The darkness pressed in around me, smelling of living wood and very faintly of that strange flowery fire. I couldn't see at all. And it felt a million miles away from anything. I've been to some out-of-the-way places in my time, but compared to this, the plains of Antarctica are downright homely and bustling. "That far country from whose bourne to traveler returns," I said out loud and immediately wished I hadn't. There was no echo, no sense of my voice carrying at all, but the darkness suddenly felt sharper, almost hostile. I put out a hand to feel in front of me and almost impaled it on something extremely sharp (Is 'impale' the word I want here? Can you impale just a hand, or is that only for an entire person?) When I was done cursing and licking the blood off my hand, I tried again, slower. The sharp things were everywhere, seemingly, and they were the things smelling of living wood. So, thorns. Thorns the size of stakes – at least, the size stakes Buffy always used to carry. I allowed myself a moment of sentimentality, then went on trying to suss out where I could get through the thorns. Nowhere, it seemed. The sodding things were all around me, and above me as well. I knelt down, very carefully trying not to put an eye out, and felt about on the ground. And here's another funny thing: the earth was damp and loose, good fertile soil that probably just needed a drop of sunlight to grow things other than mutant stakes. But a foot in front of me, my hand bumped into spiny cold bark again, that went in a circle all around me. I dug my hands into the ground, just to get that earth smell again. It welled up around me, strong and almost, almost living. I sniffed it again, and there was something else. Buffy. Buffy's blood. I lifted my head and tried again to get a sense of my surroundings, other-than-thorns-wise. Just darkness and wood. I put a handful of earth up to my nose and the smell smote me again, full in the face. There was no way forward, or backwards, or up. There was only this patch of earth, and the trail of Buffy's blood. Not very moor-like, but far be it from me to criticize the arrangements. I vamped out and began to dig. It took everything I had to put my head in when the hole got deep enough. I hate things covering my face and cramped spaces. But I was following the scent, and that meant digging straight down and also having my face pressed into the earth while I scrabbled at it with my hands. I kept panicking and forgetting about breathing and getting wet clumps of earth up my nose and in my mouth. I don't know if I was there for days or hours or years. It became increasingly difficult not to think about the weight of the earth above me, but the farther I went, the heavier it got.

At first it was pretty much what you'd expect if you had to tunnel down for a while using just your bare hands. Your softer bits get shredded and the pressure is unbearable but you bear it anyway. After a while, it got worse.I could no longer tell where I ended and the earth began. The thought took hold that I was finally and terminally dead, and that all I was feeling was the interminable moment of my dissolution into dust. Moving seemed both pointless and impossible; it was time to stop, sink quietly into the ground, become as nothing.

My mouth filled with blood.

The pain slammed back in half a second later. I could think again, sort of; at least, there was a me to do the thinking. At the moment, everything in my head was going haywire. All around me, the earth smelled of blood. Buffy's blood.

As you know, Giles, there was a time in my life when that would've just mad me very hungry. Now, I had a vague feeling that it should not move me either way, but it did. I felt hungry, and also nauseous, and also all the misery I'd been tamping down on all these months recrudesced in a great gout of agony. If you ask me, was I keeping my mind on the task, no, I sodding was not.

Eventually, I did calm down enough to keep following the trail of blood. I even remembered the part where it was Buffy's blood that was scattered all over and tried to keep some in my mouth, to store like. No, I don't know what good I thought that would do. It just felt right.

Onward and downward. It was quiet there too. Just the sloshing, squelching sounds of me moving through wet clay. You know how when you listen to some monotonous noise long enough, you begin hearing patterns, even words? Maybe it was the smell of the blood, but at some point the sloshing began to sound like more of a thwacking, nasty butcher-shop noise, punctuated by a wet chewing, smacking sort of thing. What I really minded was how confused it made me feel. The things I liked, and not being sure if I still did, and knowing I oughtn't, and what that meant for me trying to get Buffy back.

Worse, I began hearing a rhythm, and once that happens, you really can't make yourself stop listening for it. The words came a bit later.

