Through a Glass Darkly, 1/4
Here's my first ficathon entry, for tenyearsofbuffy. The prompt was my own, and will be revealed at the end of this first part. Many and sincere thanks for their invaluable comments and critical readings go to rahirah, clavally, rainkatt and antennapedia-- the latter for reading through multiple versions, including the final draft. All mistakes remaining are my own. They did try.
Spoilers/ Time period: End of Season 3 to Start of Season 5.
Characters: Core Scoobies + Anya and Tara, with a special guest appearance by someone not quite dearly departed.
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Buffyverse. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.
Distribution: If you're planning on asking me, I'm planning on saying "yes." Just let me know where it's going.
Word Count: 2,190
Through a Glass Darkly, part 1/4
He wondered sometimes, later, what he would have done differently, if he had known that it was going to be his last day alive on earth. He replayed the day over and over in his mind. He remembered getting up with the dawn, as was his habit, and dressing in his crisp white shirt, grey suit, striped tie. He’d stomped into his office a little before 7:00 and taken a seat behind his desk, scowling down at the graduation program in his hand. Something was misspelled-- deliberately, he was still convinced, because he distinctly remembered double checking the proof. The band would apparently be playing Elgar's classic, "Poop and Circumstance" while the pathetic bunch of losers known as the Class of 1999 was filing in that afternoon.
He remembered thinking that it would be sweltering later, and he’d toyed briefly with the idea that the solar eclipse might cool things down a bit. He'd asked Wilkins months before, when he had first realized graduation day would be marked by a total eclipse of the sun, if they shouldn't reschedule the event. But the Mayor had been insistent-- he was a busy man, after all. He still recalled the goofily affable grin as Wilkins had said, "The show must go on! Besides, it'll make the day so much more... memorable for everyone, don't you think?"
He remembered setting the program aside and taking a sip of bitter, black instant coffee from a white styrofoam cup. Remembering it now, he regretted not stopping at the Espresso Pump on the way to work. He remembered flicking on the clock radio sitting on the bookshelf behind his desk. Even now, could almost taste the oily bitterness on his tongue, smell the musty decay of mildewing books on the shelves around him, hear the static-filled broadcast from a public radio station in LA....
He didn’t have many specific memories of how his day had proceeded after that. He could extrapolate, remember facts from dozens of similar events over his career-- final checks, greeting guests and parents, threatening troublemakers, making sure the microphone had been set up and tested, everything in order and ready to go. But the last moments-- those were clear. How chaos had erupted all around him. How Mayor Wilkins himself suddenly changed into something which simply could not be. In nightmare slow motion, he saw himself shouting, demanding order. And then, a sickening crushing pain, the crack of bone and rush of blood. And darkness swallowing him whole.
That darkness surrounded him still as he wandered his beautiful, wrecked campus. It was always dark, now. Everywhere he looked, things were broken, shattered. He tried to remove scraps of paper littering the algae-scummed pond where a fountain had once sparkled in the sunlight. But his fingers passed through whatever he reached for. He didn’t understand why, at first. But then, in a bathroom mirror on the second floor, where the moon shone now through tumbled-down walls, he saw a pale, wispy reflection of himself, his eyes glittering darkly, his suit and tie pressed and immaculate as they had been on the last morning of his life. And then, he knew. He was dead.
He was not always alone. At times he could sense hundreds of souls milling about, all around him. He knew he should be with them, that his continuation in this eternal darkness was an affront to both God and Nature. But some force held him, and he could not penetrate the barrier between himself and the others. So he gave up, pretending it was merely the change of class periods, and that there were students jostling past him. The fiction was comforting, and if he did not try hard to penetrate the mist before his eyes, he did not have to face the fact that the school, and everything he had known, was gone.
At other times, there was only a profound silence. He would wander aimlessly, looking for something, but he wasn't sure what. Time slipped by, but time held no meaning for him now. It might have been minutes, or years, before he heard a familiar voice.
***
“Wow. We really did a number on this place, didn’t we?” Buffy picked her way carefully through the rubble, steadying her companion as the rock shifted beneath their feet. When they got to a clear space, she looked up at her Watcher and frowned. Giles had a stunned, rather lost look on his face as he took in the unholy mess around them. Then he seemed to recollect himself.
“Um, indeed,” he replied with a somewhat unconvincing chuckle. “I suspect my services will no longer be required by Sunnydale High School anytime in the foreseeable future.” He paused, then added, “Unless to fill in this bloody great hole.” He gestured toward the Hellmouth, which looked deceptively peaceful in the afternoon sunlight streaming in from above, the library skylight quite a bit enlarged by their industry.
