What Is This, A Joke? (Chapter 2)
See part 1 for all header material.
- * -
Susan Pevensie didn't pace as Spike explained the situation to her. She stood utterly still, watching him with an intensity that reminded him eerily of Drusilla. Squirming slightly under her gaze, he recounted the trials, the demon in the cave, the trip to the bar, the Lion. How it had followed him, how it had just appeared places.
"Typical encounter," Susan said, flatly, when he had done.
"You've dealt with him before, then?"
"Why do you think they put me on this case? I'm an expert. He's very dangerous. Strongly empathic, mind-altering."
"Mind-altering? That don't sound so pleasant."
"It is. Pleasant, that is. That's why he's so deadly."
"Don't think he's altered mine, do you? Because I like folk to stay the hell out of my mind."
Susan took out a pamphlet from her jacket pocket, folded it open to a page in the middle, and handed it to Spike. Potential side effects of prolonged contact, it read, in print so small he had to strain to read it. Dizziness, vomiting, ennui, lucid dreaming, existential angst, pregnancy, death.
"Explains the dreams, then," Spike said, half to himself. Susan looked at him, something that might have been interest flashing across her face.
"What sort of dreams?"
"Well. The bugger was in it."
"What else can you recall?"
Spike closed his eyes, thinking. "He said - he said he was everywhere. That I couldn't escape. And there was poetry. Eliot. Something about tigers."
"Eliot. You're not too far gone, then. When he starts in on the Song of Songs, it's hopeless." There was no humor in the woman's voice.
He had a zinger all ready to go, but Spike had hardly opened his mouth when Susan's impeccable jacket emitted a buzzing noise. She held up one hand in a gesture for silence that was accustomed to obedience, and with the other pulled out a phone, flipped it open, and held it to her ear. "Pevensie here."
After a pause, Susan spoke again, in the tone which seemed to be universal with her - not uninflected, but impersonal, crisp, businesslike. "Put District C-16 on lockdown. A through F code silver. Dispatch strike forces to all SCC's within a three-mile radius of each sighting. And I want Fowler's division handling the PR aspects, take up to four secretarial units as needed." She closed the phone and pocketed it without waiting for a reply, and, without looking to see if Spike was listening, added "You, come with me," and set off briskly.
- * -
The car was long, and black, and had more gadgets than Spike had ever seen outside of a spy movie. Susan drove it herself, wearing white kid gloves she took from the glovebox, and even Spike found himself wincing at the sheer madness of some of her maneuvers. He didn't have a problem with breaking traffic laws, but he preferred to get wherever they were going undecapitated.
"Brake's the one in the middle, love," he said tersely, involuntarily clutching at the armrest.
"Pevensie."
"What?"
"My name's Pevensie. Susan Pevensie. You can call me ma'am." She wrenched the wheel with surprising strength, bringing the car to a screeching stop in a dingy alleyway.
The radio crackled, and a static-y voice came through. "Number one, you here?"
Susan tapped a button and replied, "Number one primed and waiting."
"Sectors E through F are cleared. Ready to commence Operation Lionheart."
"What all's that?" Spike asked, as he followed Susan out of the car and off at a brisk pace.
"We're isolating him. Narrowing down the areas."
"Can you do that?"
"His physical manifestation, yes. Our mages are very good. As long as we can distract him - lure him in to focus himself on one point - then we have rituals that can trap him. Then we do whatever we have to do to banish him."
"And how are you planning to distract him?" Spike looked at Susan, then froze. "Oh. No. God no. You're suffering under a misconception, love, that's not - "
"Pevensie," Susan corrected, then placed a hand on Spike's elbow to halt him, pointing at a building. "In there."
Spike stared at the concrete atrocity with its sickly felt banners. "A church? You've got to be joking, love, that's just not happening."
"Pevensie," Susan repeated. "The Black Guard are on their way to desecrate it. It'll hold him off from the bait for long enough."
"The bait being - "
"You, yes. Go."
