Author's Note: So take the episode Afterlife, and carve out a couple extra
days in the middle of it. After everyone knows Buffy's back, and before
the piggybacking demon thingy shows up. That's where we are. (Also, yeah,
okay, next episode is where the M'Fashnik makes its appearance. Maybe it
and my demon are cousins. In town for a demon family reunion. Look, I
don't know, I just used it cause it was an easy way to make a joke. And
I'm cheap. :P)
Spoilers: Up to, well, Afterlife. And all the stuff I spoiled in the author's notes. :P Though it also resonates, subtly, with some later events. At least, that's what I like to think. :)
Distribution and Feedback: Make my day. Talk to me at minxncognito@hotmail.com.
*****
She was supposed to be sleeping.
Instead she was awake. Willow and Tara were talking in low voices right outside her door, wondering if they should tell her about this M'Kulough demon they'd found skulking around her dug-up grave, but that wasn't what was keeping her up. It was just that her heart was too loud.
She wondered how vampires stood it, hearing all those heartbeats all around them all the time. Beating, all the time. Did they learn to tune them out? If not, she understood now why they always seemed so crabby. She'd try to bite her too, if she could.
"It was familiar," Willow was saying.
"Like the one that tried to attack us while we w-were digging Buffy's. . ." Tara trailed off.
"A lot like. Identical-like, even. Scales and all."
The problem was the pause between beats. It was just long enough to make her think maybe it had stopped this time, maybe the sound wouldn't come, and just when she was convinced, it would drum again. Trum-trum. Trum- trum. And she would want to rip out of her skin.
"It was the strangest thing, Tara, it's like it was looking for something."
"Like for Buffy?"
"We shouldn't let it near her until we figure out what's happening. We don't know what could have. . . when I, when we. . ."
It was quieter during the day. Quieter when she was moving. The rhythm was even then, and not so widely spaced as to trick her into believing its insistent, incessant demand was over. That she was somehow back where it was quiet, and warm, and nothing ever needed her attention.
"Baby, baby, it's okay. The spell's over. And she's back. It's going to be okay."
Willow sniffling. "Giles is working on it. He said he'd call. So we'll know soon."
Here, everything wanted for her attention. Dawn Willow Xander. Giles soon. Bills and vamps and big ugly scaly things named Mick Cullough. Even Spike, though he was like the long spaces between beats. Deceptive. Because he was used to waiting. But she knew he would be just as persistent, when the time came. He was like her heart. Which might be sluggish now, but it was remembering how to need her too.
After a few hours, after the voices were gone and it was just her own heart, thumping, and Tara's tentative footfalls occasionally outside her door, she gave up. She dressed in the dark. It was easy to slip out her window, drop down into the dark of the yard. Easy to leave the neighborhood, to pass the rubble of the old school. (Funny, she thought, that it hasn't been cleaned up yet, before she remembered that this was the rubble of building up, not blowing up, or knocking down. Tricky to tell.)
It was hard, however, to find herself at the cemetery. It wasn't her cemetery-it wasn't the one she had been dead and buried and resurrected in- but it was close enough. She half-leaned on a headstone and considered the merits of crying in an absent, clinical manner.
Why was she there? She didn't know. She hadn't even brought a stake.
Something brushed the back of her arm, and she twitched violently. Oh. Her hair. She found a band in her pocket and secured all of it high on her head. High enough that it wouldn't touch her anymore. Five washes after death later it was still lank and matted from the grave, and so long that she didn't know what to do with it. Should cut it, she thought, but it didn't make an impression.
"Dinnit your Watcher ever tell you to keep your neck covered?"
Spike. She hadn't felt him come into her radar, which meant he must have been watching her since she got here. Probably he followed her from the house. She hadn't really noticed; Spike's presence lately was so easy to ignore.
The idea of it struck her as funny, but only in a far away place that couldn't reach her motor functions. So she didn't laugh.
"Hey Spike," she said.
She glanced back at him. He was standing 20 feet behind her, hands shoved deep in his pants pockets.
"Hey Buffy," he said back.
Turning away from him, she slid down the headstone and stretched out in the dirt, folded her arms across her chest.
"Isn't one of us supposed to be patrolling?" she asked, staring up at the sky. Black like dirt. She didn't know what to make of the stars.
