Chapter Twenty-Three:
The Poison of Lindsey Spreads
If she hadn't panicked. If only she had not panicked. Things would've been different. Things wouldn't be like they were with Tara three years beforehand. Kennedy wouldn't be coming in and out of reality. Kennedy would still have a soul.
Willow was looking at Kennedy on the ground. She had gone off with Kennedy to a secluded area. That way she could be alone with her unbearable fiasco. Kennedy was staring into space with glazed eyes. No longer could she even speak. Please God let her speak again. Willow would kill a million people to give Kennedy that ability again.
Willow wondered where Kennedy's soul was now that Willow had stolen it from her. That was the worst of it, knowing she had been the cause of it all. The cause of Kennedy's extreme amount of suffering.
"Come back," Willow squeaked. Tears were flowing down her dirt-stained cheeks now, leaving shining paths behind them. "I'll do anything. Just come back." That was when Lindsey appeared in front of her. He was just there. Not there one moment and then there the next. No noisy or dramatic fanfare. Willow jumped backwards and fell on her back in the dirt. Wind was blowing loudly over the crumbling and crumbled buildings alike.
Willow got to a sitting position quickly and looked at Lindsey. She had seen him before, but never like this. The whites of his eyes were now yellow and his pupils pure white. He had no eyebrows and his hair was flowing and fire-engine red. He was in a monk's robe and a grin was playing at the ends of his mouth.
Lindsey slowly turned to look at Kennedy, who was now staring at him. He then turned back to Willow.
"Anything, eh?" Lindsey inquired ominously.
"What are you?" Willow asked as she got to her feet with her mind set on defensive incantations and her arms ready for battle.
"God of an underworld," he stated matter of factly. "I've got some power at my disposal." He then turned and looked down at Kennedy. "You could probably use some of it for your girlfriend situation here."
"What do you mean?"
"You seem idiotic. Don't make me regret coming to you. Figure it out for yourself."
"Y-You can help her?"
"Didn't you see that coming a mile away? I would've predicted it the moment I said that I'd do anything."
"Catch?"
"Always a catch! The catch is that you have to kill Angel."
"No."
Then Willow shrieked. No one could hear it because of the sound barrier Lindsey had set up around them. Willow shrieked as her memories were pulled out for viewing. Giles suffering, Xander suffering, Buffy suffering, herself suffering, her dead fish, and Angelus stalking them all. Filling them all with fear and hatred and distrust.
"YES!" she screamed. "I'll kill him! I'LL KILL THE BASTARD! I'LL KILL HIM!"
"Act casual," Lindsey ordered simply before disappearing. Willow wondered what she had just gotten herself into.
Meanwhile…
Bob was done with the scavenger hunt. It had taken him a bit, but he was done. The wires and the metal and the chips were all in a pile at Lindsey's feet. He had just come back from manipulating Willow.
The construction would begin as soon as Zaerintoleran was back from Australia with the Slayer's body. Lindsey was the only one who wanted to wait until Vinieria was awake before attacking the small group and eliminating it.
"Why don't we just destroy them now?" Illyria had inquired.
"Because they might still pose too much of a threat for us to survive a full on attack."
"There aren't many of them. There are very few of them."
"They have the girl, Ashley. They have Buffy, some other Slayers, and the werewolf. Angel as well. I took care of the problem of him… I hope. And the fact that there was only one emotionally unstable individual in the group is a clear warning to stay away for the moment. Not to mention the zombies. And the commanders and the emperor. They could attack while our backs are turned. What then? We surrender the world to them? There's not a way in Hell that I would allow them to gain control of the situation. I should know." Lindsey then chuckled at his little joke.
That's when the Bolinkodagenat walked up to Lindsey on his throne of rubble with the scared little sister of Buffy Summers. Lindsey smiled. "That's a good job, Bolinkodagenat. Keep it up."
"Oh, my God," Dawn muttered upon seeing Lindsey. "What's going on?" Lindsey leaned in close to Dawn, who was held out to him by the Bolinkodagenat like some trophy.
