Title: "Episode 83 & 1/2 - With A Little Help From My Friends".
Part: 10/12
Author: "A Gentleman Of Leisure".
Summary: There's a stranger in town and the world's about to end. Who you gonna call?
Story Type: In-Canon adventure set between Episodes 83 & 84 (hence the title).
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to Series 5, Episode 83 (of course).
Pairing: In-Canon
Disclaimer: In the beginning there was Joss. And Joss said "Let there be Buffy". And there was Buffy. And it was the morning and the evening of the first episode. And lo, Joss saw that it was good. (All copyrights and trademarks acknowledged - it's all just a bit of fun, folks. Thank you.)

Author's Note: I'm a British writer, so there may be some terms (and spelling) not used in the US. OK? Now read on...

*

Part Ten - 'White Light, White Heat' - The Velvet Underground.


"If any traffic cop is stupid enough to try and stop us now, he's going to get a thick ear from me", Giles shouted above the engine noise as they sped through the growing chaos that was spreading through Sunnydale.

"Wow, Giles! Mr aggression man!" Xander exclaimed.

"However they probably have more than enough to do, what with all the vampires and demons, and the earthquake damage and fires", Giles added over his shoulder. "Anyway, we must be nearly there now".

He swerved the car to avoid a huge fissure that opened up in the road just as he spoke, the rear wheel scrabbling for purchase on the very lip of the crack.

"A bit too close for comfort, that", Willow said, and hung onto Tara even tighter than she already had been. The two girls looked at each other briefly, and then stared anxiously out into the swirling murk again.

"Is it my imagination, or is this stuff getting thicker?" Xander asked. "I can see a glow up ahead - do you suppose the old school is on fire?"

"No bad thing if it is", Buffy said.

"What's to burn?" Dawn asked. "I thought you guys blew it into tiny little pieces".

Michael shook his head doubtfully.

"That's not a good sign. Things must already be happening. I suspect the other universe has already started to make its entry into this continuum. Hurry, Giles! Hurry!"

The next moment, as they turned into the road running past the ruins of the school, there was a huge crash as something landed heavily on the hood of the car, crushing the whole engine block down onto the roadway. The vehicle stopped dead, and everyone was thrown forward by the impact. Buffy just managed to grab Dawn in time to save her from falling head over heels over the top of the windscreen. Everyone in the back fell in a heap.

"So, Michael. Nice to see you. Introduce me to your little friends, why don't you?".

Stunned, they all stared upwards. Towering over them as high as a house, standing on the crumpled remains of the front of the car, was a huge dark figure with horns, great bat like leathery wings and a long barbed tail, which waved about as if it had a life of its own, pointing first at one and then another of the Scoobies, seeming to examine them individually and to dismiss them, until it came to point at Dawn and her spear.

"Sssso!" The creature hissed angrily at them, sounding like a snake speaking. "I see you've come to interfere as usual! Why can't you leave things alone? You are always trying to spoil things for us. We only want to have a little fun. Where's the harm in that?"

Buffy cautiously pulled Dawn out of the car with her. Those in the back scrambled out over the trunk, and they all retreated a little way, leaving Michael, now standing, and Giles still stuck at the wheel of the inert vehicle, to face the great demon.

"Anyone know who that is?" Xander whispered. "He looks kinda familiar".

"He certainly should be", Tara said, but before she could enlighten them she was interrupted by Michael, shouting back at the creature.

"I see you are up to your usual tricks again, Azazel. Well, not this time!"

Michael's voice could be heard clearly over the roaring sound of the building burning, and the shouts and screams from the darkness beyond.

"We're just having a little barbecue here, don't ruin it! Don't be a party pooper, Michael", the creature protested, but Michael threw off his hat, opened his coat, and slowly and deliberately drew his sword.

Their surroundings were immediately illuminated as if they were spot lit by invisible Klieg lights, and every single detail on the demon's skin was clearly visible - each horrible wart and hair and scale, the great red eyes with their unearthly vertical slit pupils, and the great batwings looming over them.

