The Road Home
By: Little Bird
Completed: 24 October 2008
Disclaimer: No infringement intended: I own none of Joss Whedon's characters and I'm not making any money. I do own my original characters, however, so taking them to play requires credit. Hint, hint.
Spoilers and Notes: Spoilers for ALL of Buffy. This picks up directly after Chosen and assumes Angel (the series) does not exist. Completely AU.
This is a dark fic. I wrote this long ago and re-reading it now, I can't say I'm as thrilled with it as I once was. But I do like the ending still.
Act I
Only terror remained after becoming dust. That bright emotion gave the vampire no solace, just proof of continued existence. The sun surging through him had felt like a tangible manifestation of his night spent holding her: radiant, miraculous and frightening beyond his ability to reconcile. In the end, he had shown her the joy, which lasted until she fled at his insistence, but after that, it burned.
Until he fell face down in the dirt and a new kind of burning began. Hot and relentless in its torment, the cracked surface seared his skin as if exacting a long plotted scheme for vengeance. Surely he would sizzle like a worm on Los Angeles blacktop. But Spike just lay there.
His arrival in Hell did not surprise the former un-dead. In a time past, he would have thought it well deserve and even counted upon it. Now, however, Spike had other considerations. Refusing to accept the harassment of being cooked, he squatted in his mind like a transient guarding a dumpstered can of refried beans. Not much, but it was his. Had he succeeded? Spike remembered his dusting well enough to be completely sure of his own demise, but had he actually achieved anything by it? Or would it simply be a matter of time before he marched through the Hellmouth to Earth yet again on the wrong side of the war.
"I love you."
"No you don't..." What an moronic thing to say. Maybe she did not, but just the "Thank you," would have been apposite. But apposite and Spike were seldom synonymous.
'Can't ignore Hell, it's in my head too. Balls!' Spike thought.
"Hey asshole! You're holding up the line!" Some hick with a not quite Southern accent made him open his eyes. But that proved ill advised. Spike had not endured direct sunlight since his afternoon while using the Gem of Amara in pursuit of Buffy.
He screamed. Not a bad-ass, manly scream but wordless shrieking falsetto born of true pain and suffering. The intensity of the light forswore any image that might have formed in the brief moment his eyes had been open. Now he only knew white and unyielding noise.
"Fine, you stay there and rot, you miserable fuck. I'm going ahead of you." The nasally and cloying voice moved and Spike felt the unceremonious scrape of a cowboy boot across his sunburned ass as the man stepped over his body.
"Like hell you are!" Spike did not need to see the shit-kicker to seize him by the leg and hurl him to the ground. Fists seeking retribution for more grievances than Spike could hold in his mind at one time, the man's face became mush beneath him. The souled-vampire had no need to see the man for this job. Human anatomy had not changed much since he died the first time.
Spike did not give a flying sack of horse shit anymore. He was in Hell. The whole soul thing meant precisely squat. Here it presented a liability rather than an asset. He broke the man's jaw on one side and then the other. Deciding to knock his teeth out, Spike tried to grab the git by his hair, but he crumpled a Stetson instead. Grinning blindly, he jammed the cowboy hat on his head and felt enough shade to risk opening his eyes. Fangs rammed painfully through his gum line at the sight of fresh blood. He responded without hesitation to his ravenous hunger and drained the hick dry.
Spike licked his fangs and wiped his mouth on his singed and blistering wrist. More human thoughts returned to his brain as he hunched over the exsanguinated hulk. Who knew humans in Hell had blood? The hot wind sent vicious and biting rock chips into vulnerable flesh riveting Spike's attention to more practical concerns. The vampire growled and began undressing the body.
Fortunately for Spike, the hick's family had had the decency to bury him in a respectable business suit. It could have easily been different: a torn flannel and crusty jeans with the crotch scratched out, for example. The sunburned vampire tried to wriggle his toes away from the hot playa and decided that even the tasteless, over-done cowboy boots were preferable to burned feet. They might fit.
"Well," Spike said aloud, "I could wander around naked or look like a model for Men's Warehouse." He buttoned up the shirt.
"Too bad," French accent, rough neighborhood of Paris, early 1900's.
Surprise made Spike's fangs retreat with the usual sting and he looked up for the first time. Ahead of him, a single file line disappeared into the distance. To either side of the line, a perfectly flat desert extended to the horizon without variation. It vibrated in the heat. Some sand blew in little dust devils, but no hills, valleys or even rocks decorated the bleakness. Behind him, the line looked much as it did ahead: dejected people shifting their feet, kicking the dirt and not talking. The ones closest to him watched with discomfited interest.