"Drop her," he ordered and Dawn fell to the topmost stair of the four leading up to Lindsey's throne. She got up and Lindsey could sense her want, her need, to run.
"If you prove that I can't trust you then you'll be in a vice grip for the rest of your very short life. Don't say anything. You don't need to." Dawn's overwhelming belief in Buffy coming to save her was annoying. He didn't sense the thought of her fighting for herself anywhere in that jumbled mess of thoughts that was Dawn's mind.
"Why did you bring me here?" she asked, not following the one rule Lindsey had set for her. He didn't care.
"Remember Glory, Dawn?" Lindsey said with a smile. Dawn's eyes widened in apprehension. Lindsey couldn't help but chuckle. "I'm sorry, but Glory's work will be finished tonight, Key."
"B-B-But I thought…"
"You thought what Glory thought. She never did her homework efficiently. With the right ritual and the right placement you can be used at any time I want to use you. Since you've only eight hours to live I suggest you enjoy it. Now run along and stay close. You'll be experiencing extreme pain soon after you wander too far away. Take my word for it. I'll play with you as morbidly as Leatherface with his victims." He then smiled. "Neither of us wants that now do we?"
Dawn stood where she was for the moment, disbelieving. She thought her mind was being toyed with for their sadistic pleasures.
"Run along." She still stood anchored to where she was.
"Run along!" he snapped. That broke her entrancement and she took off down the center of the alley covered on both sides by Venacklondages and Jarlkarlones.
It was at that time that Buffy realized that Dawn was missing. A futile search party was organized shortly thereafter and so much energy was wasted as they scanned much of the surrounding wreckage with much help from Ashley. Even after all of the search party trekked back to the resting area and to the wounded Buffy kept searching without the scanning aid of Ashley. Her cries for Dawn were heard throughout the darkening city as Dawn's time of death drew ever closer.
Zaerintoleran was back with the body of Claire and the construction of Vinieria had been completed. The beautiful dead body of Claire was clad in sheet metal with wires shooting out from her spinal cord. Each of these wires was connected to a small computer. Each of these computers was filled with the parts that the Jarlkarlones and Bob had come up with. They were regular supercomputers. Each one shot information into the at the moment inactive brain of the Slayer's body.
Dawn had been wandering by the collapsed building that Angel and company had gone through so much in so very recently. The hotel that Angel had been hung in and Angelus had been unleashed in. She had been wandering by that building when Lindsey appeared in front of her and escorted her back to the center of his domain. She hadn't gone willingly but Lindsey overpowered her to the extreme. She was given some marks on her head with black ink and clad in a robe. She had been forced to do this by not only Lindsey but Illyria and Bob.
Her belief in Buffy was still abundant and Lindsey didn't feel like shattering that belief no matter how annoying it was. A pain in his ass. A thorn in his side.
The Jarlkarlones had created a small camber not too far underground. In this chamber hung suspended by the ceiling was an equilateral triangle with its tip pointing up. It was the size of a good-sized house's roof.
Below that were two slopes. One on one side and one on the other. Both would carry Dawn' blood down to the center where the portal would open. Also at the center was the metal woman that had appeared in Gunn's dreams. Her awakening was a major turning point in the war and many others all across the world had dreamed of her like Gunn had because of the pure energy that was pressing against the barriers of reality to allow this to happen.
Dawn would lay down on the catwalk of the triangle's tip and she would be cut. Lindsey wouldn't bother with the shallow cuts of before because the shorter the gates were down the better. They had so many demons on guard to slaughter the unwanted demons to come through the open gates, but if there were enough coming through they wouldn't be able to hold their ground and the demons would leak into the world and create havoc and chaos that Lindsey wanted to create.
So Dawn would be practically stabbed, not cut. Lucky for Dawn she didn't know this. Otherwise she would've struggled so much more.
Lindsey led her to the point where she had to lay down and let her lay down herself. Her eyes were watering and her thoughts were trailing to Spike and Willow and Xander. Her faith in Buffy was dwindling.
