Don't Go Solo : Part 17 - Kill the White Rabbit
Title: Kill the White Rabbit
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect
Word Count: 3,129 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a longer way from where they're going. Follow-the-leader doesn't always get you to a place worth visiting.
“Chaos” was a good word for it. Buffy could hear her slayers shouting for medics here and there-she had no idea where the vampires had come from. If that’s even what they were, at the very least. Stick a stake in ‘em, and she’d killed enough vampires in her time to know that the level of dust was way too little.
So fake vampires. Or not-quite-vampy vampires.
The lumps on the forehead looked real enough, even if their game faces were less snarl, more blankness. Punches and kicks without grunts, no growls, and they didn’t even go for the neck. Just hits and swings, and when they got staked, they didn’t even groan in frustration.
They still hit hard, though.
Willow was on the ground, and maybe it was a good thing that these vampires weren’t really vampires, or that the vampires were fake vampires, or whatever the hell the vampires were, because even in the middle of a fight, no such bitey type could turn down the possibility of a vulnerable redhead. Even in the presence of however many slayers were still standing and fighting.
Not as many as their needed to have been. Walking-dead-girl had done a number on anyone that got close enough to take a hit. Buffy still didn’t know where Faith had landed.
One thing at a time. One vamp at a time. Hope her girls can do her proud.
Every hit, every dodge, every time she buried her stake in a vampire’s chest, it was all to get to that truck. The blocked-in truck that had pulled in with the motorcycles. The one they had managed to keep from driving off once the van had torn out of the driveway with Xander in the compartment.
The one that had Amy Madison standing on the trailer, slinging spells at anyone that got too close.
Wasn’t it early for a high school reunion?
One of the not-vampires lunged at her, and she vaulted over its back, slamming it down to the ground. One of her girls stumbled in front of her, stake falling free, and Buffy caught it before spinning and hurling it at the creature that was still trying to regain its balance. One of Amy’s spells had shadows standing up from the ground in front of her, tendrils growing out like spiked trees and darting for her, and it was all she could do to dive behind the cover of the large fountain in the drive.
The tendrils broke it apart and dissipated, and Buffy decided she had never really liked Amy to being with.
Willow. Buffy had to get to Willow. She didn’t let her head get to that point where she had to remind herself that, even though Willow hadn’t come back for her when she’d fallen into the street during a chase.
Willow. She had to get to Willow.
Something came at her from the side, and she bashed its face in with a crumbled piece of masonry. Water drenched her, erupting from the obliterated pipes underneath what had been a very pleasant fountain.
Drenched everything, in fact. Like in an action flick when a car plowed through a fire hydrant and left a geyser shooting into the air.
This wasn’t fair. By this point, Willow would have been black-haired and black-eyed and on the last legs of whatever magical rampage she would’ve been going on. Amy had made an entire army of fake vampires. She’d teleported a walking dead girl off the complex. She was sitting there being a freaking mortar on the back of a semi, causing so much damage that Buffy hadn’t even been able to process confusion over why there was an enemy semi in front of the complex, and who exactly that enemy could be.
Sometimes things were better explained with fists, though.
Soaked to the bone, she was up and sprinting, running perpendicular to the line that would get her to Amy. There was so much chaos down there on the driveway that she doubted she’d be spotted and recognized as herself. Really, just another super-strong girl in a sea of super-strong girls, fighting off waves of fake, super-strong monsters.
Note to self, chunk of concrete? Effective.
But it shattered on the last creature between her and Willow. She just punched out with it and it broke apart against the expressionless, but monstrous face in front of her. When that didn’t floor the creature-when it just kept coming at her, sharp nails and fangs that didn’t plan to bite and deadness in dead eyes, she plunged her stake in it and the weapon finally crapped out on her.
She fought through the faint dust, dropped the splintered weapon, and slid into a crouch next to her fallen friend.
Breathing, good. Shaking, chanting, whimpering, and twitching? Not as good as breathing, but at least it meant she could move.
“Will?”
The chanting went on, louder, like she was working up a doozy of a spell. Which Buffy wouldn’t have complained about, since she’d seen nothing but doozies coming from the opposition, but Willow looked to be in a state not conducive to spellcasting.
More sleeping. Slipping into a nice coma. Something like that.
