Carnivore

Chapter 6 – Heroism in Waiting

I should have known better than to follow a vampire into a cold, dark, dank cave. I lived in Sunnydale the first twenty-three years of my life, had been fighting the monsters with Buffy for almost a decade, and still I stupidly followed Spike into the darkness. Of course, he was a "good guy" now and was leading me toward Buffy, but that didn't completely make up for the fact that I should have known better. What can I say? When Buffy's life is on the line, I get stupid, too. Always have.

But this particular instance had me lost, in a dark cave system, with hardly any battery left in my flashlight, following Spike. See? Stupid!

After we'd been wandering around for what felt like hours, I blurted out, "We're lost! We're going to die in here!"

"Not lost!" Spike insisted. "She's getting closer, mate. I can smell it."

"Well, good for you," I complained, wanting to stomp behind him like a two year old. What? I was getting really hungry! "But some of us are thinking maybe we should try to find our way back to the entrance and try again."

"What, and waste another hour trying to find her?" Spike growled, leading me to the left when our passage ended in a larger cavern. The tunnels and caves were pretty rough, but definitely kept up by someone, because the trail was relatively flat and not too difficult to walk, for the most part.

Then, when the meaning of Spike's words sunk in, I pulled my sleeve back from my wrist and shined the light on my watch. "How the hell has it only been an hour?"

"Shh!" Spike hissed back at me. "Comin' up on somethin' else now, Harris! Be a good lad and try not to attract any attention, eh?"

Lowering my voice to a whisper, I got closer behind Spike and asked, "What is it?"

"Quit breathin' in my ear, you git, and I'll tell you!"

"Fine," I said, backing off and raising up my hands in surrender. Spike just sneered and put his nose in the air again, taking a deep breath.

"Mostly vamps," he whispered back. "And some other demons. Buffy's close." After walking ahead a few more feet, Spike said, "Oi. Turn off the light, would ya, mate?"

Knowing that turning off my flashlight while lost in a dark cave with a predator was the bad idea to end all bad ideas, I still followed his directions. I suppose it was because I trusted him, which was weird for me. I'd worked with Spike before, but never really trusted him. No matter how much help he could be on patrols, I hadn't trusted him even a tiny bit until he got his soul. And even then, it was uncomfortable having him stay in my apartment. I kept thinking the whole thing was some big joke and one of those nights, he'd go ahead and kill me in my sleep. But Buffy trusted him, now more than ever. So I guess, if I trusted Buffy's judgment (which I did, most of the time), then I should trust her vampire. Damn it.

As my eyes adjusted to the absolute darkness of the cave, the passage ahead of us grew much brighter than anything else. Those demons and vampires Spike smelled must have had their own lights. I desperately wanted to turn mine back on (because really, how could those other guys see it way over here and around the corner?) but Spike crept forward and into the passageway to get a better look.

I didn't want to be left alone in the dark, so I followed him, hating how silently he could move when he wanted to and keeping one hand on the center of his back so I couldn't lose him. Being so sightless had me twitchy and paranoid right away, making me convinced that there were spiders or something else tingly on the back of my neck, when there was actually nothing there. As we walked forward, the light got brighter and brighter and I could start to hear movement and soft voices ahead. Spike led me to the more hidden side of the passageway, and sighed, "Big iron door ahead, Harris. Guarded, too."

"Fantastic," I muttered back at him, happily keeping my own hidden self behind Spike. "Guards. What will they think of next?"

Then Spike whispered, "I think I can hear Buffy," hanging his head around the corner and cocking it. "Aye, that's her voice, alright."

"What's she saying?" I asked breathlessly. "Can you tell?"

Spike listened for a few more moments before replying, "Somewhat about keeping up hope. That help is comin' soon."

"She's waiting for us?" I cried before gasping at the noise and clapping a hand over my mouth. Quieter, I whispered, "At least she's still talking."

"Aye," Spike grimaced. "But God only knows how we'll find 'er. The vision I had..." trailing off, he shivered, pulling in on himself for a moment before taking a deep breath. Man, I did not envy him at the moment. "Problem is," he spoke up after a moment, "I reckon there's about a dozen demons guarding the door. Too many to get through."

