Running, the Musical
Created on 5/22/12
Inspired by secooper87's Adventures of a Line-Hopper series.
She suddenly broke off the kiss, a look of confused horror on her face. Spike stared at her, too shocked by what had just happened to react. By the time he got his thoughts back in order, she had already taken off, her feet barely connecting with the ground, her flight fueled by her unstable, unbearable emotions.
She ran without thinking, letting her instincts guide her steps. She ran past people singing and dancing to their own sorrows or joys, their words drowned out by the voices clamoring in her head, crying to be free, to have their chance to burst out in song. But she bit her lip, forced the voices away, and focused on running, ignoring the sharp pain that came with every other step.
The hard pavement was littered with broken glass, and she felt a shiver of horror roll down her spine when she felt something shift into dust under her foot, and saw, out of the corner of her eye, a scrap of tattered, charred cloth that had once been a shirt.
But she blocked the horrifying image from her mind before she could fully comprehend its implications, and kept running, moving so quickly that all who saw her pass hardly knew what they had seen.
Who was that girl, running as if all the demons of hell gave chase? Why was she only wearing one shoe, and why did her eyes seem so old, and so, so sad?
But she didn't stop to answer to answer, didn't stop to explain that she had once been happy, oh, so happy. Didn't stop to explain that her friends had thought she was in trouble, and had brought her back. Torn her out of her happiness, torn her out of her heaven.
So she ran.
She didn't stop until she could go no further, and by then, she was more than halfway across town. Her lungs were on fire. Her legs ached and felt as heavy as lead. The voices in her head were deafening. She didn't think she'd be able to hold them back for much longer.
Her breathing coming in ragged gasps, she limped over to a wall and leaned against it for a moment, catching her breath, before she slowly slid to the ground. That was when she realized that she was missing a shoe. Her sneaker had somehow fallen off. She froze when she noticed that the shoe she was still wearing was blackened and burnt. She could see through to her sock in some places. That explained it.
And now that she thought about it, all of her clothes—which had changed again, magically, from a red shirt and jeans, to what she had been wearing earlier while training with Giles, a white tank top and black sweats—were singed and reeked horribly of smoke. Her skin was bright red and hot to the touch, like sunburn. She swallowed as she realized how close she had come to dying. Again.
And then, she realized how ridiculous it was for her to have left behind a shoe, right after kissing Spike. She scoffed bitterly. Some Cinderella she made. Cinders? Yes. Princess in need of rescuing from an evil family?
…
She closed her eyes and sighed when she realized that she couldn't automatically answer that with a 'no'.
They weren't evil. They hadn't meant to hurt her. They'd thought they were helping her. It wasn't their fault; they had no way of knowing where she was…
But no matter how many times she told herself this, she never quite managed to convince herself. She didn't know a lot about magic, but she knew that it was possible to speak with the dead. Why hadn't they held a séance, or whatever it was called, and asked if she was happy or not first? Could they be anymore selfish?
She slowly opened her eyes and quickly blinked away the tears that wanted to fall. She wiped her face with a hand—and then frowned when she saw that it was covered in soot. Now she probably had a black streak across her face. It took her a moment to realize that she really didn't care, lowered her hand again, and wrapped her arms across her chest.
She wondered briefly if she was being selfish for wanting to still be dead, for wanting to be happy again. Because she wasn't—happy, that is…It seemed impossible to be happy here—here, where she was a killer, forced to spend her nights murdering people. For the good of the world.
For the good of the world, she had sacrificed her life. For the good of the world, she had been rewarded.
But now? This wasn't supposed to have happened. It shouldn't have happened.
She'd moved on. She'd left behind this life of pain and blood and death, and moved onto something greater. Something…brighter.
She no longer belonged here. This was no longer her world. It belonged to them, to Spike, and Willow, and Giles, and all the other Scoobies. It belonged to Angel and Cordie, and Wesley, and Faith, and whatever other poor girl had been Chosen to lead the life of a Slayer with her death. It belonged to them all, to those strangers walking past her now, too caught up in their own pain to notice hers. It belonged to them, but not her. Not anymore.