“Willow!” Buffy tried, and Willow’s eyes snapped open. Looked at her. Every part of her was shaking-the hands that clasped around Buffy’s shoulders, the eyes that were looking somewhere about a thousand miles behind Buffy’s head, the breaths that came out ragged.
“B-” For all she could chant, Willow sure couldn’t talk. The work aborted in the back of her throat, overtaken instead by a fit of coughs, and Buffy didn’t miss the nosebleed.
She looked up, though. She looked up and saw Amy, at her perch on the back of the semi. Up there, like something old and dark, slinging magic like Willow at her darkest and most reckless. Laughing as she did it.
“That-” Willow said surprisingly clearly, and Buffy was more than a little upset that she could manage something that wasn’t her name.
Willow’s expression was hard to define. But it was the same as it had been back then, when she’d gone on her manhunt. When she’d lost Tara and healed Buffy and decided that Warren was a dead man.
Buffy didn’t know the word. But it was a look that didn’t belong on Willow’s face.
“That’s mine,” she whispered, her voice low. Strong. A little wrong.
Buffy followed her eyes, wishing herself confused. But she’d been around Willow and magic and darkness and demons for way too long to pretend to be naïve. To have a blonde moment that lasted twenty four hours a day and just go with Xander’s patented “Where with the who, now?”
Willow watched Amy throw the darkest of magic around like droplets from a water hose.
Possessively.
“You have to stop her, Buffy,” she said, turning quickly and looking at her like she’d just finished turning every Potential in the world into a slayer. That strong look, but without the warmth. Really, that just let it a hard look. Like Willow knew she could do anything she wanted just then, so long as she was doing it through Buffy.
“Kind of in the game plan,” Buffy said, not a little affronted. What, did she look like she wasn’t working ten miles a minute, here? It wasn’t exactly easy to fight through half a dozen not-vampires to get to a confusing and frightening Willow.
It wasn’t exactly easy to be around a confusing and frightening Willow.
Scary Willow stood up, knees shaking but gaze unwavering, and Buffy worried over the air around her. Well, it wasn’t like “fragile” was a good word to describe the woman Willow had become over the past few years, especially if Buffy had stopped being one of the people she let herself be vulnerable around. There was the thing between her and Xander-the not sharing that Buffy could see weighing on her heart.
All their roads seemed one way nowadays.
“Maybe you shouldn’t stand,” Buffy began, but Willow raised one hand.
“I’m fine. Just get to Amy. The longer she’s up there, the harder it’ll be to take her down.”
“Take her down?”
Buffy cocked an eyebrow. That wasn’t a Willow thought. Willow was supposed to say something like “incapacitate her” or “knock her out” or “lead her through the hall and then bag her like Don Knotts,” which Buffy had never really understood, but-
“Whatever you have to do,” Willow said, voice grim and eyes dark. And not looking at Buffy. That was the kind of thing she really should have said while looking at Buffy. Because when she said something like that when she wasn’t looking at Buffy, then it made it feel like the not looking at Buffy was because she couldn’t bring herself to be looking at Buffy.
She didn’t look at Buffy. Just turned and stumbled off in the opposite direction.
“What’re you gonna do?” Buffy asked instead of requesting further clarification. Whatever you have to do was pretty clear, even to someone trying really hard to be oblivious.
“I’m gonna find Faith,” Willow grunted, searching out a path that kept her away from the worst of the fighting.
Last time Buffy had seen Willow around vampires, on a patrol, Willow had had half a dozen protection spells around her before Buffy could even blink.
Willow bent down and weakly lifted a metal pipe-probably from the exploded fountain.
Buffy just told herself that Willow probably knew what was best, even if recent events had proven to her that Willow probably really didn’t. Maybe it was coincidental or just coincided with Buffy and Xander and Faith taking up permanent residence at the complex here, but it was a shame that she was relieved that things like this hadn’t started happening until then. Because, honestly?
If Willow had to deal with successful betrayals and spies and infiltrations and an all out battle taking place on Council grounds on a regular basis, then Buffy was going to be talking to Giles about possibly transferring her to a place she could actually manage.
One of the smaller states in the U.S., maybe. Rhode Island, maybe Connecticut.
Buffy looked up about when Amy looked down. Buffy knocked aside a monster while another few were dusted between them. The expanse between her and the truck became a lot more open, so it wasn’t like she could call shenanigans on it then.