Spike spoke from the same place. "Witch said she had it."
"Willow?"
"Yeah."
"Explains why Tara was on pace-in-front-of-Buffy's-door duty then."
Spike was moving cautiously towards her, she could hear him. When he was close enough to see what she was doing, he made a choking noise.
"What-" He sounded panicked. "Don't-"
"Spoilsport."
Exhaling, she closed her eyes, threw her arms out away from her body. Like a cross. No, that wasn't it. Slowly she moved them up and down against the earth, dragging them from her sides to her ears and back again. The monotony of it soothed.
"Pet?"
"I'm a cemetery angel," she explained, still moving her arms. Up. Down.
"What about your legs?" They were stiff.
"I'm a paralyzed cemetery angel."
This was also funny. But Spike didn't laugh.
"Come on, pet, get up."
"Nuh uh." She stilled her arms, palms up, and smiled a little up into the stars. See, now they made sense. "Gonna lay here until some vamp comes and bites me. You wanna?"
He squatted down beside her, even more cautiously. "Well. Yeah."
"You don't mean it," she sighed, and rolled away from him. More cemetery dirt in her hair.
She tucked her legs under her, so she was kneeling, eye-level with Spike. He was watching her, and his face was carefully expressionless. A mirror. She wondered if he was annoyed by her heartbeat like she was. No, probably not.
She tilted her head and asked: "What are you doing here?"
"Following you."
"Okay." She pushed up to standing, and started to walk away. She didn't move too fast.
"Where are you going now?" he called after her.
"Not sure yet. But how can you follow me if I don't keep moving?" she called back, over her shoulder.
She thought about leading him in a slow-motion chase around Sunnydale. The idea appealed. It sounded better actually than anything else had since she had returned. She thought it would be nice. Did he used to follow Dru around like this when she went out to hunt? Had he followed her this way before? She imagined a trail of cigarette butts she could follow home like breadcrumbs.
Instead, a few blocks and minutes later, she found herself at her grave. It took her a moment to figure out what was wrong. Her headstone was gone. She felt misplaced.
She was standing, looking down at the depression in the earth, when he caught up.
"Oh, bloody hell," he expelled. Like he hadn't noticed where she was taking him until just then.
"No," she said whimsically. "Not hell."
"What?"
She lifted her arms out to distract him, out like a bird. Like a phoenix, but without the fire. Or the ashes, really. Though if they'd cremated her. . . Imagine coming back from that.
Before she even thought to fall forward, his hands were clamped on her shoulders, nails digging into her skin. His hands felt warm. So she must have been cold.
"Good thing I've got you followin' me around," she told him. "A girl could get hurt out here."
She leaned back against him, and it felt. . . good. Secure. She pondered crossing her arms in front of her again, but thought he wouldn't like that. So she just let them hang beside her, and they stood there, and looked at her grave. Once she heard him whimper, and his hands tightened on her. She knew he'd closed his eyes.
"There there," she whispered. "All okay. I'm here now, you see? The spell's over. I'm back. Everything's going to be okay."
He didn't answer. The night went on. She felt a stillness here; her heart was muffled. There were no crickets, no breath but hers. No car sounds, no music echoing from the Bronze. There were no rustlings in the bushes to alert her to approaching forces of darkness.
Except for that whole rustling in the bushes thing.
The rustler, six feet of scaly brown and green, heavy-set and big-clawed, launched out of them, snarling, and stood over the vacant grave as if guarding it. She stumbled back, and Spike's hand shot out, held her beside him in a death grip she thought might be bruising her arm.
"Are you Mick?" she asked as Spike took a testing step towards it.
It roared.
"Ohhkay then."
Spike snorted.
"I don't know what he's so proprietary about," she muttered. "It's my grave."
"Oi, Mickey," Spike said in a low voice. "Girl's not dead anymore. You can have the dirt, yeah?"
Everybody was a little proprietary, actually. Who was he to give away her dirt? She knew of course that the whole vamp/home-soil thing was just a Dracula special, but it still felt like Spike of all people. . .demons. . . sentient thingies. . . should have been a little more sensitive about it.
The thing was still crouched over the plot. "Lost," it howled.
