe growing silent. Buffy understands it well, she's seen it so many times, she's felt it, too. Like the moment she watched Angel fall into Hell. Like watching him disappear into the fog, before heading to LA. Riley on the helicopter. Spike as the Hellmouth died around him. And now. Now, as Angel stumbles backwards, and his skin pulses with light. His eyes burn, and his hands shake. She remembers it too, that feeling, eyes in her blood. She remembers how she couldn't move.
Preacherman pulls away from her, and Satsu. Buffy screams, and she can't move fast enough to grab him, to stop him before-- He pulls away from the slayers trying to hold him down. And he is a mountain again, now, deep brown and black haired for a moment before he's fur, before he's black feathers, a raven. He grabs Angel's shoulders, and his voice, a high shriek, says, "You are a sinner," before he pushes forward, dragging Angel with him, and disappears into the shadows.
From miles away, the shatter-sound of breaking glass. Buffy squeezes her eyes shut against burning tears for no more than a fraction of a second. When she opens them, the mist has faded, and so has the music. Around them there is nothing -- simply the trashed remnants of a once beautiful penthouse apartment, its windows broken, its doors smashed down, a murdered man that was once a wolf lying in the center of a crimson-stained rug.
Buffy screams Angel's name and runs to the shattered windows, staring down at the empty streets below.
Ten.
(Preacherman says, "This is the beginning," and Angel wants to tell him that's a cliché. A nonsense line spouted by every cheesy villain in every lame movie Buffy's ever made him watch.
He'd say it, if he could talk.
"It's the beginning of evolution. The ancients understood this world far better than you children do. So blinded by science. So blinded by reason." Just inches from Angel's face, Preacherman says, "Oh, I know. You think you aren't a child. You think you're rather old, correct? Two hundred years on Earth, and countless centuries in timeless lands. But everything is relative." Preacherman's pale fingers wrap around Angel's shoulder. "You understand."
Angel's skin burns. And gazes, metaphorical or real, they can be like razor blades in his skin - the gaze of judgment, the gaze of his own self-evaluations. Preacherman whispers, "You are the sinner," and its like insects under his skin, crawling, cutting, burning.
He has been to Hell. He's inhaled the brimstone air that seared his useless lungs like wildfire. He's fought the demons, their clawed hands and endless coils, tentacles, their insect faces. He's felt the lash and the claw and watched the streets flicker with the red light of dimensions he would never have wished on the worst of enemies or the greatest of foes.
And it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to compare torments. Torment of the body, torment of the mind. The unhealing rake of claws in his skin, and the tear at his mind, the weight of his guilt.
It's been said that one tends to privilege whichever is most recent.
This, then, is the most recent of all.
Preacherman circles him, a vulture, eyes burning. Angel doesn't know where he is. It isn't Hell, he knows that - he knows the smell of Hell dimensions and the taste of their sulfur air. It isn't Hell, but it's dark, and his wrists ache with the press of metal cuffs against his skin.
Preacherman touches him, the inferno of his gaze, and says "Show me your sins."
Angel closes his eyes, tries not to let Connor's face come to mind, Cordelia's. Darla's. Drusilla. His father. His sister. A flood of images, sketches of Buffy made while she slept, and the knife twisted in her gut when he told her --
He opens his eyes in the inky darkness, and stares into the air, but his mind still screams.)
* * *
Buffy's room is empty without him, and cold. It doesn't make sense, because it isn't as though he brought in any heat (except the heat, she thinks with a tiny smile) and yet somehow she needs two blankets for every one she used to use. She keeps the lights low and the shadows are hollow inside.
* * *
At 1:06 in the morning, Willow arrives and whenever she opens doors these days, Buffy feels like there should be fairy dust, or tinkling bells. It's the whiff of magic that hangs around Willow - something tangible, tickling her nose and tingling her skin. Buffy's pretty straight, and even if she weren't it's Willow, but even so there's something weird and intoxicating in that presence.
Willow sits on the edge of the bed, her dress draping long and swaying against her ankles. She says, "I thought you'd need someone to talk to. You know, get girlfriendy with. Girlfriendy in the non-gay, best friendy sense."