"Oh, when I was in love with you,

Then I was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passed by,

And nothing will remain,

And miles around they'll say that I

Am quite myself again."

Over and over again, sounding eerily like Darla, of all people. Same self-satisfaction, same sneering tone. I even opened my mouth to answer and was promptly rewarded with a shovel's worth of clay down my gullet. Had to gather up more blood.

If I stopped caring, if I got the chip out, would I be quite myself again? Would I ever miss not being it? Last time she came back, Drusilla thought all I needed was to ignore the chip – didn't believe in it, she said. Maybe the problem was that, by that time, I'd started believing in it, a little.

Buffy had said the same thing. A serial killer in prison, and I hadn't known why that was a bad thing. After all, prison is very effective in stopping people from killing, except when there's gangs, with those shivs they make out of paper towels and things, awfully inventive I heard they are.

I was beginning to understand what Buffy had meant that day. It wasn't really about the killing or the not killing. She had no way of knowing of who the hell I was, who would be standing there when I was quite myself again. And it's all very well for me to know that there is no passing fancy here, but that is not the question either. If all I'm doing is wearing a mask, it's no good me supergluing it to my face so it stays on forever. I'm actually fairly sure most people would view that as making everything a lot worse.

Now you would say that there was no question here at all, that all of you knew I had not, could not have changed. Lies. You would've staked me as soon as looked at me, if I hadn't looked just a teeny bit like a person to you. Buffy would have done the same. No, all of you, same as Drusilla, you suspected me of it. Came speechifying at me about higher purposes. That still really annoys me, although I'm no longer sure why.

But just because something with Darla's voice was parroting Housman over and over at me didn't mean I had to decide any of this then and there. This was about saving Buffy, not what she'd think of me afterwards. Whoever else I was, for now I could just be the one who does what it takes.

The muttering faded back into mud noises and I couldn't feel my hands at all, when I hit something solid, face-first. Wood or rock, I could not tell. I tried to follow the scent, but by then I guess I was bleeding fairly heavily myself, so it was confusing. I began scraping my way along the solid wall. I had no idea if I was going up or down. As I scooped the next soggy handful of clay, I suddenly found myself clutching a handful of empty air. The panic I'd managed to squash down all this time surged up so hard, I can just remember flailing and scrambling until most of me was flopped on top of the ground, sobbing and gulping, then passing out.

When I opened my eyes, I lay for a bit, staring into the nothing overhead, and taking deep even breaths. Hey, I don't need my lungs to work, but I still have a psychology. In a sense. Eventually, I hauled my legs out of the pit and sat up. My observational powers considerably enhanced by me no longer being buried in dirt, I noticed that not only did I not have any clothes on, to speak of, but apparently a quantity of flesh had sloughed off as well, especially on my hands, which were pretty much all bone and claw. Clay, on the other hand, was plastered all over me. Either the darkness had lifted a little or my eyes were getting used to it. I could now see the faint outlines of the same thorn bushes I'd felt earlier, all around me. The one thing that was different was the solid bulk at my back that I had used to claw my way out of the ground. I tried touching it, but couldn't feel anything – like I said, claw and bone. Bugger. I tried smelling and got a glob of snotty clay up my nose. As I had nothing to blow my nose with, I will spare you the details, but I eventually managed to excavate my nasal cavities sufficiently for them to be of actual use. Faint whiff of burning flowers, reek of blood-churned earth under my feet, and the smell of living forest from the wall-like thing near me. I couldn't see its edges on either side, though it appeared to curve a little. As far as I could tell, it went mostly up, and the thorns surrounding me came from branches growing out of it.

So, here I was, to all appearances exactly back where I started, only I'd had to dig forever and a day to get there. Big-ass tree, this time no way out but up. I thought again about the weight of the earth around me, and the feeling that I wasn't so much digging as the earth was sifting through me. This could not be worse, nothing could be worse. I was in pain, but pain would not kill me and it did not have to stop me. I found the nearest branch and started hauling myself upward, trying to avoid the thorns.