---
Part Five: The Virgin Queen
---
The ink flowed slowly from Spike's pen, as he carefully marked the place with a straightedge on the atlas map.
It wasn't perfect, he wasn't exactly a surveyor-- but he watched. He measured the space that he and Buffy had walked from the river, and identified where the building must be on the map. He wrote the name in the margin: 'Saint Christopher's.' His left hand ran across the page, careful not to smudge the words while they were drying. After a moment's thought, he added to that a single word: 'Tara'.
It joined with the places he'd marked for years in this book. Rewriting the map, pulling it together into a physical record of his journeys, and the remarkable things they told.
"I know you."
The words came from a light, musical voice behind him, sweet like a reed flute. A young girl's voice.
He turned from the desk in the yellow lamplight. The girl stood in a shadow falling from the bookshelves. It cut her tiny face in half. He looked at her a moment and turned back to his atlas.
"I don't think so."
She walked forward, and her form cut off the light from the lamp. As she moved her arm, a ghostly shadow of her hand rising up to her neck danced along the surface, twisting in a spray of long shadow-hair and vanishing into the trail of it.
She dropped a necklace onto the book. A strong, silver chain. And the pendant that hung there was a long, curved foreclaw, in a startlingly bone white.
He picked it up, the weight noticeable in his hand. Around that thin little neck, he thought, it had to weigh down hard.
"You killed it, for me—for us," she continued steadily and with a quiet confidence that seemed too great for her years.
"Killed a lot of things," he said, measuring to make sure the lines matched carefully in the book—the trailing paths full of names, some with notes glossed in the margins in his carefully defined copperplate.
When she didn't leave, he amended the statement.
"Some of them were little girls that asked too many questions."
"It's just..." she said, "My name's Mei... and I think you knew my mom—I think I remember you talking to her, when—that night that she died."
And with that, he made the connection.
His mind snapped back to those days—those defining moments that were the most important of this, his strange reemergence into life. The painful crawling stretch into an existence that had sprung from the ruins of the old world— the time, the choices that had finally led him to Buffy.
And beyond this, it had given him light to see by, settled firmly in the earth, and moving swiftly through his blood.
Facing the dragon—the only remains of which rested now in his hand—facing the dark embodied and fighting it back-- drawing a line, somehow. Coming back to Dawn, learning she was still alive, still real. Ever present. It had given him the assurance that somehow, even through their failure, it had all meant something, and he was just too close to see the pattern it made.
"I remember, kind of—she was talking to a vampire that night. Up where the gymnasium bleachers used to be. It was you, I'm sure of it. You brought back its arm after, when she died. You don't forget something like that..."
He flipped the atlas back, looking for the right page. America-- its states and borders were rewritten, over the type, in spiraling detail. A record of over a decade of wandering, ink for footsteps, recording where he'd gone, up into the north lands and down again past the equator. Into rich wilds of mountains and desert.
He stopped on a page. A map of New York State. He pointed to one particular note there. The girl leaned over and read what he'd written there, right over the plain, bland typeface that read 'Utica'.
"Heorot—Erin. Dragon. Dawn."
The mother. Erin. He hadn't fought that darkness for its own sake. It was for her— for his promises, through her. She died trying to protect her own from it, and he felt a kind of duty to that.
It pulled at something in him—something that had begun to grow with the promise to Buffy on the stairs before that final battle, that had twisted in him when he fell from that tower, and lost their only chance—and in all the events after. It was the turning point. He'd fought back the darkness before that—had spent the years since that apocalyptic battle trying to make up for his failure, trying to push forward into something new—but in that reclaimed, Adirondack wilderness, he met the point of no return.
He stood, looked at the claw in his hand. They didn't forget. This was the proof. He looked to the girl again, standing next to him with still, even calm, dark eyes. She'd been a just little thing, then, and he could remember, dimly, sitting on the bleachers with her mother, talking, and the little girl waving to them from down below.
"Your mum was a good lady," he said, quietly earnest, "Strong and brave and all. Should be proud."
