The lights really were pretty, with the soft white—with just a tinge of warm yellow—up against the forest green of the tree. It had a nice calming effect, or at least it would have if it wasn't for the gap on the right side of the tree. Obviously, whatever idiot had strung the lights up had been too dense to see the spot of branches they didn't hang the lights on, leaving a sore-looking dark spot. As it was, Beth was glaring at the tree, arms crossed, looking every bit of grumpy that she was. Sure, after freezing her ass off outdoors tracking down demons until three am, she had been woken up at seven in the morning all because her Aunt Dawn and Uncle Xander decided an early flight in was a good thing ("It gives us more time with you!" Uncle Xander had pointed out loudly—and happily—when Beth had slunk in, dark rumbling clouds all about her), but she was mostly upset because of the tree. It was just so obviously there. And don't get her started on the ornament arrangement!
"'Friad it's planning its attack?" her father asked as he ambled into the living room. He could only take so much of the Xander-Buffy-Willow reunion without wanting to put his fist through the wall. With Dawn off shopping with Anya, that left stark company, all in the form of Miss I-Have-To-Be-Unhappy-On-Christmas-Because-I'm-A-Teenager. He really hoped that Dawn and Xander didn't get it easy with Anya. They didn't deserve to.
"It's unbalanced," she emphasized, gesturing toward the tree. "There is obviously a spot right there that isn't lit! It's unacceptable!" She threw her hands up into the air with an exasperated sigh, like some haute-couture fashion designer seeing next season's line-up (and it disturbed Spike that he could make that comparison), except she was wearing red flannel pajama bottoms and a black long-sleeve shirt, her hair throwing its own party on her head.
"Mum's got plans for lunch today," he told her, picking a topic of relevance that he could stomach—he wasn't going to fight about the tree, it was too late, the decorations were up and he was done. "Shouldn't you get dressed?"
She shot him a scathing look. "Why?" she nearly hissed. "The tree looks atrocious so why shouldn't I?"
At loss for words (ooh, wouldn't Buffy be laughing if she knew that) and not wanting to touch that logic with a ten-foot pole, he just gave her a quick once-over. Maybe she ought to skip lunch and go straight to the post-food-bliss nap.
"I have to fix this," she said after a long moment, going for the tree.
"Oh no you don'," he cut in, reaching out and grabbing her arms. And while she was stronger than him (but just a little, tiny bit and he had more skill anyway), she wasn't awake enough to put up much of a fight. Oh, she struggled, but barely, allowing him to drag her away from the tree and throw her onto the couch.
"Leave it alone," he commanded and she harrumphed, slumping down into the couch.
"It looks hideous," she muttered petulantly.
"Anya likes it," he told her, and then, in a moment of brilliance, added, "seein' as she's the one who did most of the work."
Beth looked chastised for a moment (and he did an air fist-punch in his mind), before logic caught up. "No she didn't," she replied with narrowed eyes. "Anya's not tall enough. How'd she reach the top?"
"Doesn't matter, she likes the tree," he responded quickly. "An' do you want her to come back seein' it all deconstructed?"
After a pause, she murmured, "No," and it seemed like a win until she added in a louder tone, "I'll just do it after they all go back to the hotel."
Well, Spike was jumping ship. He let out a sigh, heading back toward the kitchen. There wasn't enough rum in that eggnog to make him drunk enough to deal with that.
"Beth's going to dismantle the tree," he announced when he entered the kitchen, breaking into whatever Willow, Xander, and Buffy were talking about.
"What?" Buffy asked, bemused.
"Really? Why? I put a lot of work into making it look good," Xander nearly pouted and Spike refrained from rolling his eyes.
"Somebody's a grumpy goose this morning," Willow noted. "When did she get home last night?"
"Late," Buffy responded.
"Funny, I didn' hear her come in," Spike said.
"That's because you were out cold on the couch," she retorted. "Even with a heartbeat you still sleep like the dead. She all but slammed the front door closed when she came in and woke me up. It was also hard to miss her grumbling and stomping as she went up the stairs."
Willow was a bit more sympathetic. "Do you think it was a hard night?"
Buffy snorted. "It's always a hard night, Wills. Demons don't seem to have any sort of Christmas Spirit."
