Spoilers: Up to the Gift.
Feedback: Send to magarettt@aol.com.
A/N: The story-within-the-story is based on something by Ray Bradbury. I don't remember the title or much of the plot, but the idea is taken from it.
Faithless, Part One
After Dawn walked down the stairs and saw the dead body of her sister, after she saw the broken bones and splattered blood, after she saw Spike's shaking fingers cover his shell-shocked face, her real tears started. They weren't well-up-in-your-eyes-I-think-I-might-cry water droplets. They weren't even big-salty-get-your-shirt-wet ones. These tears came out as dripping sweat and blood. Dawn saw the scene and wept those real tears, creeping like acid out of a broken heart and gushing down her cheeks uninhibited.
She'd been crying a lot lately. Sometimes it was out of fear, like when Glory/Ben casually held a jagged piece of glass near her throat; other times because of anger, like when Spike broke into the Magic Box and they discovered what she really was; and, within the last few hours, out of pain. The intense physicality of the pain had made her cry, but it had also helped her to feel better. Being injured means you're still alive, Dawn had reasoned. It means that there is still time to be rescued, a couple more minutes before the world ends. Pain keeps your brain from thinking about what really hurts: the grief.
Fifty years from now, a woman falls in love and marries an astronaut. He's brave, strong, and an excellent kisser; they love each other to distraction. He loves space, too, and once a month goes on a mission of exploration that lasts a few days.
But now she wasn't able to concentrate on any physical sensation -- the tears, the slashes across her stomach, the rope burns on her wrists, the dried blood crusted on her feet. Her mind was fixated on that final speech followed by that graceful dive.
It was strange to think that she had pretty much known this was going to happen. Everyone in the Scooby gang had admitted they expected to die tonight. Yeah, they had all tried to prevent it, but how hard can you push against the tide of the inevitable? Dawn herself had been poked and prodded for hours by Glory, who continuously told the girl that her Slayer sister was going to kick it. So she wasn't surprised or especially shocked when she saw that flash across Buffy's face. Something had changed in those clear green eyes right before the jump.
She looked at Buffy's body. An unfamiliar urge to touch it made Dawn itch with longing. They hadn't really been a hugging family. After Mom had died, it had been ok to give/receive the odd embrace, but that practice had soon faded away. The closest the sisters had gotten to giving comfort through physical contact was when Buffy shoved Dawn behind her for the younger's protection. Dawn remembered that during one fight, as she was staring at Buffy's back, she had noticed the tag of the Slayer's t-shirt sticking out. It had been kind of funny: Buffy, violently and efficiently swinging an axe, dressed in her kicking-ass clothes that proclaimed, "Made in Taiwan."
He comes home after his trips and tells her about the wonderful things he has seen: black holes, birthing stars, whirling purple clouds of light. She loves to hear him talk. They look at the night sky together, pointing out constellations and planets, making wishes on shooting stars.
And now she, the Key to unlock dimensional walls, was standing in downtown Sunnydale beside a tower built by a dozen brain-sucked ambiguities and some hobbits, stupidly dwelling on arcane memories she normally wouldn't have considered for more than two seconds.
It hurt to breathe. Buffy . . .
She wanted desperately to be unconscious and unable to think. Dawn was unlucky in that she was fourteen and had already developed one of those brains that are so introspective and contemplative, it's sadly poetic. Her mind had the annoying capability of taking in a scene, such as this one, and describing to her in magnificently sardonic prose the beauty and anguish that lie within. For some reason, the monks had given her a penchant for Pound's cantos and an abiding craving to create. Since she didn't dare to draw after learning of her mother's death during art class, Dawn had turned to writing in her diary almost endlessly. Buffy never let her out of the house, anyway. Anne Frank-esque, Dawn had first written about boys and homework; but now, her entries were slowly becoming reflective of what she was truly thinking. Lately, that had been all kinds of questions about life and death.