This inspired sympathy from Lindsey. He hadn't wanted to kill someone like this, but the ends justified the means.
"I'm truly sorry for this," Lindsey whispered into her ear as he kneeled down on the small catwalk they were on. "Close your eyes."
"No," Dawn stated as she shook her head rapidly. "Buffy!"
"Be quiet, Dawn." "I want to see Buffy," Dawn whined. "I want to see them all again."
"You will." He wasn't lying. There was an afterlife and they would all be reunited in it. "Close your eyes."
"I don't wanna!" she screamed. She began to struggle. So Lindsey did the only thing he could do to stop her struggling: he stabbed her right in the stomach. So much of her blood had been drained in the slashing she had endured before by glass, but there was enough left to open the gates long enough for the entrance of who Lindsey wanted to enter this dimension. She gulped and looked calmly down at her butcher knife-impaled stomach. Blood was coming up and out of the wound. It was then that the reality of the situation hit her. She was going to die.
Lindsey tore the knife out of her and then plunged it back down in between her breasts. He slit down to the first stab wound. Blood gushed forth and Dawn began to feel less pain. She began to accept her death as an inevitability. She feared it yet she didn't fear it. She looked down the stone triangle's right slope and saw the blood dribbling down to the bottom and over the edge. She looked to the left and saw the same thing. The rock was very smooth and the cave was very red. The body of Claire, all clothed in metal, was beyond her sight, but the wires and computers were in clear sight. She knew this was some sick combination of science and magic.
There were several Jarlkarlones stationed all over the multi-storied chamber. She was in extreme pain. She couldn't formulate words. She looked to the gigantic main entrance of stairs and watched as Buffy ran down them to save her. She was covered in demon blood and looking as beautiful as ever. She didn't even care that was just a hallucination. Buffy was there and Dawn mouthed her appreciation of all the times her older sister had saved her life. She mouthed her apologies and she mouthed her sadness at not seeing Buffy through her horrible depression. She mouthed everything as she died with no help coming.
She heard a rumbling as the gates opened. Lindsey stood up with his odd eyes looking down upon her with great pity. He then took off and ran to the stair well that led down through the stories. He reached the bottom and stared at the gate which was splashing silver light all over the walls.
There was fighting going on now. She heard it dimly. Demons fighting demons.
Then she heard Lindsey scream in ecstasy. Dawn looked down at him. His yellow and white
eyes now filled with concern as his smile faded.
A horrible ghost crossed her vision. It destroyed her sanity in a single blow upon her sighting of it. Then it disappeared and she heard a screaming. A female's screaming. Then someone else shouting for the gates to be closed. To close the gates.
One of Illyria's tentacles reached upwards and wrapped around Dawn's head. The last thing Dawn had seen was the grin on Lindsey's face. Then her head was crushed like a watermelon and her heart stopped its pumping as her body slowly shut down.
Dawn Summers, sister of Buffy Summers, was dead.
Meanwhile…
"Vinieria!" Lindsey shouted at the body of Claire laying in the pool of blood. He rushed forth with his arms outstretched. He wanted to hug his old love. He hadn't seen her in so long.
She looked at him and then smiled.
"Oh, Lucifer," she sighed. "You're the only guy who would go through all of this to get me back."
"I know," Lindsey, possessed by Lucifer, replied. "I love you."
"I love you, too." The devil embraced his love through his human shell and all was good for him as Buffy continued her search on the other side of town.
666
Hey, MorbidMan here. Sorry to fans of Dawn, but I needed to kill her to get this story's finale rolling. Can any of you believe this story's already over 210 pages long on Microsoft Words? Longest thing I've ever written thus far in my fifteen years of existence.
Anyway, that's it for my weekly update. Not much left of the story, now. Some flashy battles, some deaths, some of a lot of stuff. While there's not much story left to cover--in comparison to how much of the story has already been covered--there'll probably be many more chapters. Hope you all enjoy each and every one of them. Goodbye.
"Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Dr. Mierzwiak: Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage. But it's on a par with a night of drinking. Nothing you'll miss." - Joel's concerned "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
The Poison of Lindsey Spreads
If she hadn't panicked. If only she had not panicked. Things would've been different. Things wouldn't be like they were with Tara three years beforehand. Kennedy wouldn't be coming in and out of reality. Kennedy would still have a soul.
Willow was looking at Kennedy on the ground. She had gone off with Kennedy to a secluded area. That way she could be alone with her unbearable fiasco. Kennedy was staring into space with glazed eyes. No longer could she even speak. Please God let her speak again. Willow would kill a million people to give Kennedy that ability again.
Willow wondered where Kennedy's soul was now that Willow had stolen it from her. That was the worst of it, knowing she had been the cause of it all. The cause of Kennedy's extreme amount of suffering.
"Come back," Willow squeaked. Tears were flowing down her dirt-stained cheeks now, leaving shining paths behind them. "I'll do anything. Just come back." That was when Lindsey appeared in front of her. He was just there. Not there one moment and then there the next. No noisy or dramatic fanfare. Willow jumped backwards and fell on her back in the dirt. Wind was blowing loudly over the crumbling and crumbled buildings alike.
Willow got to a sitting position quickly and looked at Lindsey. She had seen him before, but never like this. The whites of his eyes were now yellow and his pupils pure white. He had no eyebrows and his hair was flowing and fire-engine red. He was in a monk's robe and a grin was playing at the ends of his mouth.
Lindsey slowly turned to look at Kennedy, who was now staring at him. He then turned back to Willow.
"Anything, eh?" Lindsey inquired ominously.
"What are you?" Willow asked as she got to her feet with her mind set on defensive incantations and her arms ready for battle.
"God of an underworld," he stated matter of factly. "I've got some power at my disposal." He then turned and looked down at Kennedy. "You could probably use some of it for your girlfriend situation here."
"What do you mean?"
"You seem idiotic. Don't make me regret coming to you. Figure it out for yourself."
"Y-You can help her?"
"Didn't you see that coming a mile away? I would've predicted it the moment I said that I'd do anything."
"Catch?"
"Always a catch! The catch is that you have to kill Angel."
"No."
Then Willow shrieked. No one could hear it because of the sound barrier Lindsey had set up around them. Willow shrieked as her memories were pulled out for viewing. Giles suffering, Xander suffering, Buffy suffering, herself suffering, her dead fish, and Angelus stalking them all. Filling them all with fear and hatred and distrust.
"YES!" she screamed. "I'll kill him! I'LL KILL THE BASTARD! I'LL KILL HIM!"
"Act casual," Lindsey ordered simply before disappearing. Willow wondered what she had just gotten herself into.
Meanwhile…
Bob was done with the scavenger hunt. It had taken him a bit, but he was done. The wires and the metal and the chips were all in a pile at Lindsey's feet. He had just come back from manipulating Willow.
The construction would begin as soon as Zaerintoleran was back from Australia with the Slayer's body. Lindsey was the only one who wanted to wait until Vinieria was awake before attacking the small group and eliminating it.
"Why don't we just destroy them now?" Illyria had inquired.
"Because they might still pose too much of a threat for us to survive a full on attack."
"There aren't many of them. There are very few of them."
"They have the girl, Ashley. They have Buffy, some other Slayers, and the werewolf. Angel as well. I took care of the problem of him… I hope. And the fact that there was only one emotionally unstable individual in the group is a clear warning to stay away for the moment. Not to mention the zombies. And the commanders and the emperor. They could attack while our backs are turned. What then? We surrender the world to them? There's not a way in Hell that I would allow them to gain control of the situation. I should know." Lindsey then chuckled at his little joke.
That's when the Bolinkodagenat walked up to Lindsey on his throne of rubble with the scared little sister of Buffy Summers. Lindsey smiled. "That's a good job, Bolinkodagenat. Keep it up."
"Oh, my God," Dawn muttered upon seeing Lindsey. "What's going on?" Lindsey leaned in close to Dawn, who was held out to him by the Bolinkodagenat like some trophy.
