Rating: Actually upped it to PG-13, although it's a ridiculously tame PG-13
Feedback: Thank you kindly. Melpomenethalia@aol.com
Spoilers: Through season five's "The Gift"
Distribution: Fanfiction.net, the Warren, and Fonts of Wisdom's Crypt. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: Buffy jumped through the portal and died. But what happened to her next?
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.Author's Note: Only one more after this. Sorry this one took so long to write, but it is significantly longer than most of the other chapters.
Part 19A few months later, Darla, Drusilla, and Harmony were spending a fairly relaxed evening in a small, white gazebo with vines of trailing violet clematis growing up the sides. All three of their other selves had already fed, so the prospect of a night free of pain was pleasantly possible. Still, as had happened from time to time lately, there were two figures missing from their group.
"Dru? You seen Buffy or William around today?" Harmony asked off-handedly as she made her shoes turn various shades of blue until she found exactly the right hue to match her dress.
"No, Harmony, dear," Drusilla answered with a smile. "I heard Buffy was down to check on Sunnydale earlier and William was getting Matthew and Cynthia adjusted to Limbo, but they haven't been around for the last few hours. I'm absolutely certain they're just fine."
"Huh. If you say so," she said with good nature as she experimented with different heights for her heels. "Wonder what they've been up to by themselves so much lately."
Darla gripped the sides of her lounge chair very hard to avoid asking the pretty girl precisely how dumb she was. She finally managed to grind out, "They've taken up table tennis, Harm. World championship level table tennis."
"Really? Weird, but whatever makes them happy," she said, smiling down at her baby blue stilettos.
Darla mouthed something to Dru over Harmony's head that looked suspiciously like "are you sure we can't kill her?" Drusilla bit her lip to hide a giggle but eventually took pity on the girl.
"Darla is only joking with you. William and Buffy want to spend some time together now that they've found one another," Drusilla explained in as a vague a way as she could.
Even so, the light bulb went off over Harmony's head, and she nodded conspiratorially at the others, whispering, "Oh, I got ya."
It happened that William and Buffy chose that particular moment to wander up to the gazebo together, and Darla couldn't help but admire their timing.
"Hello, Buffy, William. How was Sunnydale today?" asked Dru quickly, and Darla caught the smallest note of strain in her friend's voice.
"Pretty much okay, but I still can't seem to find Willow. Wonder where she keeps going," Buffy replied with a slight frown as she and William joined the others.
Though Drusilla said nothing more, her face darkened for a moment. Something about Sunnydale had been bothering her, and while there was surely no cause for alarm, the fact remained that Buffy had been having difficulty locating Willow on her frequent visits. She'd even asked Drusilla with her a few times, hoping that the soul's psychic abilities might be able to locate the redhead, but instead, all she had been able to sense was absence. She didn't want to risk causing the former Slayer any distress over nothing, but she had kept a close eye out for the Wiccan and finally had come to a conclusion.
It wasn't that Willow was lost. Willow was hiding. The girl had cast some sort of blocking spell around herself that was keeping her movements from being known by anyone. Normally, this would have only affected the living, but the mere fact that the glamour was so strong that it was able to completely cover Willow from Drusilla's considerable Sight was a bit worrying. The girl was becoming entirely too powerful.
William, the gentleman as ever, noticed her distress and cast a concerned look at his old friend. "Drusilla, is something troubling you? Has your other self been causing you problems?"
"No more than usual," she said with a shudder. "But, Buffy, I'm afraid I must broach a rather disturbing topic. It's about Willow. I think that…"
Drusilla abruptly stopped speaking, her mouth slightly slack, her eyes unfocused. For a moment, she was perfectly still. And then, without warning, her eyes rolled back in their sockets as an ear-splitting shriek tore from her throat. The sound seemed to rend the air itself, filling their ears like fiery arrows. Her skin was instantly covered with a sheen of cold sweat.
"This is no feed," Darla said in a voice full of horror.
Falling from her chair, Drusilla's slight body shook uncontrollably, and her mouth began to froth, spilling ugly white foam down her chin in a torrent. William was on her in a moment, desperately trying to still her flailing arms so she wouldn't harm herself. Harmony, Buffy, and Darla stared in shock at the scene before them. The delicate form of their friend was contorted into an agony that made her usual tremors seem like child's play. William was flung from her suddenly, his body smashing through the thin wooden slats of the gazebo and reducing them to matchwood.
As quickly as they had begun, the spasms running through Drusilla stopped, but the stillness was somehow worse. Her form was sprawled across the ground, her chest heaved as though she had just run a marathon, and Buffy cautiously approached her head, reaching out a hand to touch her clammy face.
