Just a brief note before the chapter to apologize for the repeated deleting
and re-posting I've been doing—for some reason ff.net isn't reading the
formatting correctly, and keeps dropping the chapter in without any spaces
between paragraphs. Being a firm believer in paragraphs, I've felt the
need to sort out the problem. Let me know if it's still being all weird,
though I think it's ok now. Enjoy!
--- The Protecting Veil
—
Part Two: Voices
—
Buffy smiled at the figure in front of her on the road a moment, for a moment welling up with the same kind of feelings she'd had when she first found him again, all those years ago. A sort of sweetness filled the air as she felt her breath slowing and the soft humidity of the night clung to her skin.
It was good. It was good to see his familiar face, eyebrow cocked as if all the world were a great, cynical joke. The face that never changed no matter how many years went by.
And he smiled back-- a dark smile. His smiles were always tinged with dark things, even now, when he seemed more sure of the light than anything else-- more sure and stable and comfortable in this their shared battle than she had even been in her childhood. And he looked inspired as he stared across at her. He looked fascinated by the sight of her.
He always looked at her that way. Occasionally she would watch him, watching her, over their campfires. She tried to read things in his eyes, but didn't have the language to interpret them. His eyes were glittering as they always did, with humor he alone understood.
And then he swayed forward, wincing as the wave of pain struck him.
"Spike--" she said, rushing forward to catch him by the forearms. But he righted himself before she approached.
"S'allright, lamb," he said, turning his shoulder to her, exposing the wound to her line of vision, "But would you mind?"
Blood was running down his back from the imbedded stake. Buffy winced.
"Let me get that," she responded, pulling on his arm gently, "Sit down here."
Looking at the wound, she slung her pack off of her shoulders, and reached into it, searching through the clutter for bandages.
"You should be more careful," she said softly, as she pushed aside her flint and sharpening stones, and some cured meat she'd traded for further up north. When she found the bandages, she unfurled them, long and soft white in the darkness.
The queen anne's lace clustered about them, nodding in the soft breezes, and the roadside dust swirled up with the remains of the vampires, swirling about the flowery heads like mist on a lake.
"I am careful."
She raised her eyebrow, and, even facing away from him, he seemed to sense it.
"Well I'm as careful as you are..."
She remained silent as she slid her hand gently under the fabric of his shirt, across the cool skin and the trailing ridges of his spine. They were sticky with blood. In the time before-- in the time of hair dye, warm showers, and friends who breathed, it would have been intensely uncomfortable to her to touch him like this. But now it was just touching, and she hardly thought of his blood save for to think of what she was going to use to clean it off.
"Look at that..." she said, distracted, tearing away the ruined fabric and bracing his shoulder with one hand, "It's like you think you're immortal or something... ready?"
"For you, always," he responded, dryly.
She wrapped a hand around the exposed wood, pushed on his shoulder, and in one, sharp motion, wrenched the stake free. He jolted with the motion, and held the pain at bay with a clenched jaw. She pressed the remains of the dark shirt to the wound, to staunch the bleeding.
Stretching a long length of the bandage out, she tore it to the length she wanted. Laying a hand, gently, on his back, she looked at him, facing away from her, staring off into the night, calmly.
"You were cornered," she said quietly. He made no reply.
She wrapped the bandages, tightly and efficiently, where the bleeding had already begun to slow, spreading across the woven cotton in spreading red pools that reminded her of many things she'd rather forget.
"You were careless..."
He looked down, where he plucked a sprig of the white wildflower. The black center stood out against the intricate patterns of the petals, and he saw each one in detail. The pain melted away as he looked at it, listened to the softness of her voice, felt the smooth outline of her hand against his skin, spreading warmth across the plane of his back.
And he saw with the Other sight-- the Dawn sight, the Key sight. He saw the leaves quivering under the waves of energy flowing around them in thin eddies. He saw the petals against his hand, the light weaving in and out around them. He remembered the touch of her hand in his-- the strange symbols flowing from her hands to the page like wild birds flying from the branches.
