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"Huh."
Spike stared at the sheer stone wall in front of him. "'At's not gonna work."
He put an experimental hand to one of the joints.
Hmm...
It wasn't really smooth. You know, compared to a pyramid. A knife could get through, probably. But there was no way in heaven or hell that he would be able to climb it up to the tiny window above him.
He'd been around the base a couple times, just to make sure there wasn't a door. There wasn't. And he couldn't climb it. And unless Buffy had gone through a drastic change in hairstyle since he'd last seen her, the traditional method wouldn't work too well either.
Oh well. He'd never been much for traditionalists. He turned his head upward.
"Oi, Slayer! Let down your bleedin' hair!!"
There was a pregnant silence. Spike cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Slayer," he bellowed upwards, "do you hear me? Slayer! Slayer! Slayer! Slayer! Slayer! Slayer!"
A blonde head appeared in the window high above him.
"Shut up!" she yelled, faintly but clearly. "I hear you!"
Good. She's safe. Pleasant as ever, but safe.
"Well excuse a comely prince tryin' to go about his duty, pet! You don't happen to have a fire ladder up there with you, by any chance?!"
"What?!"
"I said, You don't happen to have--"
"Whatever, Spike! Just get me out of this stupid thing!"
"Right," he muttered to himself. "Better get right on that. Silly me, not thinking of it before. Get her down. It's so simple."
He craned his neck back up to look at her.
"Any suggestions?"
"What??"
"HOW, LUV??"
"You're the knight! You figure it out!"
The head dissappeared.
Spike uncraned his neck. "One solution comes to mind," he grumped. "Bloody stupid little scenario. Bleedin' obvious symbolism..."
He looked around him for anything he could use to reach the pretty pretty princess.
...A lot of grass.
"This in't gonna work."
@@@
"How could this possibly work? There's no way he's gonna get up here!"
Vadas calmly watched Buffy pace her prison. "Then perhaps you should help him."
She spun. "How? There isn't anything here that even resembles rope."
She recieved another one of the long, measuring looks she was quickly growing accustomed to. "This is your mind."
"Yeah. And I'm trapped here! Remember?? Repunzel Bar--." She stopped. "Why do you keep saying that? Are you just naturally irritating, or is it a cryptic wise man thing?"
"Oi, Slayer! Let down your bleedin' hair!!"
Buffy winced at the dulcet tones of her knight errant. "God, could he be more obnoxious?"
"But you love him, correct?"
"Yeah, of course I do. He's still annoying." She crossed the the window and leaned out.
"Shut up! I hear you!"
She could just make out his mouth opening and closing from where he stood at the base of her tower. Spike's in the sunshine. Pretty Spike.
What's he saying?
"What??"
"I said, you don't happen to have--"
"Whatever, Spike! Just get me out of this stupid thing!" She watched him
gesture to himself on the ground. He's so sexy when he's pissed off. That
must be why I do it. He yelled again, incoherently.
"What??" she screamed.
"How, luv?!"
"You're the knight! You figure it out!"
She pulled her head back inside the window. "Some knight he is. Can't even save the princess."
"Actually," Dorjan corrected amiably, "Repunzel wasn't a princess; she was she was the daughter of a peasant," came the serene reply. "The princess was the one that couldn't stand the pressure of a pea through a dozen mattresses. Repunzel was of a heartier breed."
"Isn't it cool what not inbreeding will do for your genes?" Buffy muttered off-handedly, still contemplating the not-getting-or-going-anywhere vampire outside.
She stopped.
"Outside. Spike's outside, in the sunshine." She turned to the brunette. "This place doesn't necessarily follow the rules of the real world, does it?"
"It is your mind," he repeated his reminder from earlier.
"And you keep saying that. It's my mind. Can I control the environment?"
Dojan Vadas quirked his lip. "That really all depends. How much control do you have?"
"What does that mean?"
"Very few people have more than a slight modicum of control over the workings of their own heads. To exhert it, your will must not only be strong, but focused.
"Oh, I'm totally focused."