"I think that's because Santa never gives them what they want," Xander decided. "Total world domination and your head on a stick."
Buffy made a face. "Thanks for that visual."
"Well, I don't think we have to worry about her taking down the tree anytime soon," Willow noticed, taking a peek out into the living room. Right now, Beth was fast asleep on the couch, head hanging back with her mouth open. What a pretty picture she makes, she couldn't help but think wryly.
"I think she's been pushing herself," Buffy decided. "She's gotten more antsy about all those magicky power surges we've been getting."
"Haven't we all?" Spike mused.
"Yeah, what's up with that?" Xander asked. "You had a plague or something?"
"Or something," Willow murmured. "There's been some recent activity in the area, that of the ooky kind—we think."
"Somebody's been putting out a lot of mojo, which is making the world go all funny," Buffy added.
"The surges in magical activity have been great enough to have an effect on the physical world: earthquakes, snowstorms, an epidemic; And we still don't have a clue who's doing it. We've been able to find the locations, but not who's causing it. They've always vamoosed before we arrive."
"Sounds frustrating," Xander said, not at all sympathetic. Spike glared at him harshly and he added, "Hey! You don't get a lot of fun where I'm at! Makes me miss the old times, you know?"
"Old times," Spike repeated. "Like when you ran scared? Or lost your eye?" He reached out, snapping the elastic band on the eye patch.
"Ouch," Xander said, rubbing the side of his head. "And take my point of view on this! I can't help if I get all nostalgic about it. I haven't even done any work for the Council since Anya was born. Dawn says it's 'too dangerous,' but hey, Buffy and Spike raising a kid in the thick of it? A-okay in her book."
"She's just being a mom," Buffy defended. "And no girl should grow up without a father."
"And if Jesus here takes one too many hits to the head?" Xander asked, throwing a thumb at Spike, who looked affronted to be nicknamed "Jesus." "I don't think he's going to rise again."
"Spike can take care of himself," Buffy affirmed, followed by a soft "yeah" from Spike.
The front door opened with a click, letting in a nice frosty gust of wind, followed by a red-cheeked Dawn and an excitable Anya.
"Beth! Beth! Beth!" the girl nearly shrieked, jumping onto the couch and jolting Beth into awareness.
"What, ya harpy?" she grumbled, rubbing her eyes. "I was having a nice nap."
"Look what we got," Anya sang, reaching into one of the bags she was carrying and pulling out what looked to be a DVD case.
Beth squinted at it, still groggy. "Babes in Toyland," she read. She looked up at Anya. "I don't get it."
Anya let out a frustrated sigh, rolling her eyes at her ignorant cousin. "It's a movie," she told her, sounding far too condescending for eleven-year-old.
"And this is exciting why?" Beth questioned, still not sure where Anya was going with all this.
"It's a musical," Dawn cut in. "Her favorite Christmas musical. She forgot to pack our copy and so I bought her this one."
Comprehension dawned. "Oh. And this is like a her-thing or a family-thing?"
"Go see the expression on your Uncle Xander's face when she shows it to him and you tell me if it's a family thing," Dawn muttered good-naturedly.
Anya gasped. "You're right! I have to show Dad!" She raced off the couch and into the kitchen. "Dad! Dad! Look what mom bought me! Babes in Toyland!"
"Ooh yay!" Came Xander's response, sounding almost like he wanted to cry.
"It looks very…childish," Beth decided after having searched for the right word. "The word 'babes' is very misleading."
Dawn snorted, sitting down on the couch beside Beth. "Just wait until you have to watch it. It's nursery rhymes."
"I think I might be staying the night at Nadja's that day," she decided, not at all last moment.
Dawn let out a short laugh before something to their left caught her eye. She tilted her head, studying it. "Is it just me or is there a big, lightless spot on that tree?"
-.-
It was insanity. It was an action movie. And maybe Beth would have taken the time to wonder how exactly she found herself in this situation if it wasn't for the fact that the world was literally falling in on itself. She'd never seen the sky so red; it didn't look natural. But with everything falling and crumbling around her, she didn't have time to contemplate the colors of the sky. She heard a scream, one that sounded suspiciously like her mother's, and she was off running down the street, jumping over and evading the fallen rubble. She might have heard her father calling out to her, but the words slipped past her ears like water and she kept running. It took a moment for everything to come into shape and she recognized the Space Needle. It looked absolutely normal, save for the gaping hole above it.