But Amy saw her. Amy saw her and recognized her, and maybe it was because of that that the world exploded around Buffy.
Well, not a real explosion. There wasn’t fire or pressure or heat or shrapnel, but for all other intents and purposes, the air around her buffeted her and her head spun. And there was pain. Glory punch to the gut, pain. Maybe Caleb’s finger in Xander’s eye, pain. Whole lot of pain.
Enough that Buffy was screaming. Screaming without thinking about it. She hadn’t screamed when a no-name vampire had put her own stake in her abdomen. She hadn’t screamed any of the times she’d been bitten. She’d screamed, yes, when the Gentlemen had been around, but that had been kind of the point.
Not when she’d jumped off the tower. Not when she’d been shot. Not when one of the monsters under the Hellmouth had driven a sword through her abdomen.
She screamed, now, though. For what felt like an eternity, she screamed, and when the explosion was over, she was lying on her side, quivering and shaking and wondering just when she’d started sweating so much.
It couldn’t have been an eternity, though, because the breathlessness wasn’t because she’d emptied her lungs. Just a second then? The vampire she’d tossed aside was only just now hitting the ground, and the dust from the ones her girls had dusted in front of her was only just now dissipating, faint though it was. And Amy’s dark grin was just as dark and grinny as it had been when she’d spotted Buffy.
Amy raised her hands again, and Buffy didn’t have the wherewithal to be ashamed of the fact that, had Amy been within earshot, Buffy would have begged her not do to that again.
But she didn’t do that again. Maybe even Amy, her hair blackening and her veins coursing with the darkest magic Buffy had ever seen, wasn’t cruel enough to do that to someone twice. Buffy would’ve been happy with not being cruel enough to do it once, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
And she would have begged.
Instead, Amy levitated a stake from the ground, right in front of her, its point toward Buffy. Set it spinning, like a bullet in slow motion.
Xander had told her something. Told her that Willow had shared with him what she’d done to Warren, in painstaking detail.
It had, of course, been at one of the darker moments in Willow’s rehabilitation, mere days after her rampage and just one or two before she left for England, when she spent the majority of her time shivering in the bed at his apartment while he did his best to take care of her.
Something about a bullet. How she’d made Warren feel it dig into him with tortuous slowness. How she’d set it spinning, like a small drill.
Xander had told her, because Xander couldn’t bear the burden of knowing that alone. Maybe it had been selfish of Willow to tell him that, just like it had been selfish of him to tell Buffy that, but she understood.
Amy didn’t look like she was going to regret it later, as the stake spun faster and faster, like it was winding up to shoot out of a cannon. Still, it was preferable to the explosion.
Living was better though.
Buffy’s hand was around a chunk of concrete before she even realized what she was doing, and she had it in the path of the shooting stake when Amy had had enough of anticipation. Nonetheless, the masonry shuddered in her hand as the stake thudded into it, burying itself about as deep as it would have taken to reach a vampire’s heart. Not even stopping to think, mindful of the way her nerves were still tingling in agony as she shot up to her feet, Buffy ignored the head rush and plucked the stake out of the impromptu shield.
Not marred in the slightest, it’d been spinning so fast. The tip smelled like smoke, and she didn’t dare touch it.
She staked the vampire creeping up behind her without sparing it a glance, and she snapped out a kick to the face of the one converging on her from the front. Their numbers were thinning-even Amy, raging up there on the semi, couldn’t keep them replenished, even if Buffy couldn’t actually see where they’d been coming from.
The truck was moving, though. Hadn’t Willow told her something about Amy? Amy was just up there, keeping some kind of preternatural balance while the semi picked up speed underneath her, even though there was nowhere for it to go.
Scratch that, Amy apparently knew the magical password to take down the giant, magical force field that Willow had set to go off whenever the compound was attacked. Right, cool, that made sense, but Buffy still didn’t know what had her sprinting after it, keeping pace as it slowly built up to higher speeds.
Amy slid across the top to the back, like she was skating on the backs of snakes. Her clothes were-
Was it immature of Buffy to wonder where the black rags and dried blood of her enemies were? If you took out the magic swirling around her even then, and the dark look that might have stopped the Master in his tracks, Amy looked as normal as she ever had. Little less the goth look she’d adopted later on in high school, but that was mitigated by the fact that her hair was a solid, ebon black by now.
Eyes, too.
