Title: Buffy Goes to hell
Author: BlueLight
Rating: G
Disclaimer: The characters in this story belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.
Blurb: What is hell?
Reviews, constructive criticism requested.
Distribution: Fine, just let me know where.
Feedback: Please.
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Buffy Goes to Hell
Darkness slid down like a curtain, coming between her and the radiance of the world. Buffy strained against the gloom, cut off from light, trying to see through the murk, struggling to distinguish some pattern in the subtle gradations of darkness that seemed to pulsate like dark scum on undulating black water.
A roaring white noise stormed in her ears, louder than a rock concert, as if she was trapped in the bore of a tornado. Sometimes it seemed the sound of rain on a tin roof, then the distant echo of a shower in Sunnydale High's locker room, then the hiss inside the curl of a shell, then the crackle of a radio not tuned to any station but turned all the way up. The sound was all around her, with her, maybe in her.
Random sparkles of light formed on her retina…then faded back into a differentiated blackness as dark as the shadows that hid the monsters under her bed when she was three.
The floor tilted, an unseen sky twirled, like a fright ride in a carnival dream. Centrifugal force spun her around. Sometimes she would feel she was shooting upward like a giant elevator, racing toward an unseen sky. Sometimes she would feel she was in free fall, spinning in space, falling faster and faster, bracing herself to hit, splat! Then suddenly gravity would change direction and circle her like a cork tossed about by crashing waves. She would be weightless one moment and weighted down like lead the next.
Forces plucked at her, indifferent in their malevolence. What had been merely disorienting at first became unpleasant, then annoying, then maddening. Her exhaustion became total. Her muscles cramped then spasmed into agony. At some point she began to cry. Then to scream. It never stopped. The sounds. The almost lack of sight. The feelings. There was no rest, not a moment. It was hell.
She didn't know how long it had been, how long she had been trapped in this place, this no place. She tried to remember how she had gotten here, tried to remember the casual curse that had sent her tumbling into black but before she could gather her thoughts she would feel herself slung across the sky… or the universe. She would try to remember the demon's face then feel herself forced through a sieve and split into a million pieces hurled a million directions, each spinning mindlessly until they suddenly coalesced, the parts coagulating like dried blood, organizing themselves into a mind screaming in madness.
It went on.
Never-ending.
She existed to suffer. Her mind turned outward to the dreadful darkness. She lost all awareness of herself. She became only a mote tossed in a storm.
Time ended and stretched through eternity. The mote could not count it. The mote could only suffer, only feel torment. The mote could not reason or remember as it was pulled apart by chaos, by outer darkness away from the sight of God.
The mote wailed like a banshee, tormented past bearing.
The mote became aware that there was something else in the void. A new darkness was swirling in the abyss, flung as it was flung, lost as it was lost, but a darkness with a purpose, a darkness that was reaching toward her. She found she could concentrate on it for seconds at a time. She recognized it as evil but a different evil than the murk around her. It was not part of the never-ending chaos. This evil bore an invisible torch that she finally recognized as love. This new shadow briefly spread itself wide as a net and then enveloped her and, even though she and it were then hurled across a limitless space, there was something, finally, to which she could cling. This shadow was not formless. It had arms that grasped her and held on. She buried herself in it and the roar of chaos was muffled. She held on and the universe steadied. She embraced it and it became gravity.
Ignoring the maddening sounds, the chaotic sensations, the shadow gathered up the unraveled threads of her mind, careful not to lose a single strand, wrapping them around her like she was a ball of yarn.
Finally there was a pull, then another, and another and she was moving in an identifiable direction, wrapped in a familiar shadow, she was moving though a tiny tunnel no bigger than the eye of a needle, the threads of her mind pulled back toward what she now recognized as her body, pulled out of the dark abyss by a different darkness, a darkness that held her, a mind merged with hers, guiding her back to a world that was solid, where down stayed put and there was silence and light. A world where she could see the approaching image of Spike, standing in a magic circle surrounded by her friends, pulling her out of hell and back into the world using only his love as a lifeline.
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Feedback: Please
I've read several fanfictions where Spike rescues Buffy from hell but I got to wondering "What is hell?" Some religions believe that hell is nothing physical, no fire, no demons with pitchforks. They believe that hell is being cast into outer darkness, away from the sight of God which should be hell enough for anyone. Is hell what the universe was before God turned his hand to it? Is hell without form and void? Is hell chaos, chaos unbearable and unending, chaos lit by a darkness visible as was the earth before God divided the light from the darkness? So I tried to describe that hell and how Spike might rescue Buffy from it.