THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR
ALL AUDIENCES
They hated each other for years...
Buffy whirled around and hit Spike on the nose. "Oww!" he roared, grabbing
his face. He jumped up, kicked the Slayer in the chest, and then grabbed
his head in pain as the chip went off. This was pretty good, Buffy thought.
She hit him, he got hurt. He hit her, he got hurt. All right, she got hurt
as well, but it was still amusing...
(...)
The two fighters were oblivious to the outer world until a noise to
the right of them caught Spike's attention. "What the..." he said, abruptly
breaking off the uneven fight.
(...)
"A tornado!" Buffy screamed. "Run!"
But then time changed everything...
The Slayer now took in her surroundings with much the same wondering
expression on her face as he must have had moments earlier. "Where are
we?" she finally said, staring at the walls in front of them.
"I don't know..." Spike answered. "But it seems kinda familiar."
"Not to me it doesn't," she threw in. "Enlighten me."
"It looks kinda like..." He knew how this was going to sound. "Like
Rome."
(...)
Buffy had learned enough in high school to know that those were numbers,
and that it was most likely a date, or year. She didn't know what exactly
the number was though. "Spike, what does it say?" she asked. Before Spike
could reply, the butcher snatched the parchment out of his hands.
"Hey!" said Spike, but Buffy pulled him back, out of the shop.
"Leave it," she said. "Did you get the number?"
"Yeah. It's 1356."
A vampire and a slayer...
"Slayer," Spike said to her back while she was scanning the room for
a place to sleep. "Yeah?"
"Promise not to stake me while I'm sleeping."
"One snore and you're dust." Buffy replied. She stood in the corner
the furthest away from Spike. There she lay down on her side on the sandy,
uneven stone floor, and tried not to feel the cold of the morning, or the
hardness of her bed.
"I'm a vampire. We don't snore."
Forced to work together...
Now it was Buffy's turn to be astonished. "What? You had the same dream?"
The thought of Spike and Angel in each other's arms blocked out all her
other thoughts. She gasped.
"Well, yeah. I don't think it was exactly the same dream, but the words…
in my dream Dru was saying them. She was saying…" he struggled to remember
exactly. "To go home we have to…"
"Cross enemy lines."
"Yeah, yeah, that's it." Spike said. "Follow the stars beyond enemy
lines, till the sun and the moon meet—"
"Merge." Buffy stated.
"Merge. And burn a hole into time."
(...)
"We will find a way out of here, you know," he said between sips. She
wasn't sure if he was talking to himself or to her. His words were spoken
with confidence though and managed to reassure her a little. "Yeah, I know,"
she said.
(...)
"Now that we know the date," he continued, "we could try to find out
which wars are going on and, well, move behind enemy lines. Might be a
step on the way home."
"Far too optimistic," Buffy thought. She replied incredulously: "You
want us to what, purposely go into a Middle Age war zone?"
"Can't as be as bad as a twentieth century one. And I've seen those.
'Sides, it's the only possibility I can think of. Got any better ideas,
Slayer?"
She had to admit that she didn't. "Let's just go eat," she said dejectedly.
(...)
"I don't understand you." Buffy said, gently freeing her sleeve from
the girl's hand.
The girl closed her eyes and muttered a few words that sounded different
from the Italian Buffy had heard around her all day. Then the little one
spoke again. "You seek the Slayer."
To find their way home...
There Spike was, despite the chains that bound him doing an admirable
job of dodging the blows of a vampire in a black robe. Another vamp lay
knocked out at their feet. Wow, Buffy thought. "He really can fight. Even
with chains on."
(...)
"What's happening?" Spike asked. He was lying with his back towards
the action and trashed his legs some more in an attempt to get free.
"Lie still." Buffy told him, as she knelt by his side and started to
undo the chains.
"Buffy? How did you know? Why did you…?"
"Why did I come?" Buffy asked, roughly freeing his hands and legs.
She put out her hand and helped him up, and as he stood facing her, he
said softly, "Yeah."
Buffy avoided the gaze of his blue eyes, questioning her in wonder
and happiness. "I don't know," she said off-handedly. "I heard things were
wrong, and I didn't think I could just leave you to get, well, buried."
Spike was still staring at her. He had never thought she'd find out
about his predicament, but he had even less expected her to come and get
him out of it if she did find out. And here she was, and she'd done both.
"Thanks," he said earnestly, while trying to restrain the emotion in
his voice. He felt like lifting her chin, making her eyes meet his, and
kissing her until the world ended, but he thought she probably wouldn't
be charmed, so he didn't. And as for worlds ending…
"We need to get out of here." Spike said urgently.
(...)
Buffy had wrapped her arms around Spike's middle and held on for dear
life at first, but as the horse had settled into a more even trot after
a while, she relaxed a bit. She leant her head against Spike's back and
sighed, tired as hell, but content with the feeling of having him close,
and the knowledge that he was still there with her. "Slayer?" Spike at
last broke the mix of silence and clattering hoofs on the road.
"Hm?"
"Whaddaya say we stick together for a while now?"
"I say yes." Buffy smiled.
June's
"Time Out Of Mind"
Where time changes everything.