Mei shrugged, noncommittal.
"She was weak enough to die."
---
Buffy trailed after Tara, as she carried some notes to the library from her room in the upper floors. Somehow, just watching her was a comfort, even with the memories it raised in her.
Memories of coming to full consciousness on the cracking pavement. Of chaotic, piercing light filling all the corners of her mind. The sound of breaking. Of screams and prayers in unintelligible languages.
Giles' arms on her shoulders, holding her steady. Through the misty pain of her head, she could remember. She'd been on the stairs—she had been trying to get to Dawn.
He'd pulled her away.
And the tower—the tower was gone.
And it was too much. The world twisted in her gut and she had collapsed onto her palms, vomiting.
---
"Even the strong ones die, sometimes," he said, "'Specially so when they put themselves out in it like that—trust me, I've been around awhile."
"But that's what's important now—the strength. It's what brings people together—running from it... or trying to get it. I think, maybe, even though I wasn't born yet—in the time before, about the power-- was it really so much different from that?"
He closed his book, dropped it into his bag as they walked through the mazelike halls he hadn't yet had time to learn by rote. They passed Buffy and Tara there, who smiled to them, but did not stop. His eyes caught Buffy's as they turned a corner and disappeared. He nodded to his young companion, smiled at her ruefully.
"Not since the earliest age, pet. Not since forever. Can turn on you in an instant, mind you. It's a dangerous game."
He stepped over a spare ladder that had fallen in the hallway during the frenzied wiring. Whatever experiment in civilization these people had planned, it was coming soon.
"But you're playing it—you are. I know because you're wearing that green light on you," she said, leading him around a corner that lead into the balmy night air, flowing from a sort of balcony veranda that swelled with potted fruit trees and the quiet calls of night birds. She sat carelessly on the rail that overlooked the gardens, and the clustering village beyond them.
"It's interesting to look at," she continued, as he joined her perched there, "You wear it, and I think it looks confident on you—or, you look confident with it being there. It's like some kind of coat, or armor—or like some kind of veil hanging on you..."
"You can see it, then?" he asked, gesturing out at the impressionist splashes and veins of the green color that twisted so serenely over the landscape beyond them, out into the very mist of the rivers and swaying of the farm fields.
She shrugged.
"It's what I do."
She was young, impatient, and he liked her. She understood the light, was one of the rare few who actually saw it—understood what was there beneath the surface. Not the kind of peasant folk-worship that had sprung up around the vague notion of that presence. But the ones who *saw*-- the ones who knew—it was comfort to find them.
And so he smiled at her, and warmed to her a bit as he responded.
"I see then—you're the white witch in training, keeping up family traditions. Got you here for summer camp then? Learn the craft?"
She raised her chin as she responded.
"No—I already know what Tara knows. More, really. I'm helping out. With the work, 'till winter when I have to go home and take over there."
"Take over?"
"Heorot," she said, smiling slightly, "It's gotten bigger since I've been working on it."
"How old are you then?"
"I'm fourteen... but I had seven years to get ready for it before my mother died. And people have a lot of energy, I think, they just need to direct it against all the disorganization better, you know? I can make them do that."
"Brilliant-- rallying the troops," he said, smiling, "Aren't you just like your mother then?"
"No," she said confidently, looking out over the trees, "I've surpassed my mother."
---
"Giles, she's dead."
Willow's voice. Before she was lost. Long before any of this, when they'd crowded around Anya, who had been hit by falling debris in the chaos. The first of their friends to die.
Xander. He'd been standing staring at her with a terrible, numbing expression. It had to have broken his heart. But Buffy hadn't really seen it. She hadn't even thought of him until after—until it was too late and she could never find him for all the running she'd done.
The air had fallen cold. The smell of winter frost filled the air that crackled with the sound of flames. Of screams echoing faintly from somewhere off in the night.