"Be Gone!", Michael said, in a firm clear voice that sounded like a great bell. He pointed his sword at the demon he'd addressed as Azazel, and the creature howled in fury and lashed its long tail this way and that. It stamped its great clawed foot in frustration, causing the back end of the car to shoot up in the air and tossing Giles up out of the driver's seat. Like lightening the demon snatched him out of the air and dangled him upside down by one foot. It began to laugh, quietly. It sounded like a rock slide. Everyone froze in horror.

Except the Summers girls. Buffy was again carrying Giles' axe (he hadn't needed it while driving, of course) and without so much as glancing at each other, she and Dawn began to walk slowly forwards. Buffy discreetly started to move round to one side of the huge creature, while Dawn, more direct and to the point, raised The Spear to chest height, and advanced with her face set as if she was a whole army of spearmen.

After a moment the demon's tail seemed to become aware of their approach and whipped round to point at first one and then the other. Their apparently small female harmlessness seemed to amuse the creature greatly and it laughed uproariously. It sounded like a steam train wreck.

Unthinkingly it let the tip of its tail come close to Buffy, within an arm's length. Too close, that was all she needed. With her free hand she grabbed at it, and the little hand axe chopped viciously down and through!

The demon gave a great angry bellow of pain, dropped its prey, and whipped the damaged tail out of harm's way. It bowled Buffy over, but she bounced up just like a rubber ball and waved her new souvenir over her head.

"Hey, Mister Ugly! You lost something?" she shouted, and skipped away out of reach as it spun round to grab at her. This gave Dawn a chance to use The Spear, charging forwards and vigorously applying it to what, even in demons, is a tender part of the anatomy. With an agonised howl it leaped into the air and flapped away up out of reach above them into the upper darkness.

Everybody covered their ears to protect them from the deafening volume of its furious yells and curses, but as the sound faded there wasn't even time to congratulate themselves on driving it away. Before Michael had even stepped out of the crushed wreckage of Giles's car, and helped him to his feet, they found that they were now surrounded by a great horde of assorted vampires, demons and other unidentifiable beings, some of which they'd not even come across in the Watchers' Council reference books! They just seemed to appear out of nowhere from among the ruins of the school, and were all standing and staring at the intrepid Scooby Gang.

Hastily everyone clustered together, back to back.

"Remind me not to go out driving at night with you again any time soon, Michael", Xander joked grimly. "I would have been perfectly content with a movie, a pizza, and maybe dusting a handful of vampires. But fighting the entire bad guy population of the West Coast? Well, I'm not so sure about that. On the whole I think not. As for insisting on demon tail, medium rare - did you see his expression when he flew off? That was one extremely pissed-off demon if I'm not mistaken".

"You should be grateful he didn't stop to argue with us, Xander", Anya told him. "That was no ordinary demon, that was the Great One himself".

"You know him? Who he, then?" Xander asked.

"Why, The Fallen One of course. When I was still a young vengeance demon myself, not more than three or four hundred years old, we never actually spoke his name, but I thought you humans all knew about him".

"She's right, and we do", Giles said shakily, dusting himself off, and gingerly testing his arms and legs for damage. "I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised. After all, when the end of the world comes, you have to expect Satan himself to turn up and join in the fun!"

*

"I thought the end of the world was supposed to be announced with trumpets in the sky and stuff", Xander said. He sounded a trifle disappointed.

"Oh, if it really was the end of all things, then yes", Michael replied. "Everybody would be here, the dead would rise, everything would take place just as written".

"The wailing and gnashing of teeth and everything?"

"The whole works", Michael assured him.

"But it's not due yet, Xander", Willow said. "Don't you understand? That's the whole point. That's why Michael is here - it's not supposed to happen yet, maybe not for aeons. Isn't that right, Michael?"

"I don't know when it *is* scheduled, they haven't told me that, but the end of *this* universe isn't supposed to happen today - 'maybe tomorrow, I just can't say'".