- * -
He'd sat stiffly in a pew for he didn't know how many hours, trying not to wince at the low-level discomfort of the consecrated space, and afraid to move surrounded as he was by holy symbols. He tried not to think, either; the chaos of the last few days must have been getting to him, because his mind was racing, filled with thoughts and emotions that were strange and out of place. Faces of dead people flashing before his eyes, saying you killed me, you killed me, and when he told them to shut up it was Buffy, looking at him with hatred and fear and saying now you see why I can never love you. So he clenched his fists and emptied his mind and stared straight in front of him till his eyes hurt, and somehow between that and the monotonous chanting of the black-robed desecrators he fell asleep.
He dreamt he was back in the bar, and he was drinking. Drinking and drinking, but he was still thirsty, no matter how many times the bartender refilled his tumbler.
"What, more?" said the bartender, who had no face.
"She told me we could still be friends," he found himself sobbing. "No, no, that was the other one. Other one. Yes, more. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."
The bartender filled the glass again. Spike drank, and it was dry like dust. "Go away, I don't want you," he said to the Lion, who was standing behind him, warm breath on his face.
"You always want me. You were looking for me and you found me, and now you're afraid because you've forgotten how to stop looking."
He was in the desert, searching for his soul. He'd lost it, left it somewhere here, and it was buried in the endless shifting dunes, and God he was thirsty.
"Water, water everywhere," he whispered, "and not a bloody - "
"WAKE UP! WAKE UP!"
- * -
Spike started and opened his eyes. Susan was standing over him, shaking him and shouting. "Wake up, you fool, wake up, what were you thinking, falling asleep - "
"Relax, love, I'm awake," he mumbled, blinking. "You really hate him, don't you?"
"Pevensie," Susan said, but it was automatic and without venom. "He killed my family."
"He what?"
"My family. My sister was seventeen." Susan's face was terrifyingly empty. "He lied and seduced them, and he took them one by one. My sister Lucy and my brother Peter, and Edmund almost saw through it, he was always the brightest, but he wanted so much to be loved. It's the Lion's darkest trick. He really does love them, the ones he takes."
"So he says."
"Yes. And he took them, like a worm in their minds, they couldn't think of anything else, I asked Lucy once and she didn't remember a moment of her childhood when he wasn't there. They hated me by the end."
"Because you didn't love him?"
"Of course I loved him." Susan looked at the vampire with disdain. "You can't help it. I cried over him at night. I was only twenty-one. They hated me because I fought him. He doesn't like that." She smiled, small and vicious. "I was very good at it. He showed us magic, just a little, just so he could teach us never to use it, and you can't imagine what that did to Lucy. She had a talent for it, you see, and he punished her for it, made her friends hate her, and Lucy cried at night, every night, every night until she died. So I learned magic, small little magics you could sew into your stockings or paint behind your ears or in the small of your back, and nobody knew. And then I went to America to learn from a coven there, and he killed my family. Get up."
"Where are we going?"
"Out." Susan led him out of the church, where a helicopter was waiting for them. As she helped him buckle the complicated straps, she explained, "He's infested this place, deep down. We'll have to destroy it for miles."
"Destroy?"
"Bomb it," Susan shouted, over the roaring of the rising helicopters. "Annihilate it. Sow it with salt. Curse it for seven generations."
"Won't that kill a lot of people?"
"You care?"
- * -
Afterwards, he walked through the ruins with Susan. It should have been quiet, among the blackened buildings, stepping over corpses too burnt to be bloody, but instead there was the constant insistent roar of distant traffic, and the intermittent sirens of emergency vehicles daring the edges of the warzone. "The humans will stay out of it," Susan had explained to him, as he tried to numb himself to the creeping guilt for the deaths. "They'll say it was terrorists, but they'll sense the dark magic we put here to keep him out, and it'll keep them out. Most of them, anyway. Some of them will be drawn to it."
"Left here," said Spike. She'd asked him to show her where the bar had been. A small special ops team was trailing behind them, guarding a trio of mages who would make sure no portal or other easy access route for the Lion was hidden there.