The fireball she sent Buffy’s way, though, was a bright, burning orange, and the good kind of explosion that forced Buffy off her feet and off the driveway, into the grass, was hotter than hot. So hot it felt like it seared her skin-which it probably did.
Still better than the other kind of explosion, though. And Buffy didn’t scream when it went off, so much as she grunted in muted pain and not-so-muted frustration.
She didn’t even want to think of Xander as she lay there, waiting for her ears to stop ringing or for a vampire to show up and finish her off. Xander, plucked into the van by a girl with an assault rifle, right out of not-Michelle’s hands.
Had Michelle been trying to get him to the semi? Did that mean that Amy had been the one pulling that puppet’s strings, only for yet another group of people who didn’t seem to be on the same side as them to intervene and capture him for themselves?
Buffy didn’t know. Buffy didn’t feel qualified for her thinking license just then, and she missed the days when fights didn’t leave every single inch of her body sore. Slayer healing didn’t do much when you used magic to go straight for the nerves, and it wasn’t like she’d had time to lose all the marks from her fight with the not-horned demon.
Somehow, the arms she got under herself retained some of their strength, and it was enough to push herself up into a sitting position. The ringing in her ears diminished enough for her to hear that the sounds of battle behind her were as faint as they could be, with just a few of the false vampires left. The dark splotch in her vision from the brightness of the explosion faded enough to see the semi turning off in the distance, ducking out of sight.
She felt, rather than heard, Willow standing behind her. Faith, standing a few paces back, like she was afraid to stand between the two of them. When Buffy turned around, though, she was relieved to see that the hateful, enraged glare on Willow’s face was off in Amy’s direction.
When her eyes fell on Buffy, they softened. Enough that she didn’t look weird, kneeling down and offering her a hand.
“You okay, Buff?”
Her tone was a weird mix of high school chipper and black-haired serious. The fact that the tones mixed so well together almost made Buffy want to just set her head back down and cry until she suffocated.
She broke out laughing instead.
Between that and crying, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference.
Gonna see what I can do about updating more often than once a week. I love writing, but when the majority of the work I'm doing right now revolves around writing graduate project papers-yeah, ends up being a little less enjoyable.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
One's pain is another's painkiller.
-Leonid S. Sukhurokov
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect
Word Count: 3,129 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a longer way from where they're going. Follow-the-leader doesn't always get you to a place worth visiting.
“Chaos” was a good word for it. Buffy could hear her slayers shouting for medics here and there-she had no idea where the vampires had come from. If that’s even what they were, at the very least. Stick a stake in ‘em, and she’d killed enough vampires in her time to know that the level of dust was way too little.
So fake vampires. Or not-quite-vampy vampires.
The lumps on the forehead looked real enough, even if their game faces were less snarl, more blankness. Punches and kicks without grunts, no growls, and they didn’t even go for the neck. Just hits and swings, and when they got staked, they didn’t even groan in frustration.
They still hit hard, though.
Willow was on the ground, and maybe it was a good thing that these vampires weren’t really vampires, or that the vampires were fake vampires, or whatever the hell the vampires were, because even in the middle of a fight, no such bitey type could turn down the possibility of a vulnerable redhead. Even in the presence of however many slayers were still standing and fighting.
Not as many as their needed to have been. Walking-dead-girl had done a number on anyone that got close enough to take a hit. Buffy still didn’t know where Faith had landed.
One thing at a time. One vamp at a time. Hope her girls can do her proud.
Every hit, every dodge, every time she buried her stake in a vampire’s chest, it was all to get to that truck. The blocked-in truck that had pulled in with the motorcycles. The one they had managed to keep from driving off once the van had torn out of the driveway with Xander in the compartment.
The one that had Amy Madison standing on the trailer, slinging spells at anyone that got too close.
Wasn’t it early for a high school reunion?
One of the not-vampires lunged at her, and she vaulted over its back, slamming it down to the ground. One of her girls stumbled in front of her, stake falling free, and Buffy caught it before spinning and hurling it at the creature that was still trying to regain its balance. One of Amy’s spells had shadows standing up from the ground in front of her, tendrils growing out like spiked trees and darting for her, and it was all she could do to dive behind the cover of the large fountain in the drive.
The tendrils broke it apart and dissipated, and Buffy decided she had never really liked Amy to being with.