"Drop her," he ordered and Dawn fell to the topmost stair of the four leading up to Lindsey's throne. She got up and Lindsey could sense her want, her need, to run.
"If you prove that I can't trust you then you'll be in a vice grip for the rest of your very short life. Don't say anything. You don't need to." Dawn's overwhelming belief in Buffy coming to save her was annoying. He didn't sense the thought of her fighting for herself anywhere in that jumbled mess of thoughts that was Dawn's mind.
"Why did you bring me here?" she asked, not following the one rule Lindsey had set for her. He didn't care.
"Remember Glory, Dawn?" Lindsey said with a smile. Dawn's eyes widened in apprehension. Lindsey couldn't help but chuckle. "I'm sorry, but Glory's work will be finished tonight, Key."
"B-B-But I thought…"
"You thought what Glory thought. She never did her homework efficiently. With the right ritual and the right placement you can be used at any time I want to use you. Since you've only eight hours to live I suggest you enjoy it. Now run along and stay close. You'll be experiencing extreme pain soon after you wander too far away. Take my word for it. I'll play with you as morbidly as Leatherface with his victims." He then smiled. "Neither of us wants that now do we?"
Dawn stood where she was for the moment, disbelieving. She thought her mind was being toyed with for their sadistic pleasures.
"Run along." She still stood anchored to where she was.
"Run along!" he snapped. That broke her entrancement and she took off down the center of the alley covered on both sides by Venacklondages and Jarlkarlones.
It was at that time that Buffy realized that Dawn was missing. A futile search party was organized shortly thereafter and so much energy was wasted as they scanned much of the surrounding wreckage with much help from Ashley. Even after all of the search party trekked back to the resting area and to the wounded Buffy kept searching without the scanning aid of Ashley. Her cries for Dawn were heard throughout the darkening city as Dawn's time of death drew ever closer.
Zaerintoleran was back with the body of Claire and the construction of Vinieria had been completed. The beautiful dead body of Claire was clad in sheet metal with wires shooting out from her spinal cord. Each of these wires was connected to a small computer. Each of these computers was filled with the parts that the Jarlkarlones and Bob had come up with. They were regular supercomputers. Each one shot information into the at the moment inactive brain of the Slayer's body.
Dawn had been wandering by the collapsed building that Angel and company had gone through so much in so very recently. The hotel that Angel had been hung in and Angelus had been unleashed in. She had been wandering by that building when Lindsey appeared in front of her and escorted her back to the center of his domain. She hadn't gone willingly but Lindsey overpowered her to the extreme. She was given some marks on her head with black ink and clad in a robe. She had been forced to do this by not only Lindsey but Illyria and Bob.
Her belief in Buffy was still abundant and Lindsey didn't feel like shattering that belief no matter how annoying it was. A pain in his ass. A thorn in his side.
The Jarlkarlones had created a small camber not too far underground. In this chamber hung suspended by the ceiling was an equilateral triangle with its tip pointing up. It was the size of a good-sized house's roof.
Below that were two slopes. One on one side and one on the other. Both would carry Dawn' blood down to the center where the portal would open. Also at the center was the metal woman that had appeared in Gunn's dreams. Her awakening was a major turning point in the war and many others all across the world had dreamed of her like Gunn had because of the pure energy that was pressing against the barriers of reality to allow this to happen.
Dawn would lay down on the catwalk of the triangle's tip and she would be cut. Lindsey wouldn't bother with the shallow cuts of before because the shorter the gates were down the better. They had so many demons on guard to slaughter the unwanted demons to come through the open gates, but if there were enough coming through they wouldn't be able to hold their ground and the demons would leak into the world and create havoc and chaos that Lindsey wanted to create.
So Dawn would be practically stabbed, not cut. Lucky for Dawn she didn't know this. Otherwise she would've struggled so much more.
Lindsey led her to the point where she had to lay down and let her lay down herself. Her eyes were watering and her thoughts were trailing to Spike and Willow and Xander. Her faith in Buffy was dwindling.