"Yeah," I agreed with a sigh. I would probably have trouble with just one or two, and I doubted Spike could take more than maybe four at a time. "We'll have to either think of something smart or go try to get help. Maybe our people are getting somewhere with the battle outside."

"Maybe," Spike muttered, putting his back against the wall and sliding down it to sit on the ground. After I joined him, Spike said, "Think we need some sort o' distraction. Draw most of 'em away so we can get in there and free those slayers. Then, they can help us finish the battle."

With a shake of my head, I pointed out, "They've been in there since yesterday afternoon. We might not want to depend on thirsty, starving soldiers to fight this battle with us."

"So what's your suggestion then, Harris?" Spike asked me, almost spitting with annoyance. "Take time out for a cuppa once we get in there?"

"Just giving you the facts," I snarled back. "I don't want to get any of us dead either, man."

"Fuck," Spike muttered, peering around the corner again. "We can't just sit here and wait!"

"And yet, that's what we're doing," I pointed out, letting my head fall back against the cold cave wall with a gentle thump.

As the moments passed by in silence, I tried not to imagine what Buffy was going through, and failed horribly. I pictured her getting hit, bitten, cut, like she had been so many times before. I flashed back to the time I was captured by a lady demon and hung to bleed out over the hell mouth. It ended up being Spike's blood that opened that damn seal, and I almost felt grateful towards him. Or maybe proud? Buffy said he never gave up faith that she would come for him. Well now Buffy was the one in enemy hands and we were the ones coming for her.

It was all wrong.

Buffy was not the damsel in distress. If anything, I was, bruised masculinity aside. What with being a demon magnet and not having any special abilities, besides being able to wield a mean monkey wrench. Buffy saved me, or we saved someone else together. I never saved her!

"Quit thinkin' so loud, Harris," Spike muttered, shifting and resettling himself on the cold stone ground.

"What you read minds now, too?" I asked, totally freaked out. I thought the psychic visions were their own contained thing! Oh God, could he read all my thoughts? Don't think about everything embarrassing that's ever happened to you! I said don't do it, Harris!

"No," the vampire scoffed with a chuckle. "But you're breathin' funny. It's gettin' on my nerves."

"Oh," I nodded in the darkness. "Right. I knew that." Sighing again, I tried to think of some way to stop thinking so hard, but all I could come up with was, "Ever seen Star Wars?"

A disbelieving breath storming from his nose, Spike replied, "I'm not the ponce. I haven't been living under a rock for the past hundred years. I've seen it. Why?"

"How about Empire?"

"Yeah," he said, his voice implying I had about as much intelligence as a spoon. "Best sequel ever made. What's your point?"

"I'm just wondering if this is a little too … I mean, you get a vision that Buffy's in trouble and it leads us to this scary place…"

"You're wondering if this is a trap?" he asked me, catching onto the comparison I was trying to make.

"Yeah."

"First off, I'm nothing like that whiny ponce, Skywalker," he replied, hitting my arm with surprising accuracy, given the pitch blackness. "Secondly, Buffy is not secretly my sister. And third, if this was a trap, we'd find it much easier to get to the bait before the trap was sprung. Those blokes are standing out there with their loud voices and their bright lights, for anyone to see. If this is a trap, it's a bloody miserable one."

"Alright," I conceded, rubbing my arm where Spike had hit it. "So who gets to play Obi-Wan and draw the storm troopers away from the–"

"I don't know, Harris," he cut me off, sounding kind of pissed. "You wouldn't be able to get through this cave system fast enough to draw them away. And I don't know what sort of lock they've got on the door between here and Buffy, if you'd be able to get through it. I can't do both, so perhaps we should go back for more help."

"Are you going to be able to track her scent again?" I asked, seeing no way forward and no way back.

"I don't know, mate," he whispered sadly. "With all the demons running through here muddlin' everything about? I don't know."

"We could sit tight until someone comes looking for us." I suggested. "I mean, that's always the rule when you get lost as a kid. Stay put until a grown up finds you."

"We could wait for awhile," Spike replied. "See if any more of 'em leave on their own. Wait and watch."