Abruptly she shook her head, trying to rid it of the depressing thoughts as best she could, and focused her eyes instead on her foot, which, she had just noticed, really, really hurt. Now that the adrenaline had left most of her blood, feeling was returning.
She blew out a calming breath that really didn't help, and pulled her foot up across her other leg so that she could assess the damage. The sock she'd been wearing was barely hanging on anymore; only the elastic part around her ankle remained undamaged. The rest of it—now black and filthy—had been torn to shreds from the rough ground she'd been running over. Dried blood also coated the bottom of her foot.
She scowled in irritation and pulled the sock the rest of the way off, being careful not to let it brush any of painful scrapes that now covered the bottom of her foot. She was about to throw it away, then thought better of it, and used the clean part of it to gingerly wipe away the worst of the blood, dirt and gravel.
She bit her lip when enough of the grime had cleared away enough for her to see the long cut that ran the length of her foot from her big toe to her heel. How had she not noticed it before?
It was bleeding, but not badly. From the amount of dried blood on her foot, though, she knew it had been bleeding pretty badly earlier. It didn't seem too deep, but still, a cut that big could easily get infected, even with her superior immune system.
She remembered—vaguely—talking about stress in Health class, on one of those rare occasions when she'd been awake enough to pay attention. They'd said that stress affected your immune system. She would have to find that teacher—what had been her name?—and apologize for never paying attention before…As long as she was still alive. Teachers didn't really last that long when the school was directly over a Hellmouth.
She knew that with the stress she'd been facing since she got back—adjusting to life, waking up in a coffin, having to deal with the aftermath of that—the nightmares it caused, which she didn't think she'd really ever get over—finding out that she didn't have any money, finding out that her friends had taken over her house and spent all of her money, trying to act normal so they didn't notice; trying to act like nothing had happened, and then trying to convince them to stop worrying about her, which only made them worry more, trying to fight the urge to just curl up in a ball under the covers and never come out again, to sleep away forever—yeah, it wouldn't be hard to get sick. It was really just a matter of time.
She closed her eyes tightly, imagining how horrible it would be to have to go to a hospital. Would they even let her leave? Wasn't she legally dead? What did their records say? Didn't anyone besides the Scoobies even know she'd died? She'd never thought to ask about her dad. Did he know she'd died?
She suddenly made her mind up to call him when she got back home. It no longer mattered that he was living with his secretary. Why did it matter, anyway? He was family, the only real family she and Dawn had left. Poor Dawn, she'd gone through so much. Too much.
Losing her father through divorce. Having to move to an entirely new school. Losing her mother, and then her sister, in the same year, even, and now that she was back, she hardly ever saw Dawn at all. She slept almost the entire day away—oh, how she wished she could never wake up—spent her nights patrolling the streets and graveyards, and when Dawn was there, she became so over-protective that she was starting to push her away, however unintentionally.
Her interaction with her friends was nonexistent at worst and distant at best. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, she would break off suddenly and stare past them, caught up in her thoughts, her eyes glazed and unseeing as she struggled to remember something concrete about where she had been, the silence stretching so long that the others didn't know what to say. When she finally gave up the futile effort, she would blink, and continue as if nothing had happened.
It was only in her dreams that she was able to grasp some sense of her heaven. The images were always blurry, and hard to remember, but she knew that the color red was important.
…As important as the strange mixture of feelings she felt for Spike.
Sighing again, she looked once more at the cut on her foot, then at what was left of the sock, which was sitting on the ground next to her, and picked it up. She clenched her jaw, pressed the cleanest part of it around her foot where the cut was, then tied it tightly so that—hopefully—no dirt or germs could get in it. She would not go to a hospital. She would fight tooth and nail. And she would win. They'd already put her though enough. They could not make her go into one of those hell holes.
Scowling as she imagined her friends trying to drag her to the hospital, she pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, leaning further into the wall, closing her eyes again in sudden tiredness. The voices were back, and she no longer had the energy to fight them. She was going to have to sing.
The words began low, as a barely audibly whisper that just barely graced her lips. "Take a chance? No way. That would be too simple; Logic has no place for me, So instead I run. Run from my uncertainties, Flee from my despair, Hold my feeling's tight and close, Can't let hope get too far."