She stopped with a gasp, pulled from her original mission and into this one. That really wasn't normal and surely wasn't supposed to be there.
Will the owner of the giant sky hole please come up to the front counter?
Was it because of the surges? Had the sky literally ripped itself open? She couldn't tell you. What she could tell was that it was bad and something had to be done to fix it. And something deep within her gut told her that that something was her.
But before she could take a step toward it, someone reached out and grabbed her, wrapping their cool fingers around her wrist, hard enough to leave a bruise.
Vampire! Off went her tinglies and she whipped around, ready to kick out at whoever was attacking her. But she stopped just short of delivering a roundhouse kick to their face when she saw who it was.
Herself.
Huh. Well isn't that a bit of a strange encounter, if she said so herself. And maybe she would have laughed at her own joke if this wasn't so giving her the heebie-jeebies.
Vampire-her grinned maliciously, but not before striking out at Beth, sending her reeling to the ground. She impacted with the concrete, blood and pain exploding in her mouth. Growling, Beth pushed herself up off the ground. Fine, if other her wanted to play hard ball, Beth would play hard ball. But when she tried to vamp out herself, nothing happened.
"Are you surprised?" Vamp-Beth asked, grinning all the while. "What makes you think you're so special?"
"You're me," Beth realized. Somehow, in some way, she'd been split into two parts. She remembered something like this maybe happening to Xander decades ago and she wondered if it was the same thing.
"Yeah, I'm you," Vamp-Beth said, sounding just like Beth except with a slight condescending tone to her voice. "And you're me. We're all the same. It's hard to say who came first."
Not feeling much up for words, Beth struck out with her fist, catching her vampire-self off guard. She obviously hadn't been expecting it and her head snapped back against the brick wall behind them, hitting with a sickening—yet oddly satisfying—crack. Vamp-Beth slumped to the ground, leaving blood smears on the wall.
"What makes you so special?" Beth hissed, taking a menacing step forward. The next words tumbled out of her mouth, but she couldn't say she'd meant them to. "From the son of Cain, you're born out of destruction and chaos. What makes you so great?"
Vamp-Beth picked up her head, letting out a bloody cough. The punch had apparently split her lip and the blood trickling down from her smile gave her a deranged look. "And you're born from the solitude and the pain of dear old Samson's girl. Don't act like you're better than me."
She let out a grunt as she pushed herself up off the ground, Beth taking a step back to give her room. "I already know I'm the fecking stepchild. You've made your opinion clear on that. But neither one—nor the other—is without fault and while you might think less is more, I'm telling you it's not."
"I don't understand," Beth told her, her expression guarded. She took a step back to leave, but before she could, Vamp-Beth's hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, holding her in place.
"You and me," Vamp-Beth said. "We're in this together. And we can't do it without the other."
"There is no you and me!" Beth protested.
Vamp-Beth grinned. "Now you're getting it, love."
An ominous shriek pulled Beth's attention away from her counter-part, throwing her back into her surroundings. Death. Destruction. End of the World. Oh yeah. But when she looked back, Vamp-Beth was gone and she was staring at an unmarred brick wall.
Confused, she stumbled back onto the road, trying to remembering what she was supposed to be doing. She caught a flash of red hair: Maea.
"Maea!" she screamed, trying to grab the woman's attention. She didn't think she could have heard her over the shrieking, but Maea turned her head, eyes meeting Beth's. Beth ran over to her, panting even though she hadn't been running that much.
"What's going on?" Beth asked. "And what the hell is that?" She finally noticed Maea was holding a weapon in her hand, something that could easily be explained up as a flaming sword. What, was Maea some sort of avenging angel? The hilt was red and encrusted with gems, and it gave off this powerful feeling, enough to make Beth want to stumble back.
"Beth," Maea shouted, dragging her attention away from the sword and back to her. "When this all goes down, I'll be there. I promise." She leaned over and kissed Beth, who only stood still in shock. She blinked as Maea turned and ran, heading right toward some towering beast (which explained the shrieking) with huge, twisting tusks sprouting from its mouth and hard, armored-like skin patterned over its bulky shoulders and back.