"You are," Vadas repeated, eyebrow raised. "And yet somehow you cannot gather the initiative to escape this tower."
Buffy opened her mouth to reply, but was cut off by a blood-curdling roar from outside.
She ran to the window. "That was not Spike."
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"Uh..."
Spike was almost positive the dragon hadn't been there two minutes ago. Honestly, the sky had been clear last time he looked. But it was there now, and blocking out the sun with it's bulk. Pretty much the size of the tower, hunkered over in classic 'threatening vulture' posture, it was shaped more like a bat than anything. Nothing lizardlike about it but for the black scales covering it's body.
And it was looking at Spike.
"This is not good," he muttered unnecessarily, looking for an escape. The forty-foot bat cocked it's massive head at him. It growled.
Spike squinted up at it. "Heh. Niiiiice dragon." He patted his pockets. "Probably go a milk bone somewh--"
"Gryarrrrrrrrrrrr!"
"Right, that's it. Slayer!! Get your arse down 'ere!"
@@@
A leathery wing whipped by the window as the creature lunged, and Buffy jumped back.
"Oh my God! Spike! What the hell is that thing? No, I know what it is, it's a fifty-foot reptilian bat!" She turned terrified eyes to the man reclining on her pallet. "Did I do that?"
"Of course not. That's the demon."
"The demon?"
"Your demon."
*Grayayarrrrrrrngh!*
"Slayer! Buff--!"
"Oh, God, it's gonna kill him! It's gonna--"
"Probably," Dorjan Vadas cut in. "It will kill him." Buffy looked up sharply, and he favored her with another smirk.
"What are you going to do about it?"
Another roar sounded from bel--ouside.
Buffy looked to the window. She started forward, and stopped, just like she had every other time she had attempted to escape.
"Come along," Vadas groused. "Can you not even--"
There was a riiiip.
Most of Buffy's skirt fell to the floor.
"Oh."
She shook out the folds and tore at the ankle length slip until it had been brutally hemmed.
Then, with a salute to the gaping Vadas, she took a running leap out the window.
@@@
Desperately dodging the claws of the gargantuan, flailing demon, Spike missed Buffy's swan dive off the tower. Again.
But it was fairly impossible to miss the creature's screech of pain. Spike looked up, and up.
"Buffy!"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was clinging to one of the demon's earflaps, kicking it in the head whenever its frantic flailing brought her into range.
"Oh, sh--" He ran to avoid a clawed fist the size of an elevator, then launched himself at it at the last moment.
I'm insane. He scrambled as high as he could on the eerily reptilian wrist while the demon was distracted by the Slayer swinging from his ear.
Then, with a muffled curse, he vamped and buried his fangs as far as he could into the meaty flesh on the underside of it's limb.
Buffy gasped as the demon roared in fury, nearly blacking out at the sound explosion. The only reason she didn't fall off was the sudden cessation of head shaking from the beast. She cautiously opened an eye.
The demon had brought his wrist close to his face, and was watching with interest as ...Spike drank it's blood?
"Spike!" What the hell is he doing?? The vampre looked up, and stared at her for a second, dark blue blood oozing from his mouth. Then he realized where he was, and leapt from his perch into the thing's face.
The demon roared again and frantically shook its head, sending Buffy flying in another wild circle. She clung for dear life Oh God. I think I'm gonna hurl.
"Slayer! Hang on!" There was another roar from the beast, then "No, Buffy, let go! Let go!"
Buffy emerged from her panicked, near regurgitative state long enough to register the order and dismiss it as idiocy. She was nearly fifty feet in the air! That was not a fun way to go.
"Slayer! Now!"
Uhn-uh. No way.
"DO IT!!"
With a mental curse for her own status as love's bitch, Buffy let go.
Oh, hell, she actually did it, was Spike's first thought when he saw Buffy plummeting towards the ground. He'd counted on a couple seconds of hesitation on her part when he'd timed it out, just before he'd plunged his armour shard knife into the demon's eye up to his own elbow.
Buffy was still dropping like a stone. Spike did the only thing a gentleman could do.
He jumped after her.