Suddenly, Susan froze. He almost asked her why, and then Spike also saw the great golden beast padding towards them through the wreckage of the city. He started to move - whether towards the Lion or away from him, he wasn't sure - but Susan stepped in front of him as the Lion reached them.
"Daughter of Eve," said the Lion, in his deep soft voice. "I have been waiting for you."
"You can't be here," said Susan, but her voice was high like a young girl's, and quivered.
"I am who am. I was here in the beginning and I will be here in the end. Don't you understand? This doesn't keep me away. Death doesn't keep me away. Death is my gift."
"Hey!" Spike exclaimed, stepping forward. "Not to break up the party, but you owe me something, Lion."
"I owe you nothing," said the Lion, "but I will give you many things."
"Yes, well, thanks for the mysticism, but I'm just looking for what you owe me. My soul, then I'll be out of here."
"Your soul?" The Lion looked at him with piercing eyes. "I gave you your soul when first you saw me. At the bar."
Spike opened his mouth to object, but then he remembered - the rush of painful warmth, the strange feelings he'd fought off, the constant guilt - and he decided against saying anything, and forgot to close it again.
The men in their hazard gear started to move forward threateningly, but Susan stayed them with a hand. "I want none of you, Aslan. I've told you before, and I'll tell you again. There is nothing of you in me. I've made sure of that. So go. There's nothing for you here."
"Of you, we will speak another day," said the Lion. "But the other is mine."
"Bugger this," said Spike, and strode off towards the bar. He thought he'd seen a bottle of liquor there, still (miraculously) intact. Behind him, Susan tore her eyes from the Lion, and turned, walked off with a confident stride and tears running down her high cheekbones. Some of her guards lingered longer than others, but all of them followed her, one by one.
Spike kept walking, walking in the general direction of Sunnydale. There was a woman there who might or might not want him back, and plenty of things he could hurt, and the drink he desperately needed. He walked briskly, and didn't look back over his shoulder, not once.
And, inexorably, the great golden Lion padded after him.
- * -
Susan Pevensie didn't pace as Spike explained the situation to her. She stood utterly still, watching him with an intensity that reminded him eerily of Drusilla. Squirming slightly under her gaze, he recounted the trials, the demon in the cave, the trip to the bar, the Lion. How it had followed him, how it had just appeared places.
"Typical encounter," Susan said, flatly, when he had done.
"You've dealt with him before, then?"
"Why do you think they put me on this case? I'm an expert. He's very dangerous. Strongly empathic, mind-altering."
"Mind-altering? That don't sound so pleasant."
"It is. Pleasant, that is. That's why he's so deadly."
"Don't think he's altered mine, do you? Because I like folk to stay the hell out of my mind."
Susan took out a pamphlet from her jacket pocket, folded it open to a page in the middle, and handed it to Spike. Potential side effects of prolonged contact, it read, in print so small he had to strain to read it. Dizziness, vomiting, ennui, lucid dreaming, existential angst, pregnancy, death.
"Explains the dreams, then," Spike said, half to himself. Susan looked at him, something that might have been interest flashing across her face.
"What sort of dreams?"
"Well. The bugger was in it."
"What else can you recall?"
Spike closed his eyes, thinking. "He said - he said he was everywhere. That I couldn't escape. And there was poetry. Eliot. Something about tigers."
"Eliot. You're not too far gone, then. When he starts in on the Song of Songs, it's hopeless." There was no humor in the woman's voice.
He had a zinger all ready to go, but Spike had hardly opened his mouth when Susan's impeccable jacket emitted a buzzing noise. She held up one hand in a gesture for silence that was accustomed to obedience, and with the other pulled out a phone, flipped it open, and held it to her ear. "Pevensie here."
After a pause, Susan spoke again, in the tone which seemed to be universal with her - not uninflected, but impersonal, crisp, businesslike. "Put District C-16 on lockdown. A through F code silver. Dispatch strike forces to all SCC's within a three-mile radius of each sighting. And I want Fowler's division handling the PR aspects, take up to four secretarial units as needed." She closed the phone and pocketed it without waiting for a reply, and, without looking to see if Spike was listening, added "You, come with me," and set off briskly.