Only Giles caught the Jimi Hendrix quote, and it cheered him up immensely. To find that this messenger from The Powers That Be seemed to have a sense of humour after all made him feel a little better already!

"What about all these characters, then?" Buffy said, waving her hand at the huge crowd of the undead and assorted demons and other creatures that encircled them. "I don't think we'll be able to fight our way through all of them, even with your help - there's just too many".

"Ignore them", Michael said, surprisingly. "Just wave that piece of tail at them".

Buffy gave him a look - her special 'you're kidding me' expression she kept for certain critical occasions.

"Yeah. 'Shake that tail feather, baby'", Spike told her. "They aren't going to get in your way in a hurry, Slayer, believe you me".

"It's got mucho mojo power", Willow said. "Look who it came from".

"OK, OK then. I'll even do my old cheerleader routine if you think it'll help".

"Just hold it up where they can see it, and they'll move back for us", Michael said quietly.

"Right, then. Which way to the end of the Universe?" said Buffy.

Giles pointed into the ruins of the High School where a steadily increasing glow could be seen through the swirling smoke.

"I'd say over there, towards the brightest part", he said. "It looks as if that's where all the action is".

Buffy raised the great barbed end severed from the tail of The Fallen One high above her head, and a huge sigh went through the assembled ranks of Hellspawn. It died away to silence, broken only by distant screams, the faint subsonic rumble of earth tremors, and the subdued roaring sound of all the fires burning everywhere throughout Sunnydale.

"Lead on, MacDuff", said Xander.

"It's 'Lay on, MacDuff' actually", Giles said, and straightened his glasses.

"OK, 'Lead kindly light, then'. Same difference I guess, mister pedantic library man. Just let's get moving - the clock is ticking".

"Or the sands of time are running out, if you'd prefer a classical analogy".

"Yeah. Right. Whatever".

*

They stood at the top of a gigantic pile of rubble which was all that was left of the old Sunnydale High School, looking down into a great burning hollow that seemed to have been excavated in the middle of the ruins. It was like looking into the Pit of Hell itself.

The heat was unbelievable, yet somehow they were not burned by it. The light was unbearably intense, yet somehow they were not blinded by it. They were in the most terrifying place in the whole world, yet they were neither frightened nor fearful. They stood perfectly calm in conditions approximating the centre of a small nuclear explosion, but one that went on and on and on unceasingly. They stood unharmed and unafraid, and they didn't wonder how or why not.

Down in the hollow itself conditions were even more extreme, if that were possible, and at the lowest point of all there was something utterly incomprehensible. Concentrated in a place only a few tens of feet across was an entire universe.

And within that universe something moved.

"It's beautiful", Buffy said, astonished.

"It looks like an egg", Tara said quietly.

"It's a Cosmic Egg. There's a whole other universe in there", Willow told them. "That's what ours looked like just after the Big Bang, except of course ours was spreading out, lickety-split, as fast as it possibly could".

"A whole universe in there? How can it be so small?" Dawn asked.

"Yup, the whole deal, everything from soup to nuts. But it's not going to stay that way for very long", Willow said seriously. "Once that egg makes up its mind it's time to hatch there'll be no stopping it. Isn't that right, Michael?"

He nodded. "That's why we're here, Dawn, and we seem to be only just in time. Once the D'yah Ba'Wuk starts to break through, to create the opening into this universe, we have to stop it immediately. *You* have to stop it. Do you feel ready?"

The girl looked at him steadily, The Spear gripped firmly in both hands. She nodded and then turned her gaze back down into the burning fiery furnace below them.

"What exactly does it look like? Will I even be able to see it?" she asked in a small voice.

"I think we are about to find out".

Something down in the unbelievable glare was moving slowly, a shape within the brightest light, something turning and coiling and uncoiling upon itself. A head? A body? What? Dawn grasped The Spear more firmly and stepped forwards to the rim of the crater. And a piece of broken brick under her foot shifted...


End Of Part Ten. To Be Continued...