The dream clung around him still in the darkness. It persisted in his mind, in the glowing patterns around him. It thrilled beneath his skin, where the light's living presence was wild and agitated, swirling through his blood like the road-dust in the wind around them. It made everything seem misty, unreal. He tried to cut through it, focus on Buffy's voice, as she had continued talking to him, and he'd lost the words to his thoughts.
"You were surrounded, weren't you?"
Her voice was quietly questioning with that bold directness she'd developed over the years. If they were hard before, her edges were steel now. And yet she trusted him and fought with him. If she left, she always came back again. They were connected, in a way deeper than he could explain or understand. It was like the way he was bound to Dawn-- to the Key-light that twisted in his veins. Something more than words, for him.
She was a woman, grown and proud and powerful. She was statuesque, bold-- a thousand times more dangerous than she was before.
Spike loved her.
"How'd they get around you?" she pressed on, voice direct, yet undemanding, as she finished the binding and fastened in place with care, "I know you better than that."
He turned, looked at her, and her hand slid to his forearm. She smiled a closed lipped smile to him, faintly.
"They caught me sleeping," he said tersely.
Her brow furrowed slightly and she dropped her hand from where it lay to her knee. He splayed his hand against the ground, looking at something she couldn't see-- hadn't seen no matter how hard she tried.
There was once. Once, she thought she saw it on him, flitting across his shoulders in a green flash. But no more. She had begun to wonder what it was he'd experienced-- if this was a way to make whatever it was into something comforting. Because everything in her told her Dawn was dead. It was the cold lead weight in her stomach that never left her.
"Wager she wouldn't let me wake 'till she'd said her piece..." he said quietly, confirming her thoughts.
"Dawn..." she whispered, her hazel eyes tinged with something sad.
Suddenly, she didn't want to talk about it further.
She rose then, and offered her hand to him to help him up. It was red with his blood.
Buffy watched him looking at it-- seemingly startled, eyes searching through the blood and her small fingers as if there was an answer in the gesture.
And as he took it, his hand closing over his own blood, the parallel and the memory of the dream moved in his mind.
—
The rushing of the river was a constant companion as they walked together down the bank. Willows arched over them, the vines falling into the trailing water and flowing with the current. Buffy could smell the grass, and the damp earth-smells of the countryside. Here and there, the foundations of old buildings thrust through the ground like half completed thoughts. They were worn over by dirt and grass. The new world was firmly taking root over them. It had been several hours since they'd reached the first farm, the fat cows grazing idly in the fields, beating at the black flies with their tails. In the distance there was corn, rising taller than Buffy stood, growing straight and high in neat rows.
The world was adjusting. Seasons made rhythms the world understood, and the people had started to adapt with tenacity that sometimes amazed her.
Pale light moved over the countryside, the sloping plains winked with it, and the wide, fat flow of water reflected it.
It was quiet, save for the call of the flitting birds in the night, and the rush of that water, and their footfalls as they walked in companionable silence.
It was good to have him back. It was times like this, when she returned, that she wondered how she could ever have left. When she first found him at that New England campus, she had no plan in her mind as to what she'd do afterward. It was just finding him that was important, and the rest would attend to itself. Finding him meant she was someone who had someone-- someone who *was* someone. And it had largely been true. She wouldn't want to go back to the way it was before that.
But she had that restlessness of spirit that had grown in her over the years-- the voice that said 'wander'. After so long in the dark, after Willow fell to that factory floor. After the other vampire she'd known and befriended, traveled with and killed-- it was a voice that needed solitude. If she was going to be herself, she needed to be more than just the companion of the vampire. She needed to be the Slayer. She who walks alone.
The voice moved most restlessly when he seemed most distant to her. He was engrossed in his green world beyond the world she knew-- his phantoms in the air that she didn't see. He wore it-- and the strange sense of purpose it gave him-- with the same ease and confidence that he'd worn the duster.
Sometimes she was afraid that she'd leave one day, and be unable to find him again. But they both made heavy trails through the wilderness, to the eyes of their own. She wasn't prone to flights of poetry, not now, but she thought she could almost sense where his footsteps had fallen.
Spike broke her chain of thought, suddenly speaking through the silence.
"You kill anything interesting while you were gone?"
She shrugged.
"Same old stuff, mostly."