"Dru? Hon, you okay?" Darla asked in concern.
Drusilla opened her eyes and looked at Buffy with absolute knowledge, and when she spoke, her tone chilled them.
"Something evil is coming, and it's coming for you," she said in a voice tinged with both fear and anger.
A sound began to become fill the air. The rumbling was slight, at first, but it rapidly grew in intensity until the roar was almost deafening. It was like one of the earthquakes Buffy remembered from her life, but that shouldn't be able to happen here. Whatever was going on was utterly against the natural order. The entire dimension seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Without warning, erupting from below them like a spume of lava, a tower of red and black flame burst through the ground before them, spraying them all with bits of debris and soil. The peaceful garden disappeared in a heartbeat, replaced instantly by a landscape of unyielding rock and skies in angry shades of rust and orange. Other denizens of Limbo turned towards the pillar of swirling ebony and scarlet and fled from it in panic.
"Run!" Drusilla called to her friends over the maelstrom of chaos and the sound of an evil tempest of wind. "Get away from it! I'll do what I can!"
They did not need to be told twice. Swifter than thought, the four of them took off at a run, each one trying desperately to bring another reality into being, and each time finding that reality broken into pieces by the storm that raged around them. In quick succession, Buffy saw the walls of William's study collapsing around them as though they had been hit with a wrecking ball, the beach's water parching before her eyes and the sand blowing away in the wind, a cloudy sky of pink and peach clouds that must have been a creation of Harmony's dissolved as soon as it formed, and the living room of Revello Drive fell apart like a house of cards as she herself tried to intervene. Everything led back to the barren wasteland of gray rock, the tower of black and red flames pursuing them at a mind numbing speed no matter where they tried to hide.
As all this went on, Drusilla was far from idle. With a tremendous show of will, in spite of the echoes of pain that wound through her, she trained all of her gift on finding the origin of the invasion. It wasn't from this plain. Of that she was completely certain. She followed the path of the power that was ripping apart the fabric of universes and came to the place she had most hoped to avoid but had more than half expected to see.
There, standing beside Buffy's grave, were Anya, Xander, and Tara, but Drusilla barely noticed them. Kneeling at the foot of the plot was Willow, and Drusilla gasped at what she saw.
"Willow," she whispered to herself in disbelief, "what have you done?"
To the mortals present, Willow's tortured form was bathed in a faint red glow, and judging by their expressions the scene was horribly eerie and obviously frightening. But to Drusilla, who looked at it from the next level, it was far worse, for she saw what was really happening. The column of red and black fire was passing through Willow, engulfing her in waves of agony, but she was merely focusing it and controlling it. She was not the source of it. Had she known where it was coming from, Drusilla hoped that the witch would never have considered the spell at all.
The redhead's soul was very, very dim, nearly as shadowy as the form of a vampire, as it was being drained from the spell. Her eyes had gone completely black. A myriad of demons, invisible to the others, swarmed around her, feasting on the flickering light of her soul, threatening to extinguish it completely. It was only the relative purity of her previous state, the goodness that she had harbored throughout her life, that was preventing them from killing her instantly. But as nightmarish as the cloud of demons with razor teeth and cruel claws was, it was nothing compared to what lay at the witch's feet.
The fire was not splitting through only two plains. It was piercing three, for there, at the base of the column, open to the eyes of Drusilla, were the horrors of Hell itself. No words of any language could describe the place, and she reeled from the sight.
If things continued, not only would Buffy's soul be dragged back into her body, but also Willow's would be stripped away in payment. For both their sakes, something had to be done.
In a flash, Drusilla was once more in Limbo, standing on the cold, vacant, crumbling rock as the tower of flame pursued the others in the distance. It was after Buffy and paid no attention to anything else. That meant the brunette was unnoticed.
Every fiber of her being concentrated with complete attention, and she shut her eyes to block out the distractions around her. When she lifted her eyelids once more, a startling change had come over her. Drusilla's eyes burned pure white, and her voice rang forth in tones of power towards the beleaguered sky above.
"I call! By the gift that was given me, by all that is good and clean and pure, I call upon the Powers That Be! Intercede! By those the Slayer has saved and those who have loved her, I beg intercession! Send us help!"
The words sounded through all the corners of Limbo, and then there was silence.
Meanwhile, Harmony, Darla, and William, each bolstering Buffy's spirit, combining their strengths with hers in order to help her flee the thing pursuing her, continued in their frantic journey.
"Whatever that thing is," Darla complained bitterly, "you've really ticked it off, kid."
Harmony glanced over her shoulder for the thousandth time to see that the pillar was gaining on them and was now only a stone's throw away. "Oh man, oh man, oh man, we are so cooked!"