Willow. Buffy had to get to Willow. She didn’t let her head get to that point where she had to remind herself that, even though Willow hadn’t come back for her when she’d fallen into the street during a chase.
Willow. She had to get to Willow.
Something came at her from the side, and she bashed its face in with a crumbled piece of masonry. Water drenched her, erupting from the obliterated pipes underneath what had been a very pleasant fountain.
Drenched everything, in fact. Like in an action flick when a car plowed through a fire hydrant and left a geyser shooting into the air.
This wasn’t fair. By this point, Willow would have been black-haired and black-eyed and on the last legs of whatever magical rampage she would’ve been going on. Amy had made an entire army of fake vampires. She’d teleported a walking dead girl off the complex. She was sitting there being a freaking mortar on the back of a semi, causing so much damage that Buffy hadn’t even been able to process confusion over why there was an enemy semi in front of the complex, and who exactly that enemy could be.
Sometimes things were better explained with fists, though.
Soaked to the bone, she was up and sprinting, running perpendicular to the line that would get her to Amy. There was so much chaos down there on the driveway that she doubted she’d be spotted and recognized as herself. Really, just another super-strong girl in a sea of super-strong girls, fighting off waves of fake, super-strong monsters.
Note to self, chunk of concrete? Effective.
But it shattered on the last creature between her and Willow. She just punched out with it and it broke apart against the expressionless, but monstrous face in front of her. When that didn’t floor the creature-when it just kept coming at her, sharp nails and fangs that didn’t plan to bite and deadness in dead eyes, she plunged her stake in it and the weapon finally crapped out on her.
She fought through the faint dust, dropped the splintered weapon, and slid into a crouch next to her fallen friend.
Breathing, good. Shaking, chanting, whimpering, and twitching? Not as good as breathing, but at least it meant she could move.
“Will?”
The chanting went on, louder, like she was working up a doozy of a spell. Which Buffy wouldn’t have complained about, since she’d seen nothing but doozies coming from the opposition, but Willow looked to be in a state not conducive to spellcasting.
More sleeping. Slipping into a nice coma. Something like that.
“Willow!” Buffy tried, and Willow’s eyes snapped open. Looked at her. Every part of her was shaking-the hands that clasped around Buffy’s shoulders, the eyes that were looking somewhere about a thousand miles behind Buffy’s head, the breaths that came out ragged.
“B-” For all she could chant, Willow sure couldn’t talk. The work aborted in the back of her throat, overtaken instead by a fit of coughs, and Buffy didn’t miss the nosebleed.
She looked up, though. She looked up and saw Amy, at her perch on the back of the semi. Up there, like something old and dark, slinging magic like Willow at her darkest and most reckless. Laughing as she did it.
“That-” Willow said surprisingly clearly, and Buffy was more than a little upset that she could manage something that wasn’t her name.
Willow’s expression was hard to define. But it was the same as it had been back then, when she’d gone on her manhunt. When she’d lost Tara and healed Buffy and decided that Warren was a dead man.
Buffy didn’t know the word. But it was a look that didn’t belong on Willow’s face.
“That’s mine,” she whispered, her voice low. Strong. A little wrong.
Buffy followed her eyes, wishing herself confused. But she’d been around Willow and magic and darkness and demons for way too long to pretend to be naïve. To have a blonde moment that lasted twenty four hours a day and just go with Xander’s patented “Where with the who, now?”
Willow watched Amy throw the darkest of magic around like droplets from a water hose.
Possessively.
“You have to stop her, Buffy,” she said, turning quickly and looking at her like she’d just finished turning every Potential in the world into a slayer. That strong look, but without the warmth. Really, that just let it a hard look. Like Willow knew she could do anything she wanted just then, so long as she was doing it through Buffy.
“Kind of in the game plan,” Buffy said, not a little affronted. What, did she look like she wasn’t working ten miles a minute, here? It wasn’t exactly easy to fight through half a dozen not-vampires to get to a confusing and frightening Willow.
It wasn’t exactly easy to be around a confusing and frightening Willow.
Scary Willow stood up, knees shaking but gaze unwavering, and Buffy worried over the air around her. Well, it wasn’t like “fragile” was a good word to describe the woman Willow had become over the past few years, especially if Buffy had stopped being one of the people she let herself be vulnerable around. There was the thing between her and Xander-the not sharing that Buffy could see weighing on her heart.