And Buffy wants to say she can be such a little girl lost. It's not happy-making, it's not fun or empowering or any of that good, slayer commander stuff. Maybe it's the Angel thing. Somehow, things are always circular, with them. She always manages to lose him in the end. Ten years later, and...
Willow says, "I get it. You finally got him back, and now he's gone." She looks down, those red locks in her eyes, framing her face. "And you keep thinking, maybe if you did something different you could have stopped it, or saved him. Or maybe if you didn't do something that made him leave to begin with he would have been over there instead of all where he was, and then there wouldn't have been all the mojo."
"It's the risk you take," Buffy says, knees against her chest. "Look what's happened to us, Will. Me, and Xander, and you..."
"Original Variety Scoobs. I know. We've all lost people, Buffy. But you're right, it's the risk." Willow's fingers are little and pale on the edge of her knee. "But you can still get Angel back. And no one you loved has really died, died. I mean in a permanent way."
Buffy looks at her, and Willow widens her eyes, just slightly. "Oh! Spike. I mean, I didn't know if you--"
"No, that's okay, Will. I don't know if that was ever a love." She looks down. "He might have been." In another world, another time. Centuries ago, for him, years for her. For a while, there had been that sharp, timeless promise of eternal devotion, yes, his to her if not hers to him, and she would have been his new Drusilla, the center of his world, remaking him from the inside out in her image, a hero for her the way he was the big bad for Dru. But in the end, that hadn't held up, even for him. The last time she saw him, there wasn't much left of the them that was. If there was a them.
Willow says, "We'll find him. And we'll stop the bad things from happening, Buffy, it's what we do."
Buffy wants to believe it.
But it's the day before graduation again, and there's blood on her hands and demons rising in her mind. The world is ending again, and he's disappeared another time. And Buffy, as always, balancing the hero and the woman, she's holding onto the memory of him, hoping it will still be there when she opens her eyes. Trying to keep in perspective - save the world. Save him, too.
Willow says, "If the prophecies are right, he'll try to open the gate to Hell soon. Or his sister will. Someone will! It's just like old times, right? With the library?" (Like old times in loss, in stakes, in grief...) "Giles thinks he has a lead on which Hellmouth it will be." Willow's smile is just a little thin, around the edges. She has lines around the edges of her eyes, now. "It'll be okay, Buffy. You'll see."
When Angel left, the first time, Giles told her that time heals everything. That he knew she felt like she could never breathe again, but that she would, one day.
It was true, in a way. But it was never the same.
* * *
Mythology is never literal. That's what Giles has taught her. It's never literal, and it never behaves. You call on Zeus, you get Jupiter, and no they're not the same thing, no matter what the storybooks and history classes say. They might be the same being, but they're not the same personality. Names have power, they say, especially in the world of magic. Use a new name, split the spirit. Something like that. She can never keep all of the rules straight. That's why she's not a witch.
The myth of Ragnarok goes as follows:
The portents begin with the birth and death of several gods, and extend to the endless winter. Wolves will devour the sun and moon, and floods and earthquakes will free Loki and Fenrir from their bindings, while the herdsman of the giants plays his harp in celebration of the end of days.
Then the battle will be begin.
But of course, Gods never behave. Or perhaps it's simply that legends are never, really, true. Even Hansel and Gretel weren't innocents, when she met them. Or, well, "them." Of course, the myth also says that, in the end, the world will be reborn, greener and sunlit, the survivors rebuilding. Buffy hopes that part, at least, stays intact.
It doesn't say "Loki will kidnap someone's boyfriend," though. That's notable, she thinks.
Giles is the one who suggests the obvious. "This... little variation claims that Hela will open the mouth to Hell, and the end shall come." Glasses off, eyes lowered, he says, "I gather this demon-goddess intends to open a Hellmouth."
And Buffy says, "Probably a really toothy one." There aren't many in the world. Giles says there are only a few more than a dozen. Buffy would have thought there'd be one in New York, but no - just California, New Jersey and Ohio, in the United States, anyway. At least, those are the ones they've found. "And they've got Angel there."
Glasses in hand, Giles says, "The Mayans believed that in order for the Earth to renew itself, there must be a sacrifice of sinners."
Buffy's gut twists and burns. "They're going to kill him."
"And probably any number of other ne'er do wells. Or perceived ne'er do wells, as the case may be."