"Think it wants us to go," Spike said warily, eyeing it.
"Doesn't," she replied. She dug into her pocket and pulled out the impossibly knotted bit of silver that had, she now imagined, been drawing her back to this place. She took a few steps forward, and held the metal out in the palms of her hands.
Seeing it, Mick gave a high pitched wail and threw its (his?) body at her feet.
"Here," she said, dropping it beside him. "Sorry. Didn't know it was yours."
The thing's large hands cupped over it, cradling it, and he slunk back to the grave still keening. She watched him pound the dirt back smooth, and then, clumsily, maybe lovingly, plant the silver in the earth. A little funeral, she thought. Then he lay himself down beside the new grave. Lay down to rest.
She could feel her muscles ache. Maybe if she. . .
"Buffy?"
Oh.
"Found it the first night I came back," she said, not turning around. "Must've unearthed it on my way up."
"So you took it like a sodding souvenir?"
He sounded angry. She turned to look at him. His shoulders hung low, his face looked pained and weary at once.
"Kinda," she said. "Anyway, I'm glad he's got it back now."
One less thing to bother her, to want from her. Who else was there she could buy off that easy? What else could she give, and to who? What would be enough?
She gave Spike a smile.
"Time to go home, love?" he said softly.
"Uh huh," she said, then added, almost coyly, "Going to follow me?"
"'d like to just walk you, if you don't mind," he said, sounding tired.
"Okay."
And it was. Maybe it was the afterdeath.
They walked up to her front door before dawn.
"Peaceful," Spike observed as they stood there.
All dark, she thought. At rest. Lying there. Little windows, little door that seemed so big before her.
"Seems like we got back before they noticed you were gone."
"Seems like," she echoed.
This was her house; this wasn't her house. Buffy didn't live here. Where was Buffy now?
"Same thing tomorrow?" she asked, without looking at him.
He nodded silently, she felt it.
She added: "But less with the demons with the funny Irish names."
She was stalling.
"Go on," he told her. "You'll worry the Good Witch."
She hesitated. Then she reached out and captured his hand. She held between both of hers, and squeezed, before dropping it.
"Night Spike," she said as she got to the door, and smiled again, over her shoulder at him, practicing remembering how.
Night. Because it had been. And, barring further apocalypse, would be again. Like a heartbeat. Like that quiet place between. The space of abeyance-the one where they lived.
Spoilers: Up to, well, Afterlife. And all the stuff I spoiled in the author's notes. :P Though it also resonates, subtly, with some later events. At least, that's what I like to think. :)
Distribution and Feedback: Make my day. Talk to me at minxncognito@hotmail.com.
*****
She was supposed to be sleeping.
Instead she was awake. Willow and Tara were talking in low voices right outside her door, wondering if they should tell her about this M'Kulough demon they'd found skulking around her dug-up grave, but that wasn't what was keeping her up. It was just that her heart was too loud.
She wondered how vampires stood it, hearing all those heartbeats all around them all the time. Beating, all the time. Did they learn to tune them out? If not, she understood now why they always seemed so crabby. She'd try to bite her too, if she could.
"It was familiar," Willow was saying.
"Like the one that tried to attack us while we w-were digging Buffy's. . ." Tara trailed off.
"A lot like. Identical-like, even. Scales and all."
The problem was the pause between beats. It was just long enough to make her think maybe it had stopped this time, maybe the sound wouldn't come, and just when she was convinced, it would drum again. Trum-trum. Trum- trum. And she would want to rip out of her skin.
"It was the strangest thing, Tara, it's like it was looking for something."
"Like for Buffy?"
"We shouldn't let it near her until we figure out what's happening. We don't know what could have. . . when I, when we. . ."
It was quieter during the day. Quieter when she was moving. The rhythm was even then, and not so widely spaced as to trick her into believing its insistent, incessant demand was over. That she was somehow back where it was quiet, and warm, and nothing ever needed her attention.
"Baby, baby, it's okay. The spell's over. And she's back. It's going to be okay."
Willow sniffling. "Giles is working on it. He said he'd call. So we'll know soon."