All their roads seemed one way nowadays.
“Maybe you shouldn’t stand,” Buffy began, but Willow raised one hand.
“I’m fine. Just get to Amy. The longer she’s up there, the harder it’ll be to take her down.”
“Take her down?”
Buffy cocked an eyebrow. That wasn’t a Willow thought. Willow was supposed to say something like “incapacitate her” or “knock her out” or “lead her through the hall and then bag her like Don Knotts,” which Buffy had never really understood, but-
“Whatever you have to do,” Willow said, voice grim and eyes dark. And not looking at Buffy. That was the kind of thing she really should have said while looking at Buffy. Because when she said something like that when she wasn’t looking at Buffy, then it made it feel like the not looking at Buffy was because she couldn’t bring herself to be looking at Buffy.
She didn’t look at Buffy. Just turned and stumbled off in the opposite direction.
“What’re you gonna do?” Buffy asked instead of requesting further clarification. Whatever you have to do was pretty clear, even to someone trying really hard to be oblivious.
“I’m gonna find Faith,” Willow grunted, searching out a path that kept her away from the worst of the fighting.
Last time Buffy had seen Willow around vampires, on a patrol, Willow had had half a dozen protection spells around her before Buffy could even blink.
Willow bent down and weakly lifted a metal pipe-probably from the exploded fountain.
Buffy just told herself that Willow probably knew what was best, even if recent events had proven to her that Willow probably really didn’t. Maybe it was coincidental or just coincided with Buffy and Xander and Faith taking up permanent residence at the complex here, but it was a shame that she was relieved that things like this hadn’t started happening until then. Because, honestly?
If Willow had to deal with successful betrayals and spies and infiltrations and an all out battle taking place on Council grounds on a regular basis, then Buffy was going to be talking to Giles about possibly transferring her to a place she could actually manage.
One of the smaller states in the U.S., maybe. Rhode Island, maybe Connecticut.
Buffy looked up about when Amy looked down. Buffy knocked aside a monster while another few were dusted between them. The expanse between her and the truck became a lot more open, so it wasn’t like she could call shenanigans on it then.
But Amy saw her. Amy saw her and recognized her, and maybe it was because of that that the world exploded around Buffy.
Well, not a real explosion. There wasn’t fire or pressure or heat or shrapnel, but for all other intents and purposes, the air around her buffeted her and her head spun. And there was pain. Glory punch to the gut, pain. Maybe Caleb’s finger in Xander’s eye, pain. Whole lot of pain.
Enough that Buffy was screaming. Screaming without thinking about it. She hadn’t screamed when a no-name vampire had put her own stake in her abdomen. She hadn’t screamed any of the times she’d been bitten. She’d screamed, yes, when the Gentlemen had been around, but that had been kind of the point.
Not when she’d jumped off the tower. Not when she’d been shot. Not when one of the monsters under the Hellmouth had driven a sword through her abdomen.
She screamed, now, though. For what felt like an eternity, she screamed, and when the explosion was over, she was lying on her side, quivering and shaking and wondering just when she’d started sweating so much.
It couldn’t have been an eternity, though, because the breathlessness wasn’t because she’d emptied her lungs. Just a second then? The vampire she’d tossed aside was only just now hitting the ground, and the dust from the ones her girls had dusted in front of her was only just now dissipating, faint though it was. And Amy’s dark grin was just as dark and grinny as it had been when she’d spotted Buffy.
Amy raised her hands again, and Buffy didn’t have the wherewithal to be ashamed of the fact that, had Amy been within earshot, Buffy would have begged her not do to that again.
But she didn’t do that again. Maybe even Amy, her hair blackening and her veins coursing with the darkest magic Buffy had ever seen, wasn’t cruel enough to do that to someone twice. Buffy would’ve been happy with not being cruel enough to do it once, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
And she would have begged.
Instead, Amy levitated a stake from the ground, right in front of her, its point toward Buffy. Set it spinning, like a bullet in slow motion.
Xander had told her something. Told her that Willow had shared with him what she’d done to Warren, in painstaking detail.
It had, of course, been at one of the darker moments in Willow’s rehabilitation, mere days after her rampage and just one or two before she left for England, when she spent the majority of her time shivering in the bed at his apartment while he did his best to take care of her.
Something about a bullet. How she’d made Warren feel it dig into him with tortuous slowness. How she’d set it spinning, like a small drill.
