HOME FROM HELL: A short, Spike-based interlude…
Home From Hell is a snippet I wrote having been temporarily inspired by the phrase Home From Hell. Personally I'm a bit disappointed with the outcome, as the idea in my head was so much clearer. But I'd like to hear opinions. Un-beta-ed, sorry.
WARNING: Gruesome themes and images. Rating to be on the safe side, and believe me – it needs to be safe. Please don't read if you have any doubts.
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Spike woke suddenly, with an involuntary gasp that rung through him as though he was hollow, rattling and tearing against the inside of his throat, as though he'd swallowed something caustic. His first thought that it was that because he hadn't need to breathe in so long that the oxygen he'd suddenly felt compelled to suck into his lungs would be rejected, and he'd choke. Then he thought perhaps that the air was filled with poison, which again, ended in very vivid ideas of his impending termination.
There was hot, heavy, tight pressure in his chest, which he recognised as mind-numbing panic. His brain felt like it was expanding, pressing into his skull, and that any second it would start to dribble out of his ears. Thankfully, after a few moments of lying with his back against something incredibly hard and incredibly cold, and his brain staying miraculously whole, he figured that perhaps that wasn't exactly the case.
Cautiously he glanced around, seeing where he lay for the first time since he opened his eyes minutes earlier. Steep, white-washed arches, massive stained glass windows, and the smell of brick and varnish and burning wax. Bollocks. He was in a bloody church.
That panic, the thought of which had seemed momentarily to have lessened, rebounded again, folding in on his and turning his stomach to ice, and spreading like frozen fire through every single vein inside him, paralysing him. He couldn't move, couldn't even breathe – not that he needed to, really – not even able to think for the rush of blood in his ears, the penetrating, absolute terror. For minutes he lay there, pinned, as though a giant shoe had stepped on his and wouldn't let him up, the glared, open-eyed and open mouthed at the ceiling, not wanting to move his head, his body, anything, in case it triggered something and he turned to dust from the inside out, or he caught fire from the outside in.
After seven or eight agonising, petrified minutes, he felt he had no choice but to move his aching neck. But he didn't want to. He was in a church. The crosses. The goodness. The holiness. He'd be dead in a second.
So he clamped his eyes shut and panted, not moving, lying in the middle of the ground on hard, holy tiles that froze him to the core, and prayed.
He'd been lying for at least an hour. His breathing had gradually slowed, his mind had almost – almost – calmed. He could feel his heartbeat – or would have been able to, it he had one – returning to some kind of semi-normally. He considered dimly how it was bizarre, utterly bizarre, that the only reason panic itself was supposed to be so effective was because of the physiological manifestations: quick pulse, tight chest, inability to control reflexes and nervous system. Yet a being who, for all intends and purposes, was dead, and therefore unsusceptible to many of those things could be rendered just as weak and confused as a human by the memory of the response his body should be producing to stimuli that shouldn't stimulate anything.
Panic made your mind blurry, which probably explained how it came to be that he was thinking crap, and worse than that, thinking crap that went around in circles.
He was in church. He shouldn't be in a church. He needed to get out of the church. He would question everything his brain was telling him later, because right now, it was over whelmed with the desire to get out of the church. Despite the fact that, if he dealt with the whole get out of the church scenario now, he might have to avoid the other, more terrifying sensation of blind horror.
He knew that if he was to leave the church sans injury or death, he'd probably need to see. And seeing meant crosses. But not seeing meant running into crosses and dying, which, on reflection, was a lot worse than having to look at the damn things. He screwed his eyes slightly tighter shut, and counted.
One.
Two.
Thr—
Someone, or more frighteningly, something, grabbed the front of his shirt, and hoisted him to his feet. He had no choice but to snap his eyes open and take a look around. However what he saw was no longer the interior of a church, all steeples and gables. It was, in fact, wholly more fear-inducing. He saw the sun.
He was held up, without any kind of support, in midair, his toes scuffing the green, damp grass below, but unable to reach it, so he hung, as though by an invisible noose, struggling and kicking, and wheeling, as the sun burnt. He swung around, his leather duster twisting around him, his Doc Martin's bloodied from… oh shit.
From himself, from his own blood as it dripped through bubbling cracks in his skin, as his veins burst through his chest and arms and bloody continued to run down him, and he realised his searing, heart-shattering terror that he was naked and baking. He looked down through clutching, scarlet-stained fingers at a cavity that had forms in his chest as the light burnt its way into his muscles, smoking, choking him with the harsh taste of his own cooking flesh…
His stomach, his liver, his intestines were slipping out of him, falling, sprawling to the ground and splattering, bursting into flame and looking like half a barbeque gone horribly wrong, and he clutched madly as his heart toppled swiftly from the melting, smouldering hole in his front and plopped gloopily into a large, glass jar, that hadn't been there a moment ago.
He blinked, expecting his eyes to fall out of his face. Instead, though they felt dry and rough, they fell upon nothing more than a line of six hearts in crystal jars, still pumping gloomily. If he'd had a working throat, it would've stopped then. He looked around, wherever he was. An abandoned warehouse. Cold, damp. Silent, but for the noise of echoing, dripping water. The sound bouncing off far flung walls. The metal building hollow and empty.
A waxy, red-eyed skeletal head on a black suit with mad, glittering metal teeth and wide, manic grins slid smoothly past the flat metal bench on which, he realised, he was strapped. He yelled. Or he would have, if he could've used his voice. It had somehow been ripped from him, and now he felt like he'd had a plastic bag jammed into his windpipe – so light that it fluttered and rippled when he tried to breath in, but so firmly stuck that his chest got tighter and tighter, and his head more full of blood-like dread and fear as the floating, gaunt creature advanced on him, a sharp, metal scalpel glinting in his emaciated fingers, and without emotion or reaction, drove it slowly and deliberately through the middle of his rib cage, the bones cracking apart like wish bone, the sound echoing dimly through the chamber.
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"Spike! Spike!"
Willow's shiny brown eyes were staring at him, searching his features. He blinked, watching the massive pools of molten treacle flittering over his own, equally wide, eyes. Her face was the picture of concern, her own vaguely panicky expression remarkably similar to what he was feeling in his gut.
"Are you all right? We were worried."
"Uh-uh," Xander corrected, and Spike leapt to his feet, stumbling back into the coffee table and collapsing onto the floor, until he realised who it was and slowed, panting. "Not true, my friend. Willow was worried. I myself was rather more concerned with my pop tarts."
From the archway leading out of the sitting room Giles wandered, clutching a heavy, bound book.
"Anything the matter?" he asked, without looking up.
"Spikey-poo had an ickle bad dweam, and Willow was just tucking him back in," Xander explained, popping the toaster and leafing through his own assigned tome. "I'm sure he'll sleep soundly now."
"Spike, go back to sleep," Giles said.
He swallowed three times, four, maybe, before he realised he was angry and leapt to his feet. "No!" he said, somewhat anti-climatically.
"Spike did have a bad dream!" Willow said frantically. "I mean, I saw it, and he was moaning and thrashing around, and—"
"Will," Xander interrupted pointedly. "That could've been anything."
Willow looked stunned, and thoroughly downtrodden.
"It was bad," Spike croaked, not quite able yet to shake the trembling out of his limbs or blink away the taught expression in his face. "It was… bloody horrible."
"Stop being a baby and go back to sleep," Xander muttered, scouring the book before him, and shoving pop tarts into his mouth. "We're trying to research."
"I'm not a baby!" Spike roared, and Giles nodded.
"Quite right," he said evenly. "Spike's an idiot, Xander, not a baby. Now go back to sleep – we're trying to research."
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