Chuckling softly, I asked, "Be smart about this?"

"Yeah, Harris," he agreed with a trying-to-be-casual, but-actually-distraught sniff. "Yeah.

I'm not exactly sure when things changed, but at some point, the darkness became less oppressively silent. I couldn't tell exactly what the noise was, or where it was coming from, but it was definitely there. I strained my ears and stretched out my slayer senses. Oh, lots of demons! It felt like a big group of them stood not too far away. Maybe just outside the door Carnivora had used? Shortly I wondered if there were any other doors out of this place, and soon realized that it didn't really matter, not when there were heavy shackles to escape from first. Then I could worry about where the emergency exits were.

"Can anyone else," I asked the darkness, ignoring that one girl's derisive hushing, "sense how many demons are outside this room?"

"Many," Misha said, from somewhere closer to the door. "Ten, perhaps? They feel agitated."

"Good," I insisted. "That means there's trouble outside. That means someone's coming for us."

"How?" a soft voice, one I hadn't heard yet, asked. "How could anyone find us?"

Smiling to myself, I said, "I've got some very good friends, girls. They've come through for me time and time again. They won't leave us here to rot."

"Yeah," the shush-er snorted, "but how many of us will be tortured and killed before they get here?"

"We can't think like that," I hissed. "We're slayers, and we're better than that. It's our calling to keep hope alive by fighting back the darkness. We fight for the way the world should be, not for how it is."

"What a load of crap…"

"So," I just about shouted, "we fight this situation as best we can, even if it's only in our own minds. Help is coming, you will survive, and the demon will not win. Just keep repeating that to yourselves. Help is coming. I will survive. The demon will not win."

Several others, probably my team members, joined me in the chant and I hoped I was doing the right thing, keeping them going like this. If I was wrong, and those demons weren't agitated because the rescue team was close, they might not be long for this world. Georgia had disappeared, and I assumed her dead. The girl in front of me said that her neighbor had been tortured and killed. If these girls had to listen to that over and over again, so very few of them would make it out the other side. And none of those who did would ever get over it. Not really.

But if we gave up now, Carnivora would win by default. No, we were called to fight and we would fight back, even if all we had were our voices. "Help is coming. I will survive. The demon will not win."

When I drove my company car as close to the GPS coordinates of the battle and parked on the side of a forest road, it was still midday. And I was in absolute agony. The Aegis pulled on my soul, giving me a taste of that burning, tearing pain that coursed through me when I first gained the soul, and then when I first lost it. But it wasn't as bad as that yet, and I had survived the pain then. I could get through this now. I could get through this and cling to the hope that Willow was right about what the Aegis could and couldn't do to me. I promised myself that if, at any point, the pain got as bad as it had when the soul was actually ripped away, I would back off, retreat until the pain subsided and I was sure my soul was still intact. I had noticed that as the days went by, it got easier and easier to be further and further away from the damn artifact. In maybe four more hours the shadow of a small mountain would cover enough of the battleground for me to get there safely. By then, maybe I could continue on a little further away from the Aegis.

Four more hours and I could find this cave Spike had blundered into, without any communication or back up, besides Xander Harris. Four more hours and I could go after him. Four more hours and then I could find him, help him find Buffy, and get back to the castle before my whole body fell apart from the inching, wracking, shivering pain. Just four more hours.

After three and a half, I made a run for it, unable to stand sitting in the car doing nothing besides hurting and worrying. I couldn't do that anymore. I'd left the castle to relieve the constant worrying over the people I loved and the hurt over how poorly I stacked up next to Spike's ability to love that deeply. So, three and a half hours was all I could take.

Covering as much skin as I could, I bolted from the car and into the shade of the forest, dancing among stray patches of sunlight as I ran for the battle I could hear ahead of me. None of the little biting hits of sunlight hurt as much as the ache in my soul and that in my heart.

Once I knew where the battle was, I skirted around it as quietly as I could. Giles and Bethany could take care of whatever was going on there. I had to get into that cave and find Spike before he threw everything away for her. Or for me, in the long run. So, I scented the air as I ran along the tree line that butted up against the mountain, searching for him as best I could.