Buffy wrinkled her nose as she turned to survey the ruin of their old sanctuary. Picking her way forward carefully, she struggled to put her feelings into words. “It seems... smaller now,” she said finally, sadly.
Giles' smile was tight, and, Buffy thought, a little pained as well. “Yes, I suppose that it does,” he agreed. The plaster and shattered glass crunched beneath his feet as he moved to join her, not far from where his office door had once stood.
She said, with forced cheerfulness, “Good thing we got everything important out before it blew, huh?”
“Um, yes,” he agreed, with a strangely nervous rise in his voice. She frowned, a little puzzled, as he went on, “Indeed, my flat is almost bursting at the seams. Do you know, I’m seriously considering Willow’s offer to help me transfer some of them to um, digital images, and put the physical volumes into storage?”
If it had been Willow, Buffy would have called this babbling, and she wondered briefly why Giles seemed so on edge. It must be upsetting to have lost both your jobs in the space of only a few months, she decided, even more if you did lose the last one because you helped blow it up. She shrugged and dismissed the thought as just another of those mysteries which was Giles. Glancing up, she saw him smiling sadly at the place where their old research table had stood. It was now little more than matchsticks. She placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and nudged at him playfully to try to cheer him.
“Check you out,” she grinned. “The Watcher enters the 20th century! Just in time for the 21st.” She paused, then said, more quietly, “Miss Calendar would be proud.”
For a second, she thought she’d said too much, as the flicker of pain crossed his face. But then, he placed his hand over hers and squeezed it in silent thanks. The gesture made her strangely nervous, herself, and she also began to babble a little. “Wait-- ‘Watcher enters the digital age....’ Isn’t that one of the sure signs of an impending apocalypse? Shouldn’t we be done for the year?” She pulled away and said shakily, “I thought I’d get a couple of days’ vacation at least.”
Giles gave her the smile she’d always classified as the “be patient with Buffy; she’s very young” smile. “Of course you’ve earned a break,” he agreed gently. Then he turned more serious as he continued, “But Buffy, you are still the Slayer. Whether you you choose to seek out evil or not, you must still be very careful. It will be drawn to you. It isn’t fair, but...” he shrugged. “It is the truth.”
Buffy nodded, sighing deeply. She knew he was right. “Yeah. And how sad is it, that the thought of slayage doesn’t scare me half as much as starting college?”
“You’ll do fine, Buffy,” Giles replied in his best reassuring voice. They both froze as a sudden icy breeze stirred the dust at their feet. Buffy shivered and looked around uneasily.
“Did you hear something?” she asked him. He cocked his head, listening. But neither of them could hear anything now.
“No,” he replied slowly. “But we’d best be getting back.” Buffy nodded, and they turned to make their careful way back out into the world.
***
The sounds of their footsteps and voices began to fade, as they moved away. Listening in the dark, the man realized he had found what he had been looking for. Summers, and that British librarian. He followed them, drawn as if by a magnet. Keeping an eye on both of them-- he remembered that. It had been important once. And now, in this dark mist, he held on to it as the most vital, crucial piece of his unnatural existence.
And so the silent observer traded one misty darkness for another. Sometimes he found himself amidst endless shelves of books. He read the titles at first, but many were in strange alphabets or gibberish, and many more bore disturbing titles with words like “Codex” and “Grimoire”. He didn’t approve, though he couldn’t remember exactly why.
He would hear a radio and drift toward it, the same static-y station from LA that had so often been his early morning companion in his office, only to hear a peevish British voice muttering about the piss-poor radio reception. He found if he stayed still, he could hear the music almost clearly. But eventually he forgot, and as he moved closer to the sound, the signal would break up again. Then the librarian would mutter darkly under his breath as he attempted to boost the signal reception by fiddling with one of the radio’s dials.
At other times, he found himself in a cemetery, headstones and crypts casting weird shadows in the moonlight. He would shiver briefly at the thought of being alone in such a place, and then he would catch a glimpse of gold out of the corner of his eye, and his panic would ease. He followed the slightly built girl, little more than a child, as she prowled these barren wastelands, surprised each time to find more signs of life than he might have expected.
Except, the creatures she encountered were seldom alive. Though he had known Sunnydale was located on a Hellmouth, he hadn’t truly appreciated all that meant, before. But now he saw them, more clearly than he saw the living-- demons flickering in magically animated dead flesh. He’d never been a particularly religious man, but when he realized he was dead, but not like these things, he had been-- thankful. Profoundly grateful, not to be like that. They were like a cancer-- disorderly, and just-- wrong. And he rejoiced each time she beat one back, then removed it from the world with a deft thrust of sharpened wood through the creature’s undead heart.