Beth blinked again. "What the f—"
With a gasp, Beth sat up in bed, her heart beating and sweat dripping down her back. It took her a minute to reorient herself, but when she did, she realized she was in her bedroom and it was dark. She recalled that she'd been watching that horrid Babes in Toyland before finally going off to bed, letting Spike and Buffy handle the slaying tonight. That dream though. God, what had she eaten?
-.-
"And you were fighting who?" Spike asked that following day as he, Beth, Buffy, and Andrew all sat in the study room.
"Myself," Beth said again. "Except I wouldn't say we were really fighting. I almost hit her, she hit me, so I hit her, words were exchanged, but there wasn't much of a fight. If there was, it was short-lived."
"Sounds like a Slayer dream," Buffy noted. "I hate those things. Always so cryptic."
"This one seemed pretty straight-forward, save for me having a doppelganger," she replied. "Bad, world-endage is coming, including a big sky hole over the Space Needle and some huge beastie terrorizing the locals."
"The flaming sword is an interesting one," Andrew murmured, eyes cast downward as he flipped through a few texts.
"Why do you think you were fighting yourself?" Spike inquired.
"Well," she said, folding her hands over her chest and leaning back in her chair. "I'm sure it has something to do with a repressed conflict that has manifested in my dreams as—"
"Enough Freud," Buffy cut in, only sounding mildly annoyed.
"Hey, Dad was the one trying to psychoanalyze me," she accused, pointing a finger at her father.
"It is an integral part of the dream," Andrew said, looking up from his book. "Is it her subconscious reflecting an internal conflict she has with herself? Or is it something far more sinister?"
"Well, two different people have already tried to bring out the vampire in me," Beth pointed out. "And if the apocalypse that was happening in my dream is related to all the surges—"
"That would make the surges related to you," Buffy finished, though she sounded unsure. "But these surges don't seem related to you. They've been random and nowhere near where you were."
"True, but we didn't know Luther had returned because of her either," Andrew pointed out, then furrowed his brow. "Unless he didn't, and that was all merely events lining up with one another to create a disaster—Buffy, why'd you have to kill him before we could question him?"
"Oh, I don't know, because that's my job?" she retorted.
"Look, fightin' isn't gettin' us closer to any answer," Spike told them with a stern look. "Beth got the slayer dream to warn us about these surges. We need to find the source an' end it before everythin' goes to hell. Literally."
"Not the first time someone would try," Buffy muttered.
"And Maea? What's she got to do with it?" Beth asked. "It's not like she's much of a fighter. More like a mole or something. And a flaming sword? What's the deal with that?"
"Maybe it's all symbolic," Andrew decided. "A flaming sword? Very avenging-like. Such a weapon isn't uncommon in mythology either. For example, The Garden of Eden is guarded by a flaming sword, and in Norse mythology it's wielded by Surtr and it's said to have immense destructive power. And in Games of Thrones—"
"And that all means what for my dream?" Beth interrupted before they lost Andrew to the Nerdom.
"Err, well, it doesn't mean much of anything really," Andrew said awkwardly. "Symbolism can vary based upon the source. And since we don't know much about the source—"
"It could mean anything," Buffy finished with a sigh. "This is why I hate slayer dreams. Why can't they ever just be like 'this is what's going to happen, here is what you must do'? Doesn't the Council have anything else?"
"They're still following the surges," Andrew informed her, "and I've only been able to look through what I have here to compare it to the dream. I've informed Giles, but I don't know when he'll get back to me. I don't know if he'll have any more luck, especially if it's true that surges are to create a tear to open us up to another dimension. The information may just simply not exist here."
"Look, all we know is 'bad things are going to happen' soon and we need to do something about it," Beth said. "Whoever is causing these surges needs to stop before hell is upon us."
"She's right," Spike agreed. "Doesn' matter about a sword or whatnot, what's important is that we keep the dream from happening. People died due to the last surge an' who knows how many will be taken in the next one?"
Buffy's face looked grim as she settled into Senior Slayer Mode; it was such a natural turn of expression it sent chills down Beth's spine just seeing it. Things were starting to heat up and with those deaths looming over their heads, steps needed to be taken to end this all before it was too late.