I had to kill a few demons along the way, when they spotted me, but the magicians were making enough of a racket off in the woods, that none of my victories brought more enemies to fight. Eventually, when the sun was well and truly behind the mountain, I found the cave entrance guarded by four demons. Four demons that I could see, anyway. Four was a little much, especially when I could barely feel my arms for how painfully tingly they were. How to get past them?

The demons were more of those hairy ox-like guys I'd fought at the Cambridge museum, lending credence to the idea that Carnivora was working with Belial in some capacity. Only the archdemon could order those ox-guys around, according to Dawn's research. And here I was, without the Aegis that would have protected me from them, because I had to be stupidly altruistic about a bunch of whiny, annoying, hot-blooded, children!

Shit. Those were Angelus' thoughts, weren't they? But I was so close to reaching Spike! His scent hung on the air still, despite the fact that he'd had to take shelter in this cave at daybreak and it was almost dusk now. If I waited any longer, I might lose him. No, it wasn't that bad yet. I could keep going. I could distract those demons by tossing a handful of stones into the brush, and sneaking around behind them. I could stalk through the dark caverns, guided only by scent, touch and sound. I could…

"Angel?" Spike's voice whispered to me from the darkness and I half believed that the pain was making me hear voices now. But when he scrambled up and found me in the darkness, his arms tight around my chest, I knew it wasn't a hallucination. And when I found his salty-with-tears lips and kissed him, I knew my soul wasn't going anywhere. Despite the pain, despite the Aegis pulling on me, Spike had always kept me grounded.

Later on we would wonder about that moment, about how, when I sank my teeth into his skin and pulled on his blood if I was borrowing some of his soul, too, but we never figured it out for sure. All I knew was that a few mouthfuls of my boyfriend's blood and the touch of his hands on mine chased away the pain and the lingering doubt. "We do this together," I told him in a soft voice. "We go after her together, Will."

"Always," he whispered back, kissing the palm of my hand and stifling a bark of laughter when Xander asked, "You two aren't making out again, are you?"

Xander and I had been sitting in the dark cave for what felt like forever, him switching on his torch once in awhile to reassure himself that he could still see. The darkness didn't bother me, since I could feel and hear well enough and the light bouncing around from the guard's torches gave me just enough light to see by. Most of the time, though, I kept my eyes closed, listening to Buffy's brave voice saying the same words over and over again until I was mouthing them along with her. "Help is coming. I will survive. The demon will not win."

Within fifteen minutes I was crying stupid, poncey tears of frustration. She was right there, waiting for me to come get her and I couldn't. It was a stupid move, and I'd probably get myself dusted, and get Buffy and Xander killed. But who was coming? Who would be able to find us here? Who else would come to save her? Why couldn't I think of a better plan?

The boy wasn't doing much better, despite his faux-optimistic attitude. He kept starting thoughts about how maybe we could get through to her and then trailing off just a word or two in. Again and again we talked each other out of doing something rash and on one occasion, Xander even punched me, drawing blood. I hated him for doing it, but thanked him anyway. We didn't speak about anything else, though he did try on a few occasions.

Instead, I focused on trying to hear Buffy despite the weakening of her voice and the growing unease of the guards. Their weapons clanked and their voices growled and my chest clenched whenever I couldn't hear her over the other slayers chanting along with her. At least three times, I'd almost convinced myself that she was too weak and I had to go to her, but then I would hear her voice return and give up the bravado that almost got me killed time and time again. She was trying so hard to keep going while she waited for us, how could I try any less?

As I took a shuddering breath to sigh for the millionth time, wiping away the tears that didn't seem to stop, I felt him. Even before I heard or smelled him, I felt Angel approach. By then, I couldn't care less that he'd abandoned all those girls back at the castle. All I could think was thank God he was there. With his help, the whelp and I could get past those guards. We could rescue Buffy. We could be whole again.

"Angel," I called out quietly when I heard his shoe scuff softly on the cavern floor. And then he was there, hugging me tightly, kissing me, and making me feel like everything was going to be alright. Like he always does, the heroic git.

I'm really proud of this chapter, which took me quite awhile to get right, but was worth every minute of it. Please, let me know what you think by leaving a review!