Sometimes he heard conversations, familiar voices. He said their names in his head: Harris. Rosenberg. Osborne. Later, there were new voices as well. But he found himself unable to follow most of their conversations, and for the most part uninterested. He just drifted through the stones, or through the books, restlessly, aimlessly. Watching.
Time’s passage held no particular meaning for him, but he did notice an odd cycle to his existence, orderly in its disorder. It began as a gradual welling up of emotion-- uncomfortable at first, like a vague uneasy dread, which built almost imperceptibly through agitation, then terror, then blind, weeping panic. At its height, he would lash out, as he sought desperately to touch something, anything. And-- things began to happen.
Little things at first-- the librarian’s glasses knocked off a bedside table in the night. Then a mug of tea shattering on the kitchen floor. A container of pens upended on a desk. And then, one night, a stone rising from the path to strike a burly biker in the back of the head, distracting it just long enough for Summers to flip back to her feet and drive a stake home.
“Hey, does it feel kind of cold to you tonight?” she asked her companions as she brushed the dust from her hair. The vampire had been quite a bit taller than she, and looming over her at just the wrong angle when she’d taken advantage of his momentary distraction.
Willow looked around uneasily. “It did... just for a second. Like the wind shifted or something.”
Xander grinned. “You’re both crazy,” he said cheerfully. “You’re just trying to weasel out of our bet. C’mon, you both owe me a triple dip fudge sundae. Pay up.”
Buffy frowned, stretching her Slayer senses to try to identify whatever it was that had disquieted her. But then, her senses had been pretty wonky since they had tapped into the spirit of the First Slayer to defeat Adam. There was nothing out there now. Just the slowly cooling heat of a summer night. “Yeah. C’mon guys. Let’s pack it in.”
Part 2/4
**************************
Prompt:
You'd think with all the supernatural energy and traumatic deaths on the Hellmouth, we'd have seen more ghosts in Sunnydale before the First.
So-- tell a ghost story.
Characters: Core Scoobies, anyone else fine
Prompt:
1)Anytime prior to S7
2) Ghost may be a familiar character (or not)
3) Extra points for someone explaining that the unfortunate phrase "laying a ghost" does Not mean what you were thinking....
Spoilers/ Time period: End of Season 3 to Start of Season 5.
Characters: Core Scoobies + Anya and Tara, with a special guest appearance by someone not quite dearly departed.
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Buffyverse. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.
Distribution: If you're planning on asking me, I'm planning on saying "yes." Just let me know where it's going.
Word Count: 2,190
Through a Glass Darkly, part 1/4
He wondered sometimes, later, what he would have done differently, if he had known that it was going to be his last day alive on earth. He replayed the day over and over in his mind. He remembered getting up with the dawn, as was his habit, and dressing in his crisp white shirt, grey suit, striped tie. He’d stomped into his office a little before 7:00 and taken a seat behind his desk, scowling down at the graduation program in his hand. Something was misspelled-- deliberately, he was still convinced, because he distinctly remembered double checking the proof. The band would apparently be playing Elgar's classic, "Poop and Circumstance" while the pathetic bunch of losers known as the Class of 1999 was filing in that afternoon.
He remembered thinking that it would be sweltering later, and he’d toyed briefly with the idea that the solar eclipse might cool things down a bit. He'd asked Wilkins months before, when he had first realized graduation day would be marked by a total eclipse of the sun, if they shouldn't reschedule the event. But the Mayor had been insistent-- he was a busy man, after all. He still recalled the goofily affable grin as Wilkins had said, "The show must go on! Besides, it'll make the day so much more... memorable for everyone, don't you think?"
He remembered setting the program aside and taking a sip of bitter, black instant coffee from a white styrofoam cup. Remembering it now, he regretted not stopping at the Espresso Pump on the way to work. He remembered flicking on the clock radio sitting on the bookshelf behind his desk. Even now, could almost taste the oily bitterness on his tongue, smell the musty decay of mildewing books on the shelves around him, hear the static-filled broadcast from a public radio station in LA....