Tara and Spike walked towards them, from where she'd bolted over to retrieve him from the crumbling base of the tower. They circumvented the disintegrating patches of pavement that sank into the deep ravines of the fissure, spider webbing into cavernous voids around them.
It would have been a strange sight, before. The witch, newly recovered from her insanity, clad in flannel pajamas, face chalk and grey. The vampire, eyes liquid, locked on Buffy, where she huddled, staring sightlessly past the body on the ground.
The witch and the vampire. They had been holding hands.
In the cold air, a soft rumble of thunder flowed over and around him. Xander was doing something with his pocket, but, at the time, she didn't really see or care.
"Giles stop-- we can't... we can't stay here..." Willow's voice interjected. Calm yet intense. Practical. Where had that clever girl gone? Would she have fallen into darkness, eaten up not in rage, but in pathetic, desperate need, if Dawn hadn't bled? It didn't seem fair, even with the failure. Even with their losses. She should have had a chance. The light—Spike's light, the thing in the stories he told. The thing they saw folk shrines to, cluttering the roadsides with candles and painted statues—it hadn't stopped it.
The devotion in his eyes didn't match the coldness of the reality they lived in. It made her see that there was no pattern in the way they were tossed about and wondered. Beyond that, there just might be a person in that maelstrom that you could trust.
No larger pattern. Just that one who mattered.
---
Mei extended her hand into the open air in front of them, almost absently. A movement caught Spike's sharp eye from below. A small speck lifting from beneath the gables all around them, the twisting expanse of the building in the blackness.
It floated up in a lazy circling arc. Above the tree line, above the windows and gargoyle bedecked gutters. It alighted with feather light softness on the tip of her index finger.
A bright yellow wasp. It fluttered its wings and stood patiently against the little, curved edge of her fingernail.
She smiled at it, searching into the fluttering depths of its animus with a keen, discriminating sense. She was filled with the sense of soaring over a vast word, towering with gargantuan trees and gale winds to the tiny body as it quested food for its hive. Alight, alive in the trees and busy with its brief and swift existence. The sights of the world from above. The crazy quilt of farm fields and beyond those the ruins of suburban streets swelling out past them into an eternally expanding, wild and plutonian wasteland.
It was soothing. She tossed her head back and could almost feel the wind on her face from the flying.
She smiled at him, and let the wasp loft up into the space around them, where it floated before her expectantly.
"See? I can do things... they talk to me, you know. Not that they know it. Not much for brains if you're pretty much wings and a stinger..."
He didn't smile back. Instead, he made a jump for the insect where it danced above their heads.
He leapt forward, still perched with careful balance on the railing. In a swift, elegant burst of speed, he seized it between his left thumb and index finger. It was so fast she didn't see his arm move.
It sat crushed between his fingers as he sat next to her.
"Bit of a warning love," he said with a strangely quiet intensity, "There's things out there nastier than you, and you may be Queen Bee for the meanwhile, but they're well versed in what goeth before a fall, and be damned bleeding sure they'll use it against you."
He dropped the crushed insect into her hand, where it rested open against her knee. She simply stared, seemingly baffled as to what to say next.
Then both their attention was drawn away by the sudden bursting glow of thousands of electric lights.
The buzz of them filled the air as the lights directly below them burst alive in the windows, along the casements. All the windows glowed with white, new bulbs, carefully saved for the experiment—for the statement. It said the world hadn't died, and that it was going for the very throat of that darkness.
Not just a little lamp in a shut away room. The lights cut into the darkness with a power a hundred times that of the candles and lamps the halls of Heorot had burned at the slaying of their monster. It glowed on the stones like stars springing out of the earth.
"Oh..." Mei whispered, eyes shining as she craned her neck to look out, "I've never seen so many... it's so pretty..."
Then she laughed an airy, child's laugh.
Somewhere in Spike's memory it pulled at him—her face was just like when he'd first brought Drusilla to a silent film. Like a whole new world had come alive by some inconceivable miracle.
And they sat in that light together, moved to silence, looking out into the gilded outreach of the illuminated world.