Xander had told her, because Xander couldn’t bear the burden of knowing that alone. Maybe it had been selfish of Willow to tell him that, just like it had been selfish of him to tell Buffy that, but she understood.
Amy didn’t look like she was going to regret it later, as the stake spun faster and faster, like it was winding up to shoot out of a cannon. Still, it was preferable to the explosion.
Living was better though.
Buffy’s hand was around a chunk of concrete before she even realized what she was doing, and she had it in the path of the shooting stake when Amy had had enough of anticipation. Nonetheless, the masonry shuddered in her hand as the stake thudded into it, burying itself about as deep as it would have taken to reach a vampire’s heart. Not even stopping to think, mindful of the way her nerves were still tingling in agony as she shot up to her feet, Buffy ignored the head rush and plucked the stake out of the impromptu shield.
Not marred in the slightest, it’d been spinning so fast. The tip smelled like smoke, and she didn’t dare touch it.
She staked the vampire creeping up behind her without sparing it a glance, and she snapped out a kick to the face of the one converging on her from the front. Their numbers were thinning-even Amy, raging up there on the semi, couldn’t keep them replenished, even if Buffy couldn’t actually see where they’d been coming from.
The truck was moving, though. Hadn’t Willow told her something about Amy? Amy was just up there, keeping some kind of preternatural balance while the semi picked up speed underneath her, even though there was nowhere for it to go.
Scratch that, Amy apparently knew the magical password to take down the giant, magical force field that Willow had set to go off whenever the compound was attacked. Right, cool, that made sense, but Buffy still didn’t know what had her sprinting after it, keeping pace as it slowly built up to higher speeds.
Amy slid across the top to the back, like she was skating on the backs of snakes. Her clothes were-
Was it immature of Buffy to wonder where the black rags and dried blood of her enemies were? If you took out the magic swirling around her even then, and the dark look that might have stopped the Master in his tracks, Amy looked as normal as she ever had. Little less the goth look she’d adopted later on in high school, but that was mitigated by the fact that her hair was a solid, ebon black by now.
Eyes, too.
The fireball she sent Buffy’s way, though, was a bright, burning orange, and the good kind of explosion that forced Buffy off her feet and off the driveway, into the grass, was hotter than hot. So hot it felt like it seared her skin-which it probably did.
Still better than the other kind of explosion, though. And Buffy didn’t scream when it went off, so much as she grunted in muted pain and not-so-muted frustration.
She didn’t even want to think of Xander as she lay there, waiting for her ears to stop ringing or for a vampire to show up and finish her off. Xander, plucked into the van by a girl with an assault rifle, right out of not-Michelle’s hands.
Had Michelle been trying to get him to the semi? Did that mean that Amy had been the one pulling that puppet’s strings, only for yet another group of people who didn’t seem to be on the same side as them to intervene and capture him for themselves?
Buffy didn’t know. Buffy didn’t feel qualified for her thinking license just then, and she missed the days when fights didn’t leave every single inch of her body sore. Slayer healing didn’t do much when you used magic to go straight for the nerves, and it wasn’t like she’d had time to lose all the marks from her fight with the not-horned demon.
Somehow, the arms she got under herself retained some of their strength, and it was enough to push herself up into a sitting position. The ringing in her ears diminished enough for her to hear that the sounds of battle behind her were as faint as they could be, with just a few of the false vampires left. The dark splotch in her vision from the brightness of the explosion faded enough to see the semi turning off in the distance, ducking out of sight.
She felt, rather than heard, Willow standing behind her. Faith, standing a few paces back, like she was afraid to stand between the two of them. When Buffy turned around, though, she was relieved to see that the hateful, enraged glare on Willow’s face was off in Amy’s direction.
When her eyes fell on Buffy, they softened. Enough that she didn’t look weird, kneeling down and offering her a hand.
“You okay, Buff?”
Her tone was a weird mix of high school chipper and black-haired serious. The fact that the tones mixed so well together almost made Buffy want to just set her head back down and cry until she suffocated.
She broke out laughing instead.
Between that and crying, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference.
Gonna see what I can do about updating more often than once a week. I love writing, but when the majority of the work I'm doing right now revolves around writing graduate project papers-yeah, ends up being a little less enjoyable.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
One's pain is another's painkiller.
-Leonid S. Sukhurokov