Here, everything wanted for her attention. Dawn Willow Xander. Giles soon. Bills and vamps and big ugly scaly things named Mick Cullough. Even Spike, though he was like the long spaces between beats. Deceptive. Because he was used to waiting. But she knew he would be just as persistent, when the time came. He was like her heart. Which might be sluggish now, but it was remembering how to need her too.
After a few hours, after the voices were gone and it was just her own heart, thumping, and Tara's tentative footfalls occasionally outside her door, she gave up. She dressed in the dark. It was easy to slip out her window, drop down into the dark of the yard. Easy to leave the neighborhood, to pass the rubble of the old school. (Funny, she thought, that it hasn't been cleaned up yet, before she remembered that this was the rubble of building up, not blowing up, or knocking down. Tricky to tell.)
It was hard, however, to find herself at the cemetery. It wasn't her cemetery-it wasn't the one she had been dead and buried and resurrected in- but it was close enough. She half-leaned on a headstone and considered the merits of crying in an absent, clinical manner.
Why was she there? She didn't know. She hadn't even brought a stake.
Something brushed the back of her arm, and she twitched violently. Oh. Her hair. She found a band in her pocket and secured all of it high on her head. High enough that it wouldn't touch her anymore. Five washes after death later it was still lank and matted from the grave, and so long that she didn't know what to do with it. Should cut it, she thought, but it didn't make an impression.
"Dinnit your Watcher ever tell you to keep your neck covered?"
Spike. She hadn't felt him come into her radar, which meant he must have been watching her since she got here. Probably he followed her from the house. She hadn't really noticed; Spike's presence lately was so easy to ignore.
The idea of it struck her as funny, but only in a far away place that couldn't reach her motor functions. So she didn't laugh.
"Hey Spike," she said.
She glanced back at him. He was standing 20 feet behind her, hands shoved deep in his pants pockets.
"Hey Buffy," he said back.
Turning away from him, she slid down the headstone and stretched out in the dirt, folded her arms across her chest.
"Isn't one of us supposed to be patrolling?" she asked, staring up at the sky. Black like dirt. She didn't know what to make of the stars.
Spike spoke from the same place. "Witch said she had it."
"Willow?"
"Yeah."
"Explains why Tara was on pace-in-front-of-Buffy's-door duty then."
Spike was moving cautiously towards her, she could hear him. When he was close enough to see what she was doing, he made a choking noise.
"What-" He sounded panicked. "Don't-"
"Spoilsport."
Exhaling, she closed her eyes, threw her arms out away from her body. Like a cross. No, that wasn't it. Slowly she moved them up and down against the earth, dragging them from her sides to her ears and back again. The monotony of it soothed.
"Pet?"
"I'm a cemetery angel," she explained, still moving her arms. Up. Down.
"What about your legs?" They were stiff.
"I'm a paralyzed cemetery angel."
This was also funny. But Spike didn't laugh.
"Come on, pet, get up."
"Nuh uh." She stilled her arms, palms up, and smiled a little up into the stars. See, now they made sense. "Gonna lay here until some vamp comes and bites me. You wanna?"
He squatted down beside her, even more cautiously. "Well. Yeah."
"You don't mean it," she sighed, and rolled away from him. More cemetery dirt in her hair.
She tucked her legs under her, so she was kneeling, eye-level with Spike. He was watching her, and his face was carefully expressionless. A mirror. She wondered if he was annoyed by her heartbeat like she was. No, probably not.
She tilted her head and asked: "What are you doing here?"
"Following you."
"Okay." She pushed up to standing, and started to walk away. She didn't move too fast.
"Where are you going now?" he called after her.
"Not sure yet. But how can you follow me if I don't keep moving?" she called back, over her shoulder.
She thought about leading him in a slow-motion chase around Sunnydale. The idea appealed. It sounded better actually than anything else had since she had returned. She thought it would be nice. Did he used to follow Dru around like this when she went out to hunt? Had he followed her this way before? She imagined a trail of cigarette butts she could follow home like breadcrumbs.
Instead, a few blocks and minutes later, she found herself at her grave. It took her a moment to figure out what was wrong. Her headstone was gone. She felt misplaced.
She was standing, looking down at the depression in the earth, when he caught up.
"Oh, bloody hell," he expelled. Like he hadn't noticed where she was taking him until just then.
"No," she said whimsically. "Not hell."
"What?"