As they passed over a rise, she stretched out her right arm, flexing the fingers. She'd taken a strong hit to the shoulder from the vampire, at the base of the hillside, before she'd taken it. She was only thirty five, but she was beginning to feel a stiffness in her joints she wasn't used to. The years of constant stress were starting to take their toll, and as he watched her flex the arm, work out the shooting pains, she saw that they both knew it.
"How is that?" he asked, quietly concerned.
He knew it-- the Slayer was meant to burn brightly, not long. Ironically, she'd lived far longer than she might have if she'd saved the world. Nothing tried to destroy a universe that had already fallen, and the threats that faced her were always immediate, not global. And he would bear the burden with her, and the title, which had settled into something familiar to him over the years.
The days of hell gods were long buried and behind them.
But he knew it as he saw her. Not yet, no-- but soon. Or what soon was to someone who'd lived as long as he had. She was breaking down. Muscles coming apart with intense use, joints strained. Accelerated strength, accelerated healing. But over time the strength took its inward toll with the impact of the blows, and as the cells repaired themselves and repaired themselves again, how long would it be before she might fall to hidden cancers? It was the enemy within that haunted her, that would defeat her in the end. And they both knew it, and didn't talk about it as they walked.
"It giving you trouble?"
She let her arm drop to her side.
"I'm fine."
He cleared his throat and began again, trying to make sense of everything in his mind.
"She spoke to me, today."
Buffy looked away, across the fields, and they kept walking, where the riverbank met a worn road. Clusters of houses began to spring up here and there, built on the foundations of older buildings that had collapsed in that long ago apocalypse.
"She said... she said you'd fall, three times, before the end. Can't make sense of it."
Buffy looked down. The earth clung to her boots, in spatters of mud and dust. River-smoothed stones scattered the side of the road, and the sound of the water was soft and quiet around them. They climbed a hill in silence before he continued again.
"The way it sounded... Buffy, I don't know if I want to make sense of it..."
It hurt to hear him speak of her, somehow, even beyond the words. There was something in her-- that strong voice that was her own voice-- but the one within her that mocked her always. It was that voice that said it couldn't be true. And she was dimly aware of how desperately, somehow, she wanted to believe what that voice said.
"Look--" Buffy said, breaking the conversation apart like a bone.
As they reached the crest of the swell, they could see a large wall of carved stones in the distance, rising tall and high and powerful upon a high hill. And beyond it, fruit trees and arbors of green. growing things. And beyond these stood the broad walls of a vast and strong building, with grey towers and long cloisters carved out of stone. Around the wall hundreds of buildings clustered, thickly settled against the small alleys giving entrance between them. The soft, predawn light silhouetted them against a pale, nighttime sky.
She began to move ahead of him, and he trailed behind, watching, settling into the background as they headed up to the great house on the hill.
—
As the predawn glow swelled to its greatest in the sky, Buffy slipped past the heavy doors of the open gate, and into the convent gardens.
The buildings pressing so close on either side-- so close she could almost touch the walls on either side if she stretched her arms wide, were suffocating to her. And the people-- scores of people, moving and trading, and working and going out to the fields. They were taking advantage of the greater light, of the beginning of what they called their day.
It was vaguely nauseating to her, to be there in the crowds. She was used to open spaces now. She wanted hills and trees around her. She was most comfortable sleeping on the hard earth.
The garden was a relief to her overloaded senses. It looked empty. But she knew Spike was nearby, watching her, unseen. Ready to help her if this place was dangerous. He did this often. Melding back. She was reminded, again, that he wasn't human and that while he could, he didn't always mingle with humans lightly.
The arbors hung around her, wide and green. Growing smells floated in the air. As she pushed through one, moving the vines out of the way, she saw a shape moving.
A girl, about twenty years old, was leaning over a well, working the pulley. She was humming to herself, her long, light hair hung about her shoulders softly. It reminded Buffy of the Flemish tapestries in her mothers art books-- the girl surrounded in greenery and darkness.
When the girl looked up from her work, she smiled brightly, pleased at the sight that met her.
Buffy stopped in her tracks. Sparrows called in the trees softly.