---
The ink flowed slowly from Spike's pen, as he carefully marked the place with a straightedge on the atlas map.
It wasn't perfect, he wasn't exactly a surveyor-- but he watched. He measured the space that he and Buffy had walked from the river, and identified where the building must be on the map. He wrote the name in the margin: 'Saint Christopher's.' His left hand ran across the page, careful not to smudge the words while they were drying. After a moment's thought, he added to that a single word: 'Tara'.
It joined with the places he'd marked for years in this book. Rewriting the map, pulling it together into a physical record of his journeys, and the remarkable things they told.
"I know you."
The words came from a light, musical voice behind him, sweet like a reed flute. A young girl's voice.
He turned from the desk in the yellow lamplight. The girl stood in a shadow falling from the bookshelves. It cut her tiny face in half. He looked at her a moment and turned back to his atlas.
"I don't think so."
She walked forward, and her form cut off the light from the lamp. As she moved her arm, a ghostly shadow of her hand rising up to her neck danced along the surface, twisting in a spray of long shadow-hair and vanishing into the trail of it.
She dropped a necklace onto the book. A strong, silver chain. And the pendant that hung there was a long, curved foreclaw, in a startlingly bone white.
He picked it up, the weight noticeable in his hand. Around that thin little neck, he thought, it had to weigh down hard.
"You killed it, for me—for us," she continued steadily and with a quiet confidence that seemed too great for her years.
"Killed a lot of things," he said, measuring to make sure the lines matched carefully in the book—the trailing paths full of names, some with notes glossed in the margins in his carefully defined copperplate.
When she didn't leave, he amended the statement.
"Some of them were little girls that asked too many questions."
"It's just..." she said, "My name's Mei... and I think you knew my mom—I think I remember you talking to her, when—that night that she died."
And with that, he made the connection.
His mind snapped back to those days—those defining moments that were the most important of this, his strange reemergence into life. The painful crawling stretch into an existence that had sprung from the ruins of the old world— the time, the choices that had finally led him to Buffy.
And beyond this, it had given him light to see by, settled firmly in the earth, and moving swiftly through his blood.
Facing the dragon—the only remains of which rested now in his hand—facing the dark embodied and fighting it back-- drawing a line, somehow. Coming back to Dawn, learning she was still alive, still real. Ever present. It had given him the assurance that somehow, even through their failure, it had all meant something, and he was just too close to see the pattern it made.
"I remember, kind of—she was talking to a vampire that night. Up where the gymnasium bleachers used to be. It was you, I'm sure of it. You brought back its arm after, when she died. You don't forget something like that..."
He flipped the atlas back, looking for the right page. America-- its states and borders were rewritten, over the type, in spiraling detail. A record of over a decade of wandering, ink for footsteps, recording where he'd gone, up into the north lands and down again past the equator. Into rich wilds of mountains and desert.
He stopped on a page. A map of New York State. He pointed to one particular note there. The girl leaned over and read what he'd written there, right over the plain, bland typeface that read 'Utica'.
"Heorot—Erin. Dragon. Dawn."
The mother. Erin. He hadn't fought that darkness for its own sake. It was for her— for his promises, through her. She died trying to protect her own from it, and he felt a kind of duty to that.
It pulled at something in him—something that had begun to grow with the promise to Buffy on the stairs before that final battle, that had twisted in him when he fell from that tower, and lost their only chance—and in all the events after. It was the turning point. He'd fought back the darkness before that—had spent the years since that apocalyptic battle trying to make up for his failure, trying to push forward into something new—but in that reclaimed, Adirondack wilderness, he met the point of no return.
He stood, looked at the claw in his hand. They didn't forget. This was the proof. He looked to the girl again, standing next to him with still, even calm, dark eyes. She'd been a just little thing, then, and he could remember, dimly, sitting on the bleachers with her mother, talking, and the little girl waving to them from down below.
"Your mum was a good lady," he said, quietly earnest, "Strong and brave and all. Should be proud."