This inspired sympathy from Lindsey. He hadn't wanted to kill someone like this, but the ends justified the means.
"I'm truly sorry for this," Lindsey whispered into her ear as he kneeled down on the small catwalk they were on. "Close your eyes."
"No," Dawn stated as she shook her head rapidly. "Buffy!"
"Be quiet, Dawn." "I want to see Buffy," Dawn whined. "I want to see them all again."
"You will." He wasn't lying. There was an afterlife and they would all be reunited in it. "Close your eyes."
"I don't wanna!" she screamed. She began to struggle. So Lindsey did the only thing he could do to stop her struggling: he stabbed her right in the stomach. So much of her blood had been drained in the slashing she had endured before by glass, but there was enough left to open the gates long enough for the entrance of who Lindsey wanted to enter this dimension. She gulped and looked calmly down at her butcher knife-impaled stomach. Blood was coming up and out of the wound. It was then that the reality of the situation hit her. She was going to die.
Lindsey tore the knife out of her and then plunged it back down in between her breasts. He slit down to the first stab wound. Blood gushed forth and Dawn began to feel less pain. She began to accept her death as an inevitability. She feared it yet she didn't fear it. She looked down the stone triangle's right slope and saw the blood dribbling down to the bottom and over the edge. She looked to the left and saw the same thing. The rock was very smooth and the cave was very red. The body of Claire, all clothed in metal, was beyond her sight, but the wires and computers were in clear sight. She knew this was some sick combination of science and magic.
There were several Jarlkarlones stationed all over the multi-storied chamber. She was in extreme pain. She couldn't formulate words. She looked to the gigantic main entrance of stairs and watched as Buffy ran down them to save her. She was covered in demon blood and looking as beautiful as ever. She didn't even care that was just a hallucination. Buffy was there and Dawn mouthed her appreciation of all the times her older sister had saved her life. She mouthed her apologies and she mouthed her sadness at not seeing Buffy through her horrible depression. She mouthed everything as she died with no help coming.
She heard a rumbling as the gates opened. Lindsey stood up with his odd eyes looking down upon her with great pity. He then took off and ran to the stair well that led down through the stories. He reached the bottom and stared at the gate which was splashing silver light all over the walls.
There was fighting going on now. She heard it dimly. Demons fighting demons.
Then she heard Lindsey scream in ecstasy. Dawn looked down at him. His yellow and white
eyes now filled with concern as his smile faded.
A horrible ghost crossed her vision. It destroyed her sanity in a single blow upon her sighting of it. Then it disappeared and she heard a screaming. A female's screaming. Then someone else shouting for the gates to be closed. To close the gates.
One of Illyria's tentacles reached upwards and wrapped around Dawn's head. The last thing Dawn had seen was the grin on Lindsey's face. Then her head was crushed like a watermelon and her heart stopped its pumping as her body slowly shut down.
Dawn Summers, sister of Buffy Summers, was dead.
Meanwhile…
"Vinieria!" Lindsey shouted at the body of Claire laying in the pool of blood. He rushed forth with his arms outstretched. He wanted to hug his old love. He hadn't seen her in so long.
She looked at him and then smiled.
"Oh, Lucifer," she sighed. "You're the only guy who would go through all of this to get me back."
"I know," Lindsey, possessed by Lucifer, replied. "I love you."
"I love you, too." The devil embraced his love through his human shell and all was good for him as Buffy continued her search on the other side of town.
666
Hey, MorbidMan here. Sorry to fans of Dawn, but I needed to kill her to get this story's finale rolling. Can any of you believe this story's already over 210 pages long on Microsoft Words? Longest thing I've ever written thus far in my fifteen years of existence.
Anyway, that's it for my weekly update. Not much left of the story, now. Some flashy battles, some deaths, some of a lot of stuff. While there's not much story left to cover--in comparison to how much of the story has already been covered--there'll probably be many more chapters. Hope you all enjoy each and every one of them. Goodbye.
"Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Dr. Mierzwiak: Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage. But it's on a par with a night of drinking. Nothing you'll miss." - Joel's concerned "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"