"Buffy," Tara said, her face the startling image of what it was the day they'd parted.
As she pulled the bucket to the stone rim of the well, her smile broadened into a delighted, welcoming grin.
"You're here earlier than I expected!"
—
--- The Protecting Veil
—
Part Two: Voices
—
Buffy smiled at the figure in front of her on the road a moment, for a moment welling up with the same kind of feelings she'd had when she first found him again, all those years ago. A sort of sweetness filled the air as she felt her breath slowing and the soft humidity of the night clung to her skin.
It was good. It was good to see his familiar face, eyebrow cocked as if all the world were a great, cynical joke. The face that never changed no matter how many years went by.
And he smiled back-- a dark smile. His smiles were always tinged with dark things, even now, when he seemed more sure of the light than anything else-- more sure and stable and comfortable in this their shared battle than she had even been in her childhood. And he looked inspired as he stared across at her. He looked fascinated by the sight of her.
He always looked at her that way. Occasionally she would watch him, watching her, over their campfires. She tried to read things in his eyes, but didn't have the language to interpret them. His eyes were glittering as they always did, with humor he alone understood.
And then he swayed forward, wincing as the wave of pain struck him.
"Spike--" she said, rushing forward to catch him by the forearms. But he righted himself before she approached.
"S'allright, lamb," he said, turning his shoulder to her, exposing the wound to her line of vision, "But would you mind?"
Blood was running down his back from the imbedded stake. Buffy winced.
"Let me get that," she responded, pulling on his arm gently, "Sit down here."
Looking at the wound, she slung her pack off of her shoulders, and reached into it, searching through the clutter for bandages.
"You should be more careful," she said softly, as she pushed aside her flint and sharpening stones, and some cured meat she'd traded for further up north. When she found the bandages, she unfurled them, long and soft white in the darkness.
The queen anne's lace clustered about them, nodding in the soft breezes, and the roadside dust swirled up with the remains of the vampires, swirling about the flowery heads like mist on a lake.
"I am careful."
She raised her eyebrow, and, even facing away from him, he seemed to sense it.
"Well I'm as careful as you are..."
She remained silent as she slid her hand gently under the fabric of his shirt, across the cool skin and the trailing ridges of his spine. They were sticky with blood. In the time before-- in the time of hair dye, warm showers, and friends who breathed, it would have been intensely uncomfortable to her to touch him like this. But now it was just touching, and she hardly thought of his blood save for to think of what she was going to use to clean it off.
"Look at that..." she said, distracted, tearing away the ruined fabric and bracing his shoulder with one hand, "It's like you think you're immortal or something... ready?"
"For you, always," he responded, dryly.
She wrapped a hand around the exposed wood, pushed on his shoulder, and in one, sharp motion, wrenched the stake free. He jolted with the motion, and held the pain at bay with a clenched jaw. She pressed the remains of the dark shirt to the wound, to staunch the bleeding.
Stretching a long length of the bandage out, she tore it to the length she wanted. Laying a hand, gently, on his back, she looked at him, facing away from her, staring off into the night, calmly.
"You were cornered," she said quietly. He made no reply.
She wrapped the bandages, tightly and efficiently, where the bleeding had already begun to slow, spreading across the woven cotton in spreading red pools that reminded her of many things she'd rather forget.
"You were careless..."
He looked down, where he plucked a sprig of the white wildflower. The black center stood out against the intricate patterns of the petals, and he saw each one in detail. The pain melted away as he looked at it, listened to the softness of her voice, felt the smooth outline of her hand against his skin, spreading warmth across the plane of his back.
And he saw with the Other sight-- the Dawn sight, the Key sight. He saw the leaves quivering under the waves of energy flowing around them in thin eddies. He saw the petals against his hand, the light weaving in and out around them. He remembered the touch of her hand in his-- the strange symbols flowing from her hands to the page like wild birds flying from the branches.
The dream clung around him still in the darkness. It persisted in his mind, in the glowing patterns around him. It thrilled beneath his skin, where the light's living presence was wild and agitated, swirling through his blood like the road-dust in the wind around them. It made everything seem misty, unreal. He tried to cut through it, focus on Buffy's voice, as she had continued talking to him, and he'd lost the words to his thoughts.