William's grip around Buffy's waist tightened even more in response, and their eyes met. "We're together, my love. No matter what happens, we'll face it as one."
"No! We don't know what that thing's capable of. Dru said it was after me. The three of you should leave. I don't want you to risk…"
"Shut up, Buff. We're in this for the long haul," Darla said gruffly but not unkindly.
"Um, yeah, right," Harmony said with a great deal less certainty as she looked behind them and saw that the flames had closed in on them. There was no possible escape.
With a burst of unexpected speed, the fire was suddenly surrounding them. They had been caught. What went on within the column of power was beyond anything they could have imagined. The swirling inferno was like a giant whirlpool, desperately trying to rip Buffy from them and draw her down. With a mighty heave, all four souls held fast to her, but each one felt as though he or she was being pulled into a thousand directions at once, torn to pieces by ravaging teeth. Harmony and Darla were thrown from her as the raging winds increased, their futile cries echoing as they were plunged into the darkness alone. William still clung tightly to Buffy, his face a picture of strain as he battled to remain connected. They were going to lose, and they both knew it.
Then, it happened.
A light of cool, blue radiance pierced the flames like a welcome jet of water, and other forms appeared, forms who had come in answer to Drusilla's call. A hand gripped Buffy's ankle firmly, and she was stunned to see that the fingers belonged to Jenny Calendar. A firm hold was around the Slayer's knees, and she looked down to see Kendra's long black hair being whipped about in the wind. Grabbing her from behind was Joyce, pulling with a strength that was more than Buffy herself had possessed in life. Her arms were held fast by the tiny yet powerful spirit of her cousin Celia. And, unbelievably, Buffy's hands had been taken by Dr. Gregory, her sophomore year biology teacher.
"Hang on, honey!" Joyce called through the gale.
From outside the whirlwind, Drusilla bent all of her concentration on keeping the bridge between Heaven and Limbo open. Those who had answered her summons were unused to this sort of combat, but they were holding their own. Harmony and Darla, cast from the battle and unable to enter it again, huddled next to her and looked on with awe at the spectacle before them. There was a chance.
And then, things began to go horribly wrong. Willow had sensed the change in the outcome, and she thrust forth a torrent of power so extreme, so total, that her soul all but disappeared. The flames turned entirely black, and it was as though a starless night had descended upon Limbo.
"It won't take you," William said in her ear. "We won't let them."
She turned towards the face of her lover, felt the tendrils of his hair brush her cheek softly, and their lips met.
"Whatever happens, William, it's you I choose," she vowed against his throat. "I love you."
The wind gave one, last, mighty pull, and there was the sound of a scream, loud and terrified. The tower of flames receded into nothing, and the world of Limbo reformed. The spirits of the next realm grouped around the still forms of Buffy and William, but the look on their faces was not one of triumph. Something was wrong. They had neither won nor lost.
Drusilla's eyes filled with tears as she realized what had happened, and she felt the arms of Joyce slip around her in comfort.
"You did the best you could, Drusilla. We all did. There's a reason for this, but we don't know what it is yet," she soothed her gently. "Things aren't as black as they seem. And Willow has been spared… well, mostly."
By now, William was stirring, and the exhausted soul immediately tried to grip the hand of his beloved, but the chill of her flesh was like the grave.
"What's going on here?" Darla demanded angrily. "Is she here or there?"
Drusilla began to cry weakly, spent. "Don't you see? She's both. She's been ripped in two."
William's horrified gaze stared at the figure of the unconscious girl lying beside him. "What does that mean?"
"Buffy will wake, in her coffin, but she won't be entirely her. Enough of her will be there that she'll be able to function, but it will be like she's half dead. And the Buffy here," Drusilla touched William's shoulder softly, "you know there shouldn't be any such thing as pain in Limbo. Because of that, this part of her will remain in a deep sleep. Otherwise, she'd be like her other self is going to be: confused and hopeless. William, I'm so sorry."
"For how long?" he asked almost violently. "How long will she be split?"
Drusilla knelt next to him and held his hand, "Until the other Buffy dies. Until that time, because she bound herself to you, this part of her will remain with you, but when her human life ends, all of her will be called to the next level."
"She'll never see me again," he realized. "She won't remember this place and what we've shared. All she'll have is the memory of being buried alive. Oh, God, I've lost her."
William's eyes brimmed over with tears as he dragged the motionless form of his love into his arms, cradling her head to his heart. He ran a reverent hand over her pale cheek and placed a single gentle kiss against her still lips before he threw back his head and keened his grief to the vault of the sky.