- * -
The car was long, and black, and had more gadgets than Spike had ever seen outside of a spy movie. Susan drove it herself, wearing white kid gloves she took from the glovebox, and even Spike found himself wincing at the sheer madness of some of her maneuvers. He didn't have a problem with breaking traffic laws, but he preferred to get wherever they were going undecapitated.
"Brake's the one in the middle, love," he said tersely, involuntarily clutching at the armrest.
"Pevensie."
"What?"
"My name's Pevensie. Susan Pevensie. You can call me ma'am." She wrenched the wheel with surprising strength, bringing the car to a screeching stop in a dingy alleyway.
The radio crackled, and a static-y voice came through. "Number one, you here?"
Susan tapped a button and replied, "Number one primed and waiting."
"Sectors E through F are cleared. Ready to commence Operation Lionheart."
"What all's that?" Spike asked, as he followed Susan out of the car and off at a brisk pace.
"We're isolating him. Narrowing down the areas."
"Can you do that?"
"His physical manifestation, yes. Our mages are very good. As long as we can distract him - lure him in to focus himself on one point - then we have rituals that can trap him. Then we do whatever we have to do to banish him."
"And how are you planning to distract him?" Spike looked at Susan, then froze. "Oh. No. God no. You're suffering under a misconception, love, that's not - "
"Pevensie," Susan corrected, then placed a hand on Spike's elbow to halt him, pointing at a building. "In there."
Spike stared at the concrete atrocity with its sickly felt banners. "A church? You've got to be joking, love, that's just not happening."
"Pevensie," Susan repeated. "The Black Guard are on their way to desecrate it. It'll hold him off from the bait for long enough."
"The bait being - "
"You, yes. Go."
- * -
He'd sat stiffly in a pew for he didn't know how many hours, trying not to wince at the low-level discomfort of the consecrated space, and afraid to move surrounded as he was by holy symbols. He tried not to think, either; the chaos of the last few days must have been getting to him, because his mind was racing, filled with thoughts and emotions that were strange and out of place. Faces of dead people flashing before his eyes, saying you killed me, you killed me, and when he told them to shut up it was Buffy, looking at him with hatred and fear and saying now you see why I can never love you. So he clenched his fists and emptied his mind and stared straight in front of him till his eyes hurt, and somehow between that and the monotonous chanting of the black-robed desecrators he fell asleep.
He dreamt he was back in the bar, and he was drinking. Drinking and drinking, but he was still thirsty, no matter how many times the bartender refilled his tumbler.
"What, more?" said the bartender, who had no face.
"She told me we could still be friends," he found himself sobbing. "No, no, that was the other one. Other one. Yes, more. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."
The bartender filled the glass again. Spike drank, and it was dry like dust. "Go away, I don't want you," he said to the Lion, who was standing behind him, warm breath on his face.
"You always want me. You were looking for me and you found me, and now you're afraid because you've forgotten how to stop looking."
He was in the desert, searching for his soul. He'd lost it, left it somewhere here, and it was buried in the endless shifting dunes, and God he was thirsty.
"Water, water everywhere," he whispered, "and not a bloody - "
"WAKE UP! WAKE UP!"
- * -
Spike started and opened his eyes. Susan was standing over him, shaking him and shouting. "Wake up, you fool, wake up, what were you thinking, falling asleep - "
"Relax, love, I'm awake," he mumbled, blinking. "You really hate him, don't you?"
"Pevensie," Susan said, but it was automatic and without venom. "He killed my family."
"He what?"
"My family. My sister was seventeen." Susan's face was terrifyingly empty. "He lied and seduced them, and he took them one by one. My sister Lucy and my brother Peter, and Edmund almost saw through it, he was always the brightest, but he wanted so much to be loved. It's the Lion's darkest trick. He really does love them, the ones he takes."