"They're going to kill him and open the gate to Hell." Somehow that seems so repetitive.
Buffy rubs the exhaustion from her burning eyes. And maybe it's not surprising that, right now, all she wants is Angel at her side, stroking her hand in that unremarkable, casual way they'd taken to doing once they learned not to fight... destiny, or desire, whatever it is between them. That string that holds them together when they're apart, that pulls them together again when time and death and centuries and even their own hearts have pushed them away from each other.
She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. We've got a world to save."
(And maybe it does matter. Maybe she really will always have that touch of seventeen in her heart when she thinks of him, looks at him. But she isn't a teenager now, and this is bigger than that, bigger than her feelings, his life. It's the world, and it's everything.)
Giles watches her, reaches across the table to rest his palm on the back of her hand. Buffy sits up straighter, a little.
(Besides. Nothing has managed to hold them apart yet. Maybe it's right to trust that.)
Buffy says, "Let's look at Hellmouths."
Giles slides his glasses back onto his face. "The Pine Barrens, in New Jersey. The Island of Surtsey. Vatican City--"
Buffy blinks. "Vatican City?"
Willow nods. "Duh. Why do you think they put the pope there?"
And Xander pauses, coffee mug in hand. "Holy... moly! I always knew there was something fishy about that hat."
Giles clears his throat. "Yes well, I'm sure we could discuss the ramifications of holy men living on Hellmouths for the rest of the night, but it doesn't bring us any closer to finding this... ah, this--"
"Preacherman?" Buffy says.
"Yes. This Preacherman. There is another in the Valley of Kings, in Egypt, and Ganghwa Island. Also, in Balleyboley Forest. And--"
Xander frowns at the map for a moment before he says, "Wait a minute. Did you say Surtsey?"
Giles looks at him. "Ah. Yes, I do believe I did. Rather a while ago, actually. Really, Xander, your power of observation are--"
"Very funny, library guy. You said Surtsey. That's your guy." Xander taps the island on the map. "It's called... Surtsey? Surtur's Island! I read about it. In a back issue of Thor." He says it with a grin, and a bit of pride.
Willow says, "Yay for high class literature," with a little nod.
Xander throws a yellow highlighter at her. "Surtur? The fire giant?"
Buffy bites her bottom lip. There's a certain grace to the suggestion - the critical role played by a tiny island named for the Giant once expected to ravage the world. A place built from the rage of the Earth, lava and ash, the fire of the Gods, or so it's been said. The Ancients must have thought volcanoes were the mouths of Hell anyway.
Buffy says, "We'll look into it."
Xander grins. He says, "The return of key guy."
* * *
The world is ending, they say, on December 20th, 2012.
It's a little scary, except... Buffy hears that kind of thing all the time.
Eleven.
Created by a three year long volcanic eruption, Surtsey has been dying since the day it was born. Once almost three kilometers, now it's just barely one, at least according to Giles. The island is fifty years old, and already going back home. It's sad, in a way - even islands have a limited lifespan. Like mountains, or oceans. One day the ocean will dry up, too. Pretty soon if they don't stop it from boiling. Not that's it's boiling now, but she wouldn't suggest anyone go swimming.
Buffy keeps the Scythe balanced between her two hands, her feet pushed against the helicopter floor. Outside the window, Willow is flying with the helicopter light dancing in her hair and the air on her face. Theirs isn't the only helicopter, of course - Buffy tries not to march into a war without an army, these days. Next to her, Satsu, shifts her blade from one hand to another, and Buffy knows she's trying not to look too long, trying not to yearn too much. Love's first kiss, it's one of those things that never really fades. Buffy knows that feeling well. First loves, they say, never really go away.
On the ground beneath them, the island smokes, and Buffy hears the churning of water, the harp strings, calling. She hears it in her head, or maybe in the air, in her ears. It's impossible to tell, anymore.
Speaking of her ears, Xander says "All right, what do you see?" into her earpiece, and Buffy jolts before she brings herself back to where she is.
"Um, steaming island," she says. "Hellmouth under it. Your typical doomsday scenario, but without the buildings and things." She leans forward, looking down. "Sorry you had to sit this one out."