"You were surrounded, weren't you?"
Her voice was quietly questioning with that bold directness she'd developed over the years. If they were hard before, her edges were steel now. And yet she trusted him and fought with him. If she left, she always came back again. They were connected, in a way deeper than he could explain or understand. It was like the way he was bound to Dawn-- to the Key-light that twisted in his veins. Something more than words, for him.
She was a woman, grown and proud and powerful. She was statuesque, bold-- a thousand times more dangerous than she was before.
Spike loved her.
"How'd they get around you?" she pressed on, voice direct, yet undemanding, as she finished the binding and fastened in place with care, "I know you better than that."
He turned, looked at her, and her hand slid to his forearm. She smiled a closed lipped smile to him, faintly.
"They caught me sleeping," he said tersely.
Her brow furrowed slightly and she dropped her hand from where it lay to her knee. He splayed his hand against the ground, looking at something she couldn't see-- hadn't seen no matter how hard she tried.
There was once. Once, she thought she saw it on him, flitting across his shoulders in a green flash. But no more. She had begun to wonder what it was he'd experienced-- if this was a way to make whatever it was into something comforting. Because everything in her told her Dawn was dead. It was the cold lead weight in her stomach that never left her.
"Wager she wouldn't let me wake 'till she'd said her piece..." he said quietly, confirming her thoughts.
"Dawn..." she whispered, her hazel eyes tinged with something sad.
Suddenly, she didn't want to talk about it further.
She rose then, and offered her hand to him to help him up. It was red with his blood.
Buffy watched him looking at it-- seemingly startled, eyes searching through the blood and her small fingers as if there was an answer in the gesture.
And as he took it, his hand closing over his own blood, the parallel and the memory of the dream moved in his mind.
—
The rushing of the river was a constant companion as they walked together down the bank. Willows arched over them, the vines falling into the trailing water and flowing with the current. Buffy could smell the grass, and the damp earth-smells of the countryside. Here and there, the foundations of old buildings thrust through the ground like half completed thoughts. They were worn over by dirt and grass. The new world was firmly taking root over them. It had been several hours since they'd reached the first farm, the fat cows grazing idly in the fields, beating at the black flies with their tails. In the distance there was corn, rising taller than Buffy stood, growing straight and high in neat rows.
The world was adjusting. Seasons made rhythms the world understood, and the people had started to adapt with tenacity that sometimes amazed her.
Pale light moved over the countryside, the sloping plains winked with it, and the wide, fat flow of water reflected it.
It was quiet, save for the call of the flitting birds in the night, and the rush of that water, and their footfalls as they walked in companionable silence.
It was good to have him back. It was times like this, when she returned, that she wondered how she could ever have left. When she first found him at that New England campus, she had no plan in her mind as to what she'd do afterward. It was just finding him that was important, and the rest would attend to itself. Finding him meant she was someone who had someone-- someone who *was* someone. And it had largely been true. She wouldn't want to go back to the way it was before that.
But she had that restlessness of spirit that had grown in her over the years-- the voice that said 'wander'. After so long in the dark, after Willow fell to that factory floor. After the other vampire she'd known and befriended, traveled with and killed-- it was a voice that needed solitude. If she was going to be herself, she needed to be more than just the companion of the vampire. She needed to be the Slayer. She who walks alone.
The voice moved most restlessly when he seemed most distant to her. He was engrossed in his green world beyond the world she knew-- his phantoms in the air that she didn't see. He wore it-- and the strange sense of purpose it gave him-- with the same ease and confidence that he'd worn the duster.
Sometimes she was afraid that she'd leave one day, and be unable to find him again. But they both made heavy trails through the wilderness, to the eyes of their own. She wasn't prone to flights of poetry, not now, but she thought she could almost sense where his footsteps had fallen.
Spike broke her chain of thought, suddenly speaking through the silence.
"You kill anything interesting while you were gone?"
She shrugged.
"Same old stuff, mostly."