There had been lots of questions about death.
Sometimes they would make up silly poems to get each other to laugh. Other times she would softly sing until both of them fell asleep in the grass, under the weak light of the moon.
Dawn jerked her head to the right so that she was no longer looking at Buffy. The crazy thought that it wasn't healthy to stare at a dead body occurred to her, and she giggled uncontrollably for a half a minute. She supposed some counselor somewhere had bestowed that piece of advice on her. Whoever had said it must not hang around vampires too often. Dawn saw dead bodies all the time: Spike, of course; she glimpsed Angel occasionally; she had even kissed one on her first date! There were lots of dead bodies in Sunnydale, all walking around and doing their faux-living and taking unnecessary breaths, night after night . . . she realized with a jolt that Buffy was now a dead body, an unanimated lifeless corpse, and she gagged. She threw up the little bit of food she had eaten in the last day, then dry heaved for a while until her knees buckled and she fell exhausted to the ground.
As she sat in the dirt and gravel, Dawn acknowledged somewhat grimly that she had aged five years in the last eight hours, plus an extra two or three since she had walked down the steps from the tower. Her mind was working on over-drive, trying to assimilate the newfound knowledge that comes with aging. Dozens of things that are supposed to become clearer with years suddenly made sense to her. Dawn understood loneliness now, something most people don't really know about until they leave home. She understood the draw of alcohol, and why there are so many smokers. I need a cigarette. Hell, she finally understood Russian literature.
When they wake up, covered in dew and pale twilight, he tells stories of how everything came to be in existence. She falls in love again every morning.
She snorted softly, which petered out into a pathetic sniffle. Her bleary eyes searched around for a rock. If she hit herself hard enough, maybe the blow would work like a hard pinch and bring her mind out of the nightmare. She crawled over to Spike. Next to him was a nice brick.
"Oh God!" she heard him faintly moan. "Oh God!"
She leaned back on her haunches and blinked several times. What? What? Looking around wildly, she fervently hoped that her favorite vampire was standing somewhere else, kicking loose stones with his Doc Martens and clicking his Zippo open and shut, and this bundle of black leather and bleach was an imposter. It was completely beyond Dawn's concept of the world to accept Spike acting like he was now. He was kneeling, holding his head in his hands, and looking so absolutely broken that she felt dizzy. He looked so different, so out of character, and Dawn was scared. She wanted him to stand up, light a cigarette, tilt his head at her and say, "C'mon, Bit. Let's get you home to Big Sis." His eyes would dance with joy when he referred to Buffy, and he'd tug Dawn back to Casa de Summers, planning what he'd say to the Slayer all the way there.
Dawn turned to shoot a glance at Buffy's dead form and knew that could never, never happen again.
Spike was shaking, and his lungs kept taking in deep gasping sobs of air that lifted his shoulders for a few seconds until the weight of his arms and grief pulled them down again. The leather duster hung limply around him. It was torn on the right sleeve; Dawn wondered if that had happened from his fall or from the fight. She looked more closely at his arms and head, trying to discern if he was badly hurt. Physically hurt. Yeah, he was. Parts of his skull were visible under the white hair. Deep red rivulets streamed down his head to splash the ground.
The worst thing was that she understood he didn't even notice. He had no idea how profusely he was bleeding, didn't know his skull was bashed in, wasn't cognizant that she was anywhere in the vicinity of him. Spike was alone with his pleas and the dead body of Buffy, and Dawn understood that because she was alone, too.
But on the nights when he is not at home, the woman stays inside. She draws the curtains tightly closed and refuses to look heavenward. She's afraid that the mission will fail, and she'll not be able to look at the sky when the planet that caused his death is in close rotation to the earth.
"Oh God!" he whispered, and slowly let his shaking hands fall to rest against the rough cement. His eyelids remained closed. Dawn saw scarlet-tinged tear tracks etched over the pale skin. He whimpered softly, his forehead moving to touch the ground. It was a strangely reverent action. Spike --Master Vampire, Slayer of Slayers, the Big Bad -- lie beaten and broken, mourning the loss of his love, praying to an unknown god.