The woman addressing him wore a knife rent bodice caked in blood and what smelled like sewage with part of a feather boa hanging off one shoulder. Her mini skirt failed to cover her ass and ripped fish-net stockings perched over broken off heels. "I was enjoying the view," she told him.
"Really," he drawled as he considered the broad for a moment. "Wanna be next? He was tasty."
She laughed, "I wouldn't if I were you. The line never moves by the way. Guess he didn't understand that. Rumor has it the badly behaved ones go down. "
"Pet, I'm a demon and I've got nothing to lose. The next level down in Hell doesn't scare me." Spike jerked on the pants. He left the sad bastard his undies because what lay beneath them was just too repulsive.
"Mmm, you must have just arrived. If you had nothing to lose, you wouldn't be here." She looked amused.
"I'm in Hell, what more is there to it?"
"No butter-nuts, this is Purgatory."
"Come again? Having trouble, 'cause of the accent."
"Pur-ga-tor-y," the whore stretched out the syllables as if that would be helpful.
Spike lowered his gaze to the body. "You mean I had a chance..."
"Yes."
The hick's suit jacket hung from Spike's fingers for a moment before the wind took it. It sailed briefly before tumbling along to finally settle in a pathetic puddle of shapeless dusty fabric.
"Bollocks." The nearly naked body began splitting in the heat.
One hundred and sixty two years later, by his best estimate, Spike woke up naked on a chilling marble floor.
His groan dissipated into the space around him. The room was enormous and empty. Above him hovered a high painted ceiling, but, when he turned his head the walls were father away than his eyes could see. The end of vision was a blur of color where the floor met the ceiling making a dark line at the horizon; like standing on a beach with the ocean stretching away ad infinitum. No columns supported the vast ceiling, much the way the sky hung above Earth without assistance. No sound reached his ears and the air did not move.
He tried to rise, but an invisible force held him tightly against the floor from the shoulders down. All of his muscles worked, but he could not move them from their current position. At first the scenes above him, painted in that gaudy and glorious Renaissance style, were unfamiliar. Meaning dawned slowly for Spike, though. His every moment from conception forward looked down on him in morbidly bright, gilded detail complete with plump cherubs and their sarcastic harps in a seemingly endless spiral.
Directly overhead, his sheet-strewn parents were in the process of making him amid a tangle of vines and scroll work. The sky in which they floated curled its black tendrils around their mattress of night-dark clouds. The artist, unfortunately for Spike, spared not the slightest detail. Their fluffy faces appeared sweaty from exertion. His mother's damp hair curled over the pillows spilling off the edges of the clouds. His father held her securely by the back of her neck and around the waist. Spike wished more sheets had been present for the event.
The dead vampire wanted to rub his eyes, but no attempt to move his arms would allow such a comfort. After a vigorous blinking, Spike came to an unsettling realization. The ceiling turned in a slow, queasy whorl. Just to his right, the focal point of the creepily swirling paintings looked like a dark whirlpool in an angry ocean. To Spike's dismay, one of the cherubs had sprouted impractically long fangs and was cheerfully beating its smirking neighbor with a shiny gold harp.
How could a painting giggle, let alone visit violence? The paint squished and smeared with the maniacal babies' movements as if wet.
Then the damn thing spoke to him, "To each a purple flight of Justice after the March of Days?" Mad laughter ensued as the cherub with demon-worthy canines clocked its companion in the head to send a flutter of snickering feathers ass over teakettle into the vortex.
"I thought I was sane." Spike muttered to himself.
"Again the seeing, just take the walk!" The cherub gave him a terrifying smile and brandished the harp in his direction. Its fangs dripped drool.
"Damn." He struggled against his invisible bonds uncomfortably to no real effect. The vampire began to have fond memories of the line in the desert with its endless stream of broiling sun and frozen nights. The mad cherub growled at him as if it could hear his thoughts. Spike stopped thinking obediently. It scoffed and stomped across its fluffy cloud on the edge of the dark void. Fat should not jiggle on a flat plane. Profoundly disturbed, he watched while the appalling winged baby take hold of a thick gold chain. It's downy little wings stood out stiffly as it yanked with all its might.
The vortex began to suck the first painting slowly into it.
The vampire watched deed after bloody deed, reliving his rather sad existence through a mushy fog that gibbered incessantly at him. Spike's sense of time evaporated. Most of the foggy ramblings were an unrelenting soliloquy on the very popular topic of guilt. It never shut up. The taunting and senseless ramblings of the maladjusted cherub were no help at all. The damned prat did every unspeakable thing with the harp that did not involve music.