Mei shrugged, noncommittal.
"She was weak enough to die."
---
Buffy trailed after Tara, as she carried some notes to the library from her room in the upper floors. Somehow, just watching her was a comfort, even with the memories it raised in her.
Memories of coming to full consciousness on the cracking pavement. Of chaotic, piercing light filling all the corners of her mind. The sound of breaking. Of screams and prayers in unintelligible languages.
Giles' arms on her shoulders, holding her steady. Through the misty pain of her head, she could remember. She'd been on the stairs—she had been trying to get to Dawn.
He'd pulled her away.
And the tower—the tower was gone.
And it was too much. The world twisted in her gut and she had collapsed onto her palms, vomiting.
---
"Even the strong ones die, sometimes," he said, "'Specially so when they put themselves out in it like that—trust me, I've been around awhile."
"But that's what's important now—the strength. It's what brings people together—running from it... or trying to get it. I think, maybe, even though I wasn't born yet—in the time before, about the power-- was it really so much different from that?"
He closed his book, dropped it into his bag as they walked through the mazelike halls he hadn't yet had time to learn by rote. They passed Buffy and Tara there, who smiled to them, but did not stop. His eyes caught Buffy's as they turned a corner and disappeared. He nodded to his young companion, smiled at her ruefully.
"Not since the earliest age, pet. Not since forever. Can turn on you in an instant, mind you. It's a dangerous game."
He stepped over a spare ladder that had fallen in the hallway during the frenzied wiring. Whatever experiment in civilization these people had planned, it was coming soon.
"But you're playing it—you are. I know because you're wearing that green light on you," she said, leading him around a corner that lead into the balmy night air, flowing from a sort of balcony veranda that swelled with potted fruit trees and the quiet calls of night birds. She sat carelessly on the rail that overlooked the gardens, and the clustering village beyond them.
"It's interesting to look at," she continued, as he joined her perched there, "You wear it, and I think it looks confident on you—or, you look confident with it being there. It's like some kind of coat, or armor—or like some kind of veil hanging on you..."
"You can see it, then?" he asked, gesturing out at the impressionist splashes and veins of the green color that twisted so serenely over the landscape beyond them, out into the very mist of the rivers and swaying of the farm fields.
She shrugged.
"It's what I do."
She was young, impatient, and he liked her. She understood the light, was one of the rare few who actually saw it—understood what was there beneath the surface. Not the kind of peasant folk-worship that had sprung up around the vague notion of that presence. But the ones who *saw*-- the ones who knew—it was comfort to find them.
And so he smiled at her, and warmed to her a bit as he responded.
"I see then—you're the white witch in training, keeping up family traditions. Got you here for summer camp then? Learn the craft?"
She raised her chin as she responded.
"No—I already know what Tara knows. More, really. I'm helping out. With the work, 'till winter when I have to go home and take over there."
"Take over?"
"Heorot," she said, smiling slightly, "It's gotten bigger since I've been working on it."
"How old are you then?"
"I'm fourteen... but I had seven years to get ready for it before my mother died. And people have a lot of energy, I think, they just need to direct it against all the disorganization better, you know? I can make them do that."
"Brilliant-- rallying the troops," he said, smiling, "Aren't you just like your mother then?"
"No," she said confidently, looking out over the trees, "I've surpassed my mother."
---
"Giles, she's dead."
Willow's voice. Before she was lost. Long before any of this, when they'd crowded around Anya, who had been hit by falling debris in the chaos. The first of their friends to die.
Xander. He'd been standing staring at her with a terrible, numbing expression. It had to have broken his heart. But Buffy hadn't really seen it. She hadn't even thought of him until after—until it was too late and she could never find him for all the running she'd done.
The air had fallen cold. The smell of winter frost filled the air that crackled with the sound of flames. Of screams echoing faintly from somewhere off in the night.