She lifted her arms out to distract him, out like a bird. Like a phoenix, but without the fire. Or the ashes, really. Though if they'd cremated her. . . Imagine coming back from that.
Before she even thought to fall forward, his hands were clamped on her shoulders, nails digging into her skin. His hands felt warm. So she must have been cold.
"Good thing I've got you followin' me around," she told him. "A girl could get hurt out here."
She leaned back against him, and it felt. . . good. Secure. She pondered crossing her arms in front of her again, but thought he wouldn't like that. So she just let them hang beside her, and they stood there, and looked at her grave. Once she heard him whimper, and his hands tightened on her. She knew he'd closed his eyes.
"There there," she whispered. "All okay. I'm here now, you see? The spell's over. I'm back. Everything's going to be okay."
He didn't answer. The night went on. She felt a stillness here; her heart was muffled. There were no crickets, no breath but hers. No car sounds, no music echoing from the Bronze. There were no rustlings in the bushes to alert her to approaching forces of darkness.
Except for that whole rustling in the bushes thing.
The rustler, six feet of scaly brown and green, heavy-set and big-clawed, launched out of them, snarling, and stood over the vacant grave as if guarding it. She stumbled back, and Spike's hand shot out, held her beside him in a death grip she thought might be bruising her arm.
"Are you Mick?" she asked as Spike took a testing step towards it.
It roared.
"Ohhkay then."
Spike snorted.
"I don't know what he's so proprietary about," she muttered. "It's my grave."
"Oi, Mickey," Spike said in a low voice. "Girl's not dead anymore. You can have the dirt, yeah?"
Everybody was a little proprietary, actually. Who was he to give away her dirt? She knew of course that the whole vamp/home-soil thing was just a Dracula special, but it still felt like Spike of all people. . .demons. . . sentient thingies. . . should have been a little more sensitive about it.
The thing was still crouched over the plot. "Lost," it howled.
"Think it wants us to go," Spike said warily, eyeing it.
"Doesn't," she replied. She dug into her pocket and pulled out the impossibly knotted bit of silver that had, she now imagined, been drawing her back to this place. She took a few steps forward, and held the metal out in the palms of her hands.
Seeing it, Mick gave a high pitched wail and threw its (his?) body at her feet.
"Here," she said, dropping it beside him. "Sorry. Didn't know it was yours."
The thing's large hands cupped over it, cradling it, and he slunk back to the grave still keening. She watched him pound the dirt back smooth, and then, clumsily, maybe lovingly, plant the silver in the earth. A little funeral, she thought. Then he lay himself down beside the new grave. Lay down to rest.
She could feel her muscles ache. Maybe if she. . .
"Buffy?"
Oh.
"Found it the first night I came back," she said, not turning around. "Must've unearthed it on my way up."
"So you took it like a sodding souvenir?"
He sounded angry. She turned to look at him. His shoulders hung low, his face looked pained and weary at once.
"Kinda," she said. "Anyway, I'm glad he's got it back now."
One less thing to bother her, to want from her. Who else was there she could buy off that easy? What else could she give, and to who? What would be enough?
She gave Spike a smile.
"Time to go home, love?" he said softly.
"Uh huh," she said, then added, almost coyly, "Going to follow me?"
"'d like to just walk you, if you don't mind," he said, sounding tired.
"Okay."
And it was. Maybe it was the afterdeath.
They walked up to her front door before dawn.
"Peaceful," Spike observed as they stood there.
All dark, she thought. At rest. Lying there. Little windows, little door that seemed so big before her.
"Seems like we got back before they noticed you were gone."
"Seems like," she echoed.
This was her house; this wasn't her house. Buffy didn't live here. Where was Buffy now?
"Same thing tomorrow?" she asked, without looking at him.
He nodded silently, she felt it.
She added: "But less with the demons with the funny Irish names."
She was stalling.
"Go on," he told her. "You'll worry the Good Witch."
She hesitated. Then she reached out and captured his hand. She held between both of hers, and squeezed, before dropping it.
"Night Spike," she said as she got to the door, and smiled again, over her shoulder at him, practicing remembering how.
Night. Because it had been. And, barring further apocalypse, would be again. Like a heartbeat. Like that quiet place between. The space of abeyance-the one where they lived.