He didn’t have many specific memories of how his day had proceeded after that. He could extrapolate, remember facts from dozens of similar events over his career-- final checks, greeting guests and parents, threatening troublemakers, making sure the microphone had been set up and tested, everything in order and ready to go. But the last moments-- those were clear. How chaos had erupted all around him. How Mayor Wilkins himself suddenly changed into something which simply could not be. In nightmare slow motion, he saw himself shouting, demanding order. And then, a sickening crushing pain, the crack of bone and rush of blood. And darkness swallowing him whole.
That darkness surrounded him still as he wandered his beautiful, wrecked campus. It was always dark, now. Everywhere he looked, things were broken, shattered. He tried to remove scraps of paper littering the algae-scummed pond where a fountain had once sparkled in the sunlight. But his fingers passed through whatever he reached for. He didn’t understand why, at first. But then, in a bathroom mirror on the second floor, where the moon shone now through tumbled-down walls, he saw a pale, wispy reflection of himself, his eyes glittering darkly, his suit and tie pressed and immaculate as they had been on the last morning of his life. And then, he knew. He was dead.
He was not always alone. At times he could sense hundreds of souls milling about, all around him. He knew he should be with them, that his continuation in this eternal darkness was an affront to both God and Nature. But some force held him, and he could not penetrate the barrier between himself and the others. So he gave up, pretending it was merely the change of class periods, and that there were students jostling past him. The fiction was comforting, and if he did not try hard to penetrate the mist before his eyes, he did not have to face the fact that the school, and everything he had known, was gone.
At other times, there was only a profound silence. He would wander aimlessly, looking for something, but he wasn't sure what. Time slipped by, but time held no meaning for him now. It might have been minutes, or years, before he heard a familiar voice.
***
“Wow. We really did a number on this place, didn’t we?” Buffy picked her way carefully through the rubble, steadying her companion as the rock shifted beneath their feet. When they got to a clear space, she looked up at her Watcher and frowned. Giles had a stunned, rather lost look on his face as he took in the unholy mess around them. Then he seemed to recollect himself.
“Um, indeed,” he replied with a somewhat unconvincing chuckle. “I suspect my services will no longer be required by Sunnydale High School anytime in the foreseeable future.” He paused, then added, “Unless to fill in this bloody great hole.” He gestured toward the Hellmouth, which looked deceptively peaceful in the afternoon sunlight streaming in from above, the library skylight quite a bit enlarged by their industry.
Buffy wrinkled her nose as she turned to survey the ruin of their old sanctuary. Picking her way forward carefully, she struggled to put her feelings into words. “It seems... smaller now,” she said finally, sadly.
Giles' smile was tight, and, Buffy thought, a little pained as well. “Yes, I suppose that it does,” he agreed. The plaster and shattered glass crunched beneath his feet as he moved to join her, not far from where his office door had once stood.
She said, with forced cheerfulness, “Good thing we got everything important out before it blew, huh?”
“Um, yes,” he agreed, with a strangely nervous rise in his voice. She frowned, a little puzzled, as he went on, “Indeed, my flat is almost bursting at the seams. Do you know, I’m seriously considering Willow’s offer to help me transfer some of them to um, digital images, and put the physical volumes into storage?”
If it had been Willow, Buffy would have called this babbling, and she wondered briefly why Giles seemed so on edge. It must be upsetting to have lost both your jobs in the space of only a few months, she decided, even more if you did lose the last one because you helped blow it up. She shrugged and dismissed the thought as just another of those mysteries which was Giles. Glancing up, she saw him smiling sadly at the place where their old research table had stood. It was now little more than matchsticks. She placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and nudged at him playfully to try to cheer him.
“Check you out,” she grinned. “The Watcher enters the 20th century! Just in time for the 21st.” She paused, then said, more quietly, “Miss Calendar would be proud.”
For a second, she thought she’d said too much, as the flicker of pain crossed his face. But then, he placed his hand over hers and squeezed it in silent thanks. The gesture made her strangely nervous, herself, and she also began to babble a little. “Wait-- ‘Watcher enters the digital age....’ Isn’t that one of the sure signs of an impending apocalypse? Shouldn’t we be done for the year?” She pulled away and said shakily, “I thought I’d get a couple of days’ vacation at least.”
Giles gave her the smile she’d always classified as the “be patient with Buffy; she’s very young” smile. “Of course you’ve earned a break,” he agreed gently. Then he turned more serious as he continued, “But Buffy, you are still the Slayer. Whether you you choose to seek out evil or not, you must still be very careful. It will be drawn to you. It isn’t fair, but...” he shrugged. “It is the truth.”
Buffy nodded, sighing deeply. She knew he was right. “Yeah. And how sad is it, that the thought of slayage doesn’t scare me half as much as starting college?”