The paintings oozed into the vortex even when he lost consciousness to sleep from either boredom or exhaustion. They slimed through his dreams unceasingly so he had difficulty determining the difference between sleeping and waking. Eventually the distinction vanished entirely. Eternity stretched away un-tabulated and it did not take long for resignation to set in. Madness took William the Bloody completely and he did not care.
When Buffy, with a nimbus blazing, glittering and throwing the light, entered his private parade of images the monologue of guilt became the deafening jeers of a mighty crowd. But by that time any meaning in the words was long lost. Only that vague sentiment remained, any other emotions were lost to the cotton-candy non-sequitur mess that was Spike's brain.
He woke with a yell. Absolute quiet reigned in his head and his voice faded quickly into the ether. Above him the paintings had stopped their slither into oblivion. The vampire's unnecessary breath halted.
The emissary of madness, the grotesque cherub, was for once, appropriately frozen in place. It gestured emphatically with its harp toward the painting. Buffy's nimbus caught the unnatural light and rainbows skittered around him on the floor as if the bright shafts radiating from her head were made of crystal. The rainbows even danced on the face of his painted self.
This day had embedded itself within his brain more deeply than any chip. And it would always hurt, never to be removed. The green and white tiles had been smooth and cool beneath his hand and the bruises had begun rising immediately where his skin had made harsh contact. Behind him, the plastic wallpaper had soaked quickly with his cold sweat. Her grey bathrobe, worn but comforting and soft, gaped obscenely. Rapidly darkening splotches and bright scrapes marred her violated posture and betrayed expression. He could still feel the fabric as he put his fingerprints into her shoulders. His longing for her body heat returned as he relived the creaking of her wrist bones when he had trapped her under his weight. The scent of her fear mingled with the dirt in her hair hung like an invisible fog in the wall-less room. It was as intoxicating to the dead vampire now as it had been then, but the result was certainly different.
Spike turned his head while he panted away dry heaves thankful there was nothing in his stomach to expel. Unable to avoid looking back at the painting, Spike noticed a change in his depiction. Epiphany on the face of his image where he had landed after Buffy launched him, the paint behind his head was a soft and sun-colored contrasting with the dull, patterned wallpaper. Some of the rainbows Buffy threw stuck like snowflakes to his nimbus making it sparkle like a weaker version of hers.
He had never questioned why all the paintings of Buffy showed her with a brilliant nimbus: she was the Slayer. But why would a soulless vampire at the single worst moment of his entire not-life suddenly sprout one? It was beautiful and it reminded him of the bobble Buffy had given him which had brought him here. He still had the brand on his chest from where it had incinerated his previous body.
The Slayer herself lay sprawled on her bathroom floor. The tears on her face, while paused in motion, glistened as if really wet. Spike remembered seeing treachery and hurt. But only now did he see the disappointment. She had, probably on some unconscious level, hoped he had grown beyond a soul-less, evil, thing through loving her. That had to be why she had not just sent him sailing across the room in the first place. Rather, she had wanted to believe he would actually hear her cries instead of being forced to rely on her Slayer strength to protect herself. Call Montresor.
"Can't hear you, love!" Spike whispered to her.
(His lack of soul had deafened him. Or was that just the excuse of a weak man? A true monster. So why the nimbus?)
"Lightening blinded you. You were dazed, stunned. Couldn't hear, couldn't see. White covering your eyes, clouds in your ears, crashing and rolling. Rumbling, whispering: go to Hell." Twisted gold staves pounded on the marble floor which boomed in response like a massive bell.
Spike flopped sloppily onto his stomach using all his strength to push his torso off the marble. Three blue-robed creatures stood staring down at him. Their completely hairless skin was perfectly paper-white and serpentine vertical green eyes, like emeralds, flashed at him catching light where there was none.
"Huh?" Spike's voice cracked and he wiggled to his knees, queasy. Muscles of jelly would not allow him more, even without the invisible straight-jacket.
"After the blindness faded, and the world again assaulted your ears, you knew this moment. It is an unexpected air current." Spike could not determine the gender of any of the beings and the lumpy blue robes gave no hints either.
"Doesn't make sense." He swallowed. "I have gone to Hell for more things than just this."
The three looked at each other, "This is not a Hell Dimension."
"Not Hell. Then where?"
"A place in between. Purgatory. You were wondering about the nimbus, just now. It is what brought us here. You have shown us, colorful, days up till now and we allowed you here so we must send you forward. Do you have anything to say?"
"Yeah, I fell in love. I am in love. And I went to get my soul back, died saving the world. Bloody well oughta count for something."
"Mmm." They nodded like they were a hive mind.
"Yeah." Spike's diaphragm lacked the strength to emphasize his conviction and his muscles twitched with their fatigue, but he held their gazes anyway.
"We will consider your testimony." They disappeared.