As they passed over a rise, she stretched out her right arm, flexing the fingers. She'd taken a strong hit to the shoulder from the vampire, at the base of the hillside, before she'd taken it. She was only thirty five, but she was beginning to feel a stiffness in her joints she wasn't used to. The years of constant stress were starting to take their toll, and as he watched her flex the arm, work out the shooting pains, she saw that they both knew it.
"How is that?" he asked, quietly concerned.
He knew it-- the Slayer was meant to burn brightly, not long. Ironically, she'd lived far longer than she might have if she'd saved the world. Nothing tried to destroy a universe that had already fallen, and the threats that faced her were always immediate, not global. And he would bear the burden with her, and the title, which had settled into something familiar to him over the years.
The days of hell gods were long buried and behind them.
But he knew it as he saw her. Not yet, no-- but soon. Or what soon was to someone who'd lived as long as he had. She was breaking down. Muscles coming apart with intense use, joints strained. Accelerated strength, accelerated healing. But over time the strength took its inward toll with the impact of the blows, and as the cells repaired themselves and repaired themselves again, how long would it be before she might fall to hidden cancers? It was the enemy within that haunted her, that would defeat her in the end. And they both knew it, and didn't talk about it as they walked.
"It giving you trouble?"
She let her arm drop to her side.
"I'm fine."
He cleared his throat and began again, trying to make sense of everything in his mind.
"She spoke to me, today."
Buffy looked away, across the fields, and they kept walking, where the riverbank met a worn road. Clusters of houses began to spring up here and there, built on the foundations of older buildings that had collapsed in that long ago apocalypse.
"She said... she said you'd fall, three times, before the end. Can't make sense of it."
Buffy looked down. The earth clung to her boots, in spatters of mud and dust. River-smoothed stones scattered the side of the road, and the sound of the water was soft and quiet around them. They climbed a hill in silence before he continued again.
"The way it sounded... Buffy, I don't know if I want to make sense of it..."
It hurt to hear him speak of her, somehow, even beyond the words. There was something in her-- that strong voice that was her own voice-- but the one within her that mocked her always. It was that voice that said it couldn't be true. And she was dimly aware of how desperately, somehow, she wanted to believe what that voice said.
"Look--" Buffy said, breaking the conversation apart like a bone.
As they reached the crest of the swell, they could see a large wall of carved stones in the distance, rising tall and high and powerful upon a high hill. And beyond it, fruit trees and arbors of green. growing things. And beyond these stood the broad walls of a vast and strong building, with grey towers and long cloisters carved out of stone. Around the wall hundreds of buildings clustered, thickly settled against the small alleys giving entrance between them. The soft, predawn light silhouetted them against a pale, nighttime sky.
She began to move ahead of him, and he trailed behind, watching, settling into the background as they headed up to the great house on the hill.
—
As the predawn glow swelled to its greatest in the sky, Buffy slipped past the heavy doors of the open gate, and into the convent gardens.
The buildings pressing so close on either side-- so close she could almost touch the walls on either side if she stretched her arms wide, were suffocating to her. And the people-- scores of people, moving and trading, and working and going out to the fields. They were taking advantage of the greater light, of the beginning of what they called their day.
It was vaguely nauseating to her, to be there in the crowds. She was used to open spaces now. She wanted hills and trees around her. She was most comfortable sleeping on the hard earth.
The garden was a relief to her overloaded senses. It looked empty. But she knew Spike was nearby, watching her, unseen. Ready to help her if this place was dangerous. He did this often. Melding back. She was reminded, again, that he wasn't human and that while he could, he didn't always mingle with humans lightly.
The arbors hung around her, wide and green. Growing smells floated in the air. As she pushed through one, moving the vines out of the way, she saw a shape moving.
A girl, about twenty years old, was leaning over a well, working the pulley. She was humming to herself, her long, light hair hung about her shoulders softly. It reminded Buffy of the Flemish tapestries in her mothers art books-- the girl surrounded in greenery and darkness.
When the girl looked up from her work, she smiled brightly, pleased at the sight that met her.
Buffy stopped in her tracks. Sparrows called in the trees softly.
"Buffy," Tara said, her face the startling image of what it was the day they'd parted.
As she pulled the bucket to the stone rim of the well, her smile broadened into a delighted, welcoming grin.
"You're here earlier than I expected!"
—