“You’ll do fine, Buffy,” Giles replied in his best reassuring voice. They both froze as a sudden icy breeze stirred the dust at their feet. Buffy shivered and looked around uneasily.
“Did you hear something?” she asked him. He cocked his head, listening. But neither of them could hear anything now.
“No,” he replied slowly. “But we’d best be getting back.” Buffy nodded, and they turned to make their careful way back out into the world.
***
The sounds of their footsteps and voices began to fade, as they moved away. Listening in the dark, the man realized he had found what he had been looking for. Summers, and that British librarian. He followed them, drawn as if by a magnet. Keeping an eye on both of them-- he remembered that. It had been important once. And now, in this dark mist, he held on to it as the most vital, crucial piece of his unnatural existence.
And so the silent observer traded one misty darkness for another. Sometimes he found himself amidst endless shelves of books. He read the titles at first, but many were in strange alphabets or gibberish, and many more bore disturbing titles with words like “Codex” and “Grimoire”. He didn’t approve, though he couldn’t remember exactly why.
He would hear a radio and drift toward it, the same static-y station from LA that had so often been his early morning companion in his office, only to hear a peevish British voice muttering about the piss-poor radio reception. He found if he stayed still, he could hear the music almost clearly. But eventually he forgot, and as he moved closer to the sound, the signal would break up again. Then the librarian would mutter darkly under his breath as he attempted to boost the signal reception by fiddling with one of the radio’s dials.
At other times, he found himself in a cemetery, headstones and crypts casting weird shadows in the moonlight. He would shiver briefly at the thought of being alone in such a place, and then he would catch a glimpse of gold out of the corner of his eye, and his panic would ease. He followed the slightly built girl, little more than a child, as she prowled these barren wastelands, surprised each time to find more signs of life than he might have expected.
Except, the creatures she encountered were seldom alive. Though he had known Sunnydale was located on a Hellmouth, he hadn’t truly appreciated all that meant, before. But now he saw them, more clearly than he saw the living-- demons flickering in magically animated dead flesh. He’d never been a particularly religious man, but when he realized he was dead, but not like these things, he had been-- thankful. Profoundly grateful, not to be like that. They were like a cancer-- disorderly, and just-- wrong. And he rejoiced each time she beat one back, then removed it from the world with a deft thrust of sharpened wood through the creature’s undead heart.
Sometimes he heard conversations, familiar voices. He said their names in his head: Harris. Rosenberg. Osborne. Later, there were new voices as well. But he found himself unable to follow most of their conversations, and for the most part uninterested. He just drifted through the stones, or through the books, restlessly, aimlessly. Watching.
Time’s passage held no particular meaning for him, but he did notice an odd cycle to his existence, orderly in its disorder. It began as a gradual welling up of emotion-- uncomfortable at first, like a vague uneasy dread, which built almost imperceptibly through agitation, then terror, then blind, weeping panic. At its height, he would lash out, as he sought desperately to touch something, anything. And-- things began to happen.
Little things at first-- the librarian’s glasses knocked off a bedside table in the night. Then a mug of tea shattering on the kitchen floor. A container of pens upended on a desk. And then, one night, a stone rising from the path to strike a burly biker in the back of the head, distracting it just long enough for Summers to flip back to her feet and drive a stake home.
“Hey, does it feel kind of cold to you tonight?” she asked her companions as she brushed the dust from her hair. The vampire had been quite a bit taller than she, and looming over her at just the wrong angle when she’d taken advantage of his momentary distraction.
Willow looked around uneasily. “It did... just for a second. Like the wind shifted or something.”
Xander grinned. “You’re both crazy,” he said cheerfully. “You’re just trying to weasel out of our bet. C’mon, you both owe me a triple dip fudge sundae. Pay up.”
Buffy frowned, stretching her Slayer senses to try to identify whatever it was that had disquieted her. But then, her senses had been pretty wonky since they had tapped into the spirit of the First Slayer to defeat Adam. There was nothing out there now. Just the slowly cooling heat of a summer night. “Yeah. C’mon guys. Let’s pack it in.”
Part 2/4
**************************
Prompt:
You'd think with all the supernatural energy and traumatic deaths on the Hellmouth, we'd have seen more ghosts in Sunnydale before the First.
So-- tell a ghost story.
Characters: Core Scoobies, anyone else fine
Prompt:
1)Anytime prior to S7
2) Ghost may be a familiar character (or not)
3) Extra points for someone explaining that the unfortunate phrase "laying a ghost" does Not mean what you were thinking....