"I'm not sitting it out, Buffy. Buff-buff. Buffster. I'm general-guy. General-guy does general stuff from very far away, lest he have his other eye poked out by another crazy preacher."
"Yeah, you do have baddish luck with those." She pushes her foot down, harder, against the floor. "Um, is there a read on Angel?"
Xander is quiet, and Buffy tries not to feel the seconds moving. "No. But we're getting heavy readings from the Hellmouth itself. If he's anywhere near it--"
"You couldn't really pick the hay strand out of the hay barrel. Yeah, I get it."
"He could still be down there." Tortured, tormented, strung up, bled dry, like with Drusilla, like with Spike, like with so many demons and vampires and things, things that wanted his blood or at least to use it against her. It's been a week since Preacherman took him - seven days, and hours, and minutes on top of that. She's not sure whether it would be kinder to find him dead than alive.
Well, "alive."
Buffy checks her watch.
It's 10:46pm. December 21st, 2012.
She adjusts her parachute, her earpiece.
Showtime.
They arrive as the hour turns to 11pm, and the air is thick with smoke and green light; ash and the smell of sulfur, like something rotting, like something wrong. Buffy drops from the sky; around her, slayers follow in twos and threes, filling the sky with their silhouettes and their parachutes blooming against the sky. Buffy feels the ground when she lands, the pulsing heat racing through the rocks and dirt, withering the plants and leaving scattered insect bodies strewn over the earth.
"There's definitely something unnatural here," she says, wrinkling her nose as she unstraps the parachute from her back. "What do you say we do a little lookaround?"
The Scythe rests against her belly, its length balanced between her hands, and she feels that pulsing, too - the power of the Slayer responding to the power of the Hellmouth gaping open under their feel, or around them, or... wherever it is. Buffy's seen three, now, and she hates how they never look the same way from city to city. It's like the Wizard of Oz, she thinks, you go in and you never know what to expect. They could be standing in it, now.
In her ear, Xander says, "Buff, we're getting heavy readings from the middle of the Island. Riiight where that fun dormant volcano is hanging out."
Buffy looks around, her gaze penetrating the trees. "Yay. Nothing I love more than lava dancing."
They split up, covering more area, but she keeps Satsu at her side as they move through the branches, stepping over the dead birds, dead tree branches. Underfoot, the ground is hot, like the streets of New York and the water in Venice. Buffy's rubber soled boots seem slippery, like the soles are melting. She tries not to think about that, and she doesn't check. Over her, Willow floats like a goddess of the air, her long skirts drifting in waves over her legs. It's comforting, in a way. Hell, Buffy figures, if it gets too bad Willow can always magic them out.
Of course, if it gets too bad, there probably won't be anywhere to magic them away to. And anyway, it's not like Buffy is ever going to run. Never surrender, never give up. Never put down your sword, or, well, in this case your Scythe. She hears Angel in her head, telling her that. Telling her she'll never fail; she never does.
(And if she wins, if this ends, they could disappear, go to Florida. And the sun would still be living there, and the air would be warm and the water blue like crystal, and he could sleep all day, and all night he'd have his fingers in her hair and his mouth on her mouth. She would watch the fish swim around her ankles, and lay down her weapons at last.)
Buffy hums under her breath as she moves through the trees, a little tune from childhood. Satsu watches her in the shadows. She says, "What are you humming?"
"Down by the riverside." Buffy whisper-sings, "I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside..."
(She'll never do it. Still, it's nice to think of it, sometimes.)
Glancing at Satsu, Buffy says, "At this point, you're kind of supposed to clap."
Satsu shakes her head. "I don't really feel like clapping."
In her hands, the Scythe pulses. "Yeah. Neither do I."
And the island is so dark, so hot, that Buffy feels like she's walking into Hell already. Still, she hums as she goes.
* * *
The slayers find each other again in a clearing surrounding a cave. It's not a clearing, really, Buffy has to admit, it's more like a minor break from the thick vegetation. Of course, while she's being picky, she's pretty sure the cave isn't a real cave. Carved into the side of a steep hill, it yawns like the jaw of a demon, and Willow says it's leaking magic. She says the walls are made of it, and in that sense it's probably more a construct than a geological feature. Buffy presses her lips together and wonders why evil beings can't just have a house these days. Maybe shack up in a nice warehouse. Things used to be so reliable.