She pressed herself farther into the wall, then scooched sideways so that she could lean against the corner where it went farther into the street. Her words were once again barely whispered, full of fear and pain. "Can't understand what's happened here, Why is everything so wrong? Darkness here, and darkness there, Where has the day's light gone?"
The darkness seemed to close in on her huddled form, the shadows reaching for her with clawed fingers, the wind trailing along her skin, raising goosebumps as she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force the suffocating memory of her coffin away as she gasped out the words to the song.
"Take a chance? No way. That would be too simple, Logic has no place for me, So instead I run, Run from my uncertainties, Flee from my despair, Hold my feeling tight and close, Don't let hope get too far."
Shuddering, she forced herself to her feet and stumbled away from where she had been sitting, away from the walls pressing against her skin, suddenly and unbearably claustrophobic. She limped back toward the road and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to control her breathing. "Can't understand what's happened here, Why is everything so wrong? Darkness here, and darkness there, Where has the day's light gone?"
A car suddenly rushed past her in a blaze of light and sound, startling her so much that she fell backwards, scraping her hands on the rough sidewalk.
Her heart pounding, aching with the sudden need to be near someone, she retreated from the road and forced herself to move in the direction she had last seen people.
She could see fires burning in the streets, small, contained fires in big metal drums. They were the same kind she'd huddled around with the other street-kids all those years ago when she had run away to LA. That had been before she had gotten her job at the diner, of course. But it had been bad.
She reached where most of the fires were burning, but to her dismay, the streets were empty, as if everyone had cleared out. She was alone in the night. A lump formed in her throat, making it hard to breathe as she tried to hold back her tears once again. This time they fell, rolling down her cheeks, seemingly without end.
It was the first time she had cried since she had gotten back. So many times she'd been close. And now that it had started, she couldn't stop. But somehow, though her sobs, she still managed to voice the words to the song of her heart, telling of her desperate loneliness. "Can't breathe, so lost in the dark, Alone in my despair, the only one, the Chosen One, No one to turn to, so I run!"
The darkness seemed to lunge toward her, and with a gasp, she took off, her only thought to get away, to get back to the Bronze where her friends were waiting for her, to get back to the relative safety of her home. But her tears blinded her, and she stumbled though the streets blindly, taking wrong turns and passing others until she found herself in an alley that didn't let out.
"Nowhere left to run, Trapped at a dead end, nowhere left to turn, So I stand, cornered." Her words were whispered, more to herself than anything. A shadow lurched wildly on the wall of the alley, and she shrank back, before she realized that it was her own shadow, thrown and twisted by the fire burning just a few feet away.
She wiped her eyes roughly and swallowed a deep breath of air, trying to settle her pounding heart as she gathered her courage. Then she spun around, facing the mouth of the alley, and shouted a challenge to the night, trying to mask her fear with a cold determination that she didn't feel. "You won't take me down, I don't need light to see that, So throw at me all you've got, And I'll beat you back again!"
As if to answer her challenge, something shifted in the air. The shadows, which before had seemed to reach for her, drew back, as if afraid. The wind grew silent, and for a moment, there was stillness, broken only by the pounding of her heart.
That was when she heard it.
The sound.
The sound that was as old as it was new, that whooshing, rattling sound that was almost impossible to describe, and seemed to reverberate from the very essence of the world around her.
She knew that sound.
She staggered backwards a step when the blue box began to materialize, fading into existence with the flash of the lantern on its top. Then the sound stopped, and the box sat there, silent.
A sob caught in her throat.
A moment passed.
Then the door opened. He stepped out.
She stumbled forward, the tears still streaming down her face, blinding her, but it didn't matter; she would recognize him anywhere. She had seen him too many times in her dreams not to.
"Doctor!" she cried as she suddenly remembered his name, lurching toward him, her legs giving way beneath her as an entire lifetime of memories tore though her mind, overwhelming it.
He caught her before she could hit the ground.
She stared up at him with blurring eyes, and weakly reached a hand to his face. Her fingers brushed his cheek, and a small, broken smile lit up her face for a moment before her hand fell limp, her eyes closing as she slipped into unconsciousness.