Buffy . . .
"Oh God!" he ground out.
His pleadings were worse than tears, Dawn thought vaguely. Who ever heard a vampire pray? Yet here in front of her was the shattered heart and body of one of the most vicious murderers the world had ever know, begging any deity who might listen to undo death. And it was wrong to think of him like that. It sounded quaintly melodramatic, and though Dawn loved drama, and causing drama, she knew it wasn't correct to call Spike a vicious murderer. He wasn't, not anymore. Who told stories for hours simply on the chance that she might tell him more about what Buffy thought of him? Hadn't he showed her the Initiative caves to keep her mind off Glory? How many times had he protected her from danger? How many stupid nicknames did he have for her? She knew that he had killed thousands, most of the deaths painful and horrifying for the victims, but she herself had no right to call him a killer.
Years pass. Stars die. New galaxies are born.
Dawn sighed. Long, painful minutes went by. The blood had stopped flowing from Spike's head, but he still looked like death. He had been in the same position for a while now: on his knees, palms flat on the pavement, with his forehead pressed down in the dirt and blood.
Prostrate, Dawn thought. He's lying there prostrate.
Glancing down at her ragged, bloody hands, --Live. For me. -- she made a decision, the first important decision she had ever made on her own. She took once last gaze at Buffy, nodded twice, and finally stopped crying. She paused for a moment, contemplating the best way to carry out what she knew her sister would have wanted and what she herself knew needed to be done. Her shoulders squared themselves and her lungs pulled in a deep gulp of air. Then, Dawn's hands timidly reached out and came to rest on the upper arms of Spike. Shaking him gently several times, she whispered, "Spike, Spike, get up. Let's go home."
He didn't respond for a moment, except to stop moaning. A full minute went by before he slowly lifted his head, bringing his eyes up to look at the little girl kneeling in the wreckage with him. She looked into his face and moved her hands up to brush the dust off his forehead. Tears continued to course down his cheeks. He stared over her head at the group of five now surrounding Buffy's body, then finally shifted his eyes down so that Dawn was in his line of vision.
Then the man receives an assignment to go on an especially exciting trip. It's an exploration of a star no one has been to before. He suits up, kisses his wife, and blasts off.
Heavy drops of water and plasma clung to his eyelashes. He didn't raise a hand to wipe the moisture away. He simply kneeled there, looking rather blindly at her sister, and let his head loll all the way back, face upturned to the slowly fading darkness of the sky. Dawn thought he mumbled something, but then he moved to stare at her again.
Three days later, the woman is informed of her husband's death.
She gasped. His eyes, his eyes. Dawn lost her breath at their beauty. They were flashing, inescapable, unfathomable fires. Deep golds, vibrant blues, impossible purples, and burning reds all flew out of the depths to create a sort of mind-numbingly intense glow. Clouded black swirled in the centers: cirrus clouds across a star-filled night. They held anger, exhaustion, love, and death; they brimmed with sadness and compassion. Maintaining eye contact with him was like staring at the sun.
His spaceship had lost an engine. It burst into flames when he made an emergency landing on the exploration site.
Dawn was certain that no one, ever, had had eyes like that before. She felt him take her small hands in his still-shaking ones, but wasn't able to look away from his gaze to watch the action. "We should go home," she heard herself say. The words came out firmly and evenly, sounding convincingly self-assured, although she felt like reading The Bell Jar and then making use of that brick she had spotted earlier.
He nodded, then blinked, turning his blazing eyes away from her. "I know, Platelet," he said quietly. Dropping his head to examine the ground, he coughed. "Daylight's comin'."
He stood abruptly, pulling Dawn with him.
The woman never looked at the sun again.
They began the walk back to the house.
TBC