Buffy shivers when she steps inside, swallowed by the sudden onslaught of cold, the prickle of ice on her skin. At her side, Satsu draws a sword with one hand, a dagger with the other. And inside is dark, a shadow inside a shadow; Buffy feels strange and swallowed, and like the walls are closing on her, though they're invisible in the black. Staying quiet, she listens to the footsteps beside her, Satsu's breath, and the pairs of feet following her as well.
The caverns are long and narrow, and Buffy feels they're going on forever. Even so, she doesn't want to turn on a flashlight, or even spark a match - it's unpredictable, what happens in a place like this. You never know when there might be fire demons, or darkness demons, or... actually, Buffy decides, it's definitely light time.
"Willow, can we light a spark in here?" Buffy takes six steps, and then stops. "Willow?"
And there's nothing surrounding her but silence.
Somewhere on her belt, there's a mini-flashlight; she scrambles for it, even as she hears the thickness of nothing - no footsteps, no breath. "Satsu?" She says as she pills the flashlight free. "Renee?" In her hear, her headphones crackle with static - no Xander, no Giles, no Willow, no friends.
She flips on the flashlight.
...the cavern, it's not like a tunnel at all. It's a wide mouth, a gaping wound of stalactites and stalagmites and dripping limestone, and red streaked walls, and Buffy can't see the whole in the moving pinprick glow of her tiny light, but she sees the parts, and how the stone looks like it's bleeding, and how there's nothing around here but air. She doesn't know where her companions have gone, or whether it's them or her that's left the other behind.
Reality warping demons and gods are always frustrating. She's been dealing with them a lot, these days.
The magic Willow leaves her blood is screaming, but there's nothing around... or at least nothing that she can see. Somewhere nearby, there is the drip-drip-drip of water from the cavern ceiling falling in trickles and splashing on her shoes, her face. Buffy turns the flashlight downward at her feet. There in her shadow, mixed with the dewdrops collected on the stone ground, is the red-streaks of blood mingling with the water. Buffy's heart clenches, her stomach tightens, because she's been here before, lived these same situations in life and in nightmares and she knows what she'll see when she turns the flashlight up. But she does anyway.
He is there, her Angel, suspended, chest open, eyes closed. Buffy fights down the urge to scream.
That's when she hears Mr. Preacherman, whispering in her ears.
"You mourn for the sinner?" This close, Preacherman smells like sulfur, like brimstone. He says, "But the sinner leads the way to heaven."
Buffy closes her eyes. "I've been to heaven. You don't get there like this."
When she opens them, Preacherman is in front of her, his blond-haired, middle-American face an inch away. His eyes are burning, ice blue. He says, "Not heaven for you."
Buffy ducks his first strike and armors her body in Willow's mojo; Preacherman's hands glaze off the magic, and it tingles, ripples, and yet it stays intact. Around her, in the blackness, there's the sound of steel and screaming, and she knows her friends are here, now. Separated and then together again, and of course somewhere in this room, this cavern, she knows there are demons too - Preacherman's slithering snake of a child with it venomous bite, and whatever other god-forsaken creatures have crawled from the Hellmouth. Wherever that is.
"You're just like every other lame demon I've ever killed," Buffy says, and the Scythe streaks beneath his feet as he jumps. "You talk a good game. Maybe bring darkness on the world for a few months. But in the end you have no followthrough. They just didn't have the endurance to go through a true Armageddon!" (She feels the give of flesh under the blade of her weapon, and Preacherman grunts in pain.) "Oh wait. It's not that they couldn't stick it out." (She swings again, and the impact of the blade with his body shakes her all over.) "It's that I killed them."
Buffy doesn't know why, but now she can see. She sees in floods of red light and gold, she sees in glows. It takes a moment to realize it's the light glowing inside the rock on the opposite end of the cavern. All around her, silhouetted in hell-light, there are her sister-slayers, scattered on the ground, or still standing with the blood of demons on her hands. The demons are there too, small and large, in the air and on the ground. Stretched across the cavern, a dead snake lies motionless, and in front of Buffy, Mr. Preacherman is still smiling.
"I'm no demon, girl." He steps back, off of the blade that's embedded in his chest. "I am--"
"I know, I know. You're destruction and death and all that yummy goodness." Buffy swings again. "Been there, done that, too."