Tara and Spike walked towards them, from where she'd bolted over to retrieve him from the crumbling base of the tower. They circumvented the disintegrating patches of pavement that sank into the deep ravines of the fissure, spider webbing into cavernous voids around them.
It would have been a strange sight, before. The witch, newly recovered from her insanity, clad in flannel pajamas, face chalk and grey. The vampire, eyes liquid, locked on Buffy, where she huddled, staring sightlessly past the body on the ground.
The witch and the vampire. They had been holding hands.
In the cold air, a soft rumble of thunder flowed over and around him. Xander was doing something with his pocket, but, at the time, she didn't really see or care.
"Giles stop-- we can't... we can't stay here..." Willow's voice interjected. Calm yet intense. Practical. Where had that clever girl gone? Would she have fallen into darkness, eaten up not in rage, but in pathetic, desperate need, if Dawn hadn't bled? It didn't seem fair, even with the failure. Even with their losses. She should have had a chance. The light—Spike's light, the thing in the stories he told. The thing they saw folk shrines to, cluttering the roadsides with candles and painted statues—it hadn't stopped it.
The devotion in his eyes didn't match the coldness of the reality they lived in. It made her see that there was no pattern in the way they were tossed about and wondered. Beyond that, there just might be a person in that maelstrom that you could trust.
No larger pattern. Just that one who mattered.
---
Mei extended her hand into the open air in front of them, almost absently. A movement caught Spike's sharp eye from below. A small speck lifting from beneath the gables all around them, the twisting expanse of the building in the blackness.
It floated up in a lazy circling arc. Above the tree line, above the windows and gargoyle bedecked gutters. It alighted with feather light softness on the tip of her index finger.
A bright yellow wasp. It fluttered its wings and stood patiently against the little, curved edge of her fingernail.
She smiled at it, searching into the fluttering depths of its animus with a keen, discriminating sense. She was filled with the sense of soaring over a vast word, towering with gargantuan trees and gale winds to the tiny body as it quested food for its hive. Alight, alive in the trees and busy with its brief and swift existence. The sights of the world from above. The crazy quilt of farm fields and beyond those the ruins of suburban streets swelling out past them into an eternally expanding, wild and plutonian wasteland.
It was soothing. She tossed her head back and could almost feel the wind on her face from the flying.
She smiled at him, and let the wasp loft up into the space around them, where it floated before her expectantly.
"See? I can do things... they talk to me, you know. Not that they know it. Not much for brains if you're pretty much wings and a stinger..."
He didn't smile back. Instead, he made a jump for the insect where it danced above their heads.
He leapt forward, still perched with careful balance on the railing. In a swift, elegant burst of speed, he seized it between his left thumb and index finger. It was so fast she didn't see his arm move.
It sat crushed between his fingers as he sat next to her.
"Bit of a warning love," he said with a strangely quiet intensity, "There's things out there nastier than you, and you may be Queen Bee for the meanwhile, but they're well versed in what goeth before a fall, and be damned bleeding sure they'll use it against you."
He dropped the crushed insect into her hand, where it rested open against her knee. She simply stared, seemingly baffled as to what to say next.
Then both their attention was drawn away by the sudden bursting glow of thousands of electric lights.
The buzz of them filled the air as the lights directly below them burst alive in the windows, along the casements. All the windows glowed with white, new bulbs, carefully saved for the experiment—for the statement. It said the world hadn't died, and that it was going for the very throat of that darkness.
Not just a little lamp in a shut away room. The lights cut into the darkness with a power a hundred times that of the candles and lamps the halls of Heorot had burned at the slaying of their monster. It glowed on the stones like stars springing out of the earth.
"Oh..." Mei whispered, eyes shining as she craned her neck to look out, "I've never seen so many... it's so pretty..."
Then she laughed an airy, child's laugh.
Somewhere in Spike's memory it pulled at him—her face was just like when he'd first brought Drusilla to a silent film. Like a whole new world had come alive by some inconceivable miracle.
And they sat in that light together, moved to silence, looking out into the gilded outreach of the illuminated world.
---