"So he says."
"Yes. And he took them, like a worm in their minds, they couldn't think of anything else, I asked Lucy once and she didn't remember a moment of her childhood when he wasn't there. They hated me by the end."
"Because you didn't love him?"
"Of course I loved him." Susan looked at the vampire with disdain. "You can't help it. I cried over him at night. I was only twenty-one. They hated me because I fought him. He doesn't like that." She smiled, small and vicious. "I was very good at it. He showed us magic, just a little, just so he could teach us never to use it, and you can't imagine what that did to Lucy. She had a talent for it, you see, and he punished her for it, made her friends hate her, and Lucy cried at night, every night, every night until she died. So I learned magic, small little magics you could sew into your stockings or paint behind your ears or in the small of your back, and nobody knew. And then I went to America to learn from a coven there, and he killed my family. Get up."
"Where are we going?"
"Out." Susan led him out of the church, where a helicopter was waiting for them. As she helped him buckle the complicated straps, she explained, "He's infested this place, deep down. We'll have to destroy it for miles."
"Destroy?"
"Bomb it," Susan shouted, over the roaring of the rising helicopters. "Annihilate it. Sow it with salt. Curse it for seven generations."
"Won't that kill a lot of people?"
"You care?"
- * -
Afterwards, he walked through the ruins with Susan. It should have been quiet, among the blackened buildings, stepping over corpses too burnt to be bloody, but instead there was the constant insistent roar of distant traffic, and the intermittent sirens of emergency vehicles daring the edges of the warzone. "The humans will stay out of it," Susan had explained to him, as he tried to numb himself to the creeping guilt for the deaths. "They'll say it was terrorists, but they'll sense the dark magic we put here to keep him out, and it'll keep them out. Most of them, anyway. Some of them will be drawn to it."
"Left here," said Spike. She'd asked him to show her where the bar had been. A small special ops team was trailing behind them, guarding a trio of mages who would make sure no portal or other easy access route for the Lion was hidden there.
Suddenly, Susan froze. He almost asked her why, and then Spike also saw the great golden beast padding towards them through the wreckage of the city. He started to move - whether towards the Lion or away from him, he wasn't sure - but Susan stepped in front of him as the Lion reached them.
"Daughter of Eve," said the Lion, in his deep soft voice. "I have been waiting for you."
"You can't be here," said Susan, but her voice was high like a young girl's, and quivered.
"I am who am. I was here in the beginning and I will be here in the end. Don't you understand? This doesn't keep me away. Death doesn't keep me away. Death is my gift."
"Hey!" Spike exclaimed, stepping forward. "Not to break up the party, but you owe me something, Lion."
"I owe you nothing," said the Lion, "but I will give you many things."
"Yes, well, thanks for the mysticism, but I'm just looking for what you owe me. My soul, then I'll be out of here."
"Your soul?" The Lion looked at him with piercing eyes. "I gave you your soul when first you saw me. At the bar."
Spike opened his mouth to object, but then he remembered - the rush of painful warmth, the strange feelings he'd fought off, the constant guilt - and he decided against saying anything, and forgot to close it again.
The men in their hazard gear started to move forward threateningly, but Susan stayed them with a hand. "I want none of you, Aslan. I've told you before, and I'll tell you again. There is nothing of you in me. I've made sure of that. So go. There's nothing for you here."
"Of you, we will speak another day," said the Lion. "But the other is mine."
"Bugger this," said Spike, and strode off towards the bar. He thought he'd seen a bottle of liquor there, still (miraculously) intact. Behind him, Susan tore her eyes from the Lion, and turned, walked off with a confident stride and tears running down her high cheekbones. Some of her guards lingered longer than others, but all of them followed her, one by one.
Spike kept walking, walking in the general direction of Sunnydale. There was a woman there who might or might not want him back, and plenty of things he could hurt, and the drink he desperately needed. He walked briskly, and didn't look back over his shoulder, not once.
And, inexorably, the great golden Lion padded after him.