Inside the light, Buffy can see the silhouette of a woman standing inside, like the star of a shadow puppet show. Preacherman's last kid, she knows. Opening the Hellmouth to let the darkness out. Buffy sets her mouth in a thin line. It's not going to happen.
She swings again.
It's not.
The next time Mr. Preacherman hits her, it sends shocks through her body and her armor splinters and falls - pieces of solid magic lying like shattered glass on the cavern floor. Buffy barely avoids his touch. Her heart beat drums a tune in her ears, and music seeps from the walls - the sound of the world's death cry played back on harp strings. She catches a glimpse of Willow's dress fluttering overhead, and something inside her unclenches. Willow's going to get Angel. He'll be all right. He'll be fine.
Then, Mr. Preacherman's hand grips her throat, and her body is aflame.
The first trickle of demons begin to emerge from the opening wall - small ones, at first, the foot soldiers of Hell. Preacherman's touch of gazes tears her, cuts her, but in the distance she hears Satsu take command, shouting orders even as her voice grows closer to Buffy.
And Buffy wants to shout, to tell her to get away, but she can't speak, can't breathe.
(Satsu. She knows she's hurt Satsu. She knows too well how it feels to wake up without the one you love; to dream of a future and wake up without one. She feels her mistakes crawling in her flesh. And she knows she's hurt Faith, although not always without cause. She knows the envy cuts both ways, sometimes, and maybe that it started with her first. Just a little. His fingers cut into her skin, and she knows she's hurt Xander. Years ago, but even so, it's true - he loved her, and she was oblivious, until it was too late, and then she was awkward and strange. And Preacherman breathes in her struggling, and Angel. She knows she hurt--)
Buffy's eyes widen, and something deep inside her clicks.
"...if the Mayans were correct, the rebirth of the world will happen only in the pain of sinners, and the sacrifice of the righteous."
She reaches up and slowly begins to pry his fingers from her skin.
"You are righteous. But you are not innocent."
She understands.
"The sacrifice of the righteous. Satsu!" Buffy clutches the Scythe in between her hands, and only feet away, Satsu stares at her with her wide, accepting eyes. Buffy kicks Preacherman in the chest, sending him flying back two yards. It will be ineffective, she knows, but it buys her time. Enough time to look back, and she has to look back. She has to see...
Behind her, Angel has drawn his tattered coat close around his bleeding chest. Leaning on Willow, he's pale and drawn, but still there. He hasn't crumbled to dust just yet.
She smiles, and Angel's eyes darken. "Buffy," he says, "Don't."
"A sacrifice of the righteous," she says again, louder this time, and her voice carries through the cavern as the Scythe pulses in her hands. Around her, the slayers hesitate only for a moment before they begin to form ranks, maneuvering their enemies.
Buffy runs.
She runs at Mr. Preacherman, Scythe positioned against her chest, and beside her, she hears the stampede of a dozen girls, all strong, all brave. Born special but for once, not born alone.
Before them, the Hellmouth yawns. Behind them, there is everything they know, and they run driving the demons ahead of them, pressing against hot and scaly skin, the flash of blonde hair and green eyes just before they reach the wall.
And it's strange, passing from Earth into... somewhere else. She feels the air shift, and thicken. She feels the heat and cold mingling and dancing in patterns over her. She feels Preacherman's gaze touch too, searching her for long moments before everything goes black.
Epilogue
The cavern is empty when he arrives, and it echoes with his every step. On the ground, at his feet, his blood still stains the rock. It's warm here, though the heat lives in the air, instead of the ground now that the Hellmouth is gone. The caress of it warms his skin, but somehow the cavern still feels cold, to him.
It's just a state of mine, he thinks. A perspective. Who wouldn't find this place cold, after all he's lost here.
The shadows scatter in front of him as he walks, sunlight by his side, trickling over the rocks, over the walls. He stands in the dark places, away from its touch, until he sees her. She's sitting, perched, on a rock and she's golden, like she always was. Golden and smiling at him with her hair in her face, and the sunlight makes her skin glow.
Angel smiles back, and wonders if she's always been so small, so strong.
He sits on a rock opposite her, separated by the sunlight spilled across the grey stone floor. He says, "Buffy," with his hands in his lap and his coat pooled behind him, gathering near his feet.
And Buffy says, "Angel," with her warm eyes and little voice. "I didn't know if you'd come."
"Of course I came. I didn't really have a choice."
"You always have choices." Her hair is in two little braids lying by the side of her face, and her eyes are so big, so wide. Angel wants to say it's true, and that he believes in free will, but he doesn't, not always. He's never had much choice when it came to her. She says, "Is it gone?"
Angel nods. "It's gone. All of it. The magic, the demons. Even the slayers."
"It'll come back one day. It always does." She grins, shifting her foot against the ground. "Or maybe it won't. Maybe it's the end of an era for real. Wouldn't that be cool?"
Angel glances down. Her feet are wrapped in strappy white leather shoes - so fashionable, even now. "What are you going to do?"
She shrugs. "Hold the gate. Me, and the other slayers. Plus we've decided to make some changes down here. We spent the past few days messing with Wolfram and Hart; we tore up some of their contracts, burnt down one of their hangouts... it was full of bones and stuff. Pretty gross. But I thought we'd start there, just for you."
"That was sweet of you, Buffy."
"Yeah, I'm a regular Miss Sunshine with a Scythe." Watching him, she says, "What about vampires?"
"No more of those, either." He can't quite meet her eyes. "We'll find a way to bring you back, Buffy." They'll find a way. And he'll hold her hand in the golden light and kiss her, and they'll finally be...
"There's no magic, Angel. That means no gate opening. That means no me." She smiles again, sadly, face down. "It's okay, I've come to terms with it. Lots of fighting and guarding, but hey, that's what I did even before the big boom. Except here there aren't any coffee breaks. I miss the coffee breaks." She looks up. She doesn't say, I miss you.
"Magic can't be gone completely." Angel reaches across the sunlight fence and runs his fingertips down the side of her body, over her smooth neck, the soft cloth of her clothes, and the cut of her jutting hipbones. He wonders when she got so thin. "After all, it's not normal to meet in dreams."
"Maybe," Buffy whispers, "Or maybe this is just a normal dream. Something you've cooked up in your spiky haired head because..."
"Because I miss you so much." Angel clenches his fingers, just for a moment. "Yeah. Maybe."
"Yeah. I mean, this isn't really gate-holding apparel. I'm not even wearing comfortable shoes." She looks down, and her hair tumbles into her eyes, over her face like a veil. "Either way, I think it's time to wake up."
Angel doesn't want to wake up. He doesn't want to leave. He wants to stay with her forever in the sunlit cavern and touch her skin and kiss her lips and feel her heart beating under his palm and listen to her breathe at night. He wants to stroke her hair and wrap her in blankets and laugh with her at stupid sitcoms, badly acted dramas. He wants to feed her chocolate chip ice cream and dream with her and watch her sleep.
But the world shifts around him, like it's changing into something else, and the cave is filled with light. Angel closes his eyes to shut out the sun. "Buffy. The dream I told you about. It wasn't a dream."
"Yeah, I see that now." Her voice is soft, trembly. "And just so you know? It sucked. But it was the right choice."
(He has so much to say, and there's not enough time.)
He opens his eyes just in time to see her smile, and the quickness of her breath when she pulls him close, kisses him, and he inhales deep, breathes her in. She's warm, and soft, and he feels her pulse under his fingertips, he feels every movement, every heartbeat.
And then she's gone, and his world ends as quickly as it came, that day when he saw her outside her school, young and full of hope, full of dreams, a thousand years ago.
(Angel opens his eyes in the cool light of morning, sheets twisted around his feet and arms, hands holding nothing. His own heartbeat thumping in his ears.)
I tiptoe softly to the timberline
Where part of me is waiting
On the other side.
* * *
Author's Notes: Originally meant for the IWRY ficathon, which I have clearly missed by about five months. Which is okay. There are like three Buffy fans on my flist, so no one's going to care, but I'm done and I care, so go me.
All lyrics are by Terami Hirsch, and come the following songs: Back to the Start, Waking the Dream, Chains of Andromeda, Witches' Brew and Timberline.
Thanks (much) to britfacexx and booboosheep for betas/looksover/telling me it doesn't suck.