"Hey, over here!" he yells, at the top of his lungs, loud enough to be heard by the 20-foot tall giant that's lugging its way towards a small group of demons that look as if they're playing cat-and-mouse with... something, or someone. She can feel the desperation in his words, this sort of panic that claws at her to the point that can she feel the fear firsthand.
"Hey, Jack!" he's calling again, this time taking a step forward. Probably to gain more attention, she figures, she knows, but the falling rain drowns out most of the volume in his words. Even so, the thing, the big-giant-man thing, lumbers around to a full turn. Slowly, in some over-exaggerated movement, it looks down at Spike. "Yeah, that's right," she can hear Spike murmur, though he's saying it to himself. "What'dya say you take on someone more your own size, eh?"
The thing quirks an eyebrow down at the teeny-tiny, about 14-and-a-half feet smaller-Spike. Point made.
"Yeah, alright. Still. Ever heard 'appearances can be deceiving'?" Before the giant can boom out a response, Spike is charging forward. His face shifts before he's even half-way there, his vampire features bursting through, but then, like a channel being changed on the TV, everything starts to get this snowy, grainy quality. Spike, the demon, the pouring rain--it all flickers to black, like the reception's gone bad, crackling with short, fading images of Spike reared back and lunging forward.
Then, in a quick switch, the picture clears once more. Spike's now running alongside Angel, tired and with a noticeable limp. The giant, in the near background, is lying lifeless on its back, this lone river of blood trickling out from beneath its head. Dead, she figures, but realizes the second she thinks it she knows that it's true.
"Where's Charlie?" Spike shouts.
Angel doesn't bother to answer, not right away. Up in the distance, way too close ahead for Buffy's taste, there's a large collection of demons who all look intent on something. Mass destruction, probably. Death. "I haven't seen him," Angel answers, steady and calm. Aside from a huge cut on his left arm, one that's bleeding more than a little fairly, he looks fine.
"You think he's..." It's an unfinished question, one that Buffy knows the end to without having to actually hear it. Without even knowing who this 'Charlie' person is, she can feel the same worry Spike feels just thinking about him.
He's dead, he's dead, he's dead plays like a song through her head; playfully, teasingly. He's dead. Charlie's dead. It means nothing to her, and, at the same time, it means everything.
Angel comes to a quick stop, breathing out a heavy, tired breath, and Spike is automatically stopping with him. He only looks at Angel for a fleeting moment before he settles forward, his gaze locked on that group of demons ahead. Large ones, big ones, small ones. Blue ones, red ones, green ones. It's like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, if you forgive some homicidal tendencies.
Spike glances back at Angel, waiting for a command. An order. Some sort of direction. Angel's their leader, and this whole fight, this whole rain-soaked gig taking place in some discreet back alley, it's all Angel's. But he never gets one and, eventually, he grows tired of waiting. Always was impatient. Spike gives the Champ a knowing grin, one that's sort of a 'See you on the other side' type thing, before he sets off in a determined spurt, headed for the gang of beasties.
The picture starts to get staticky again, fading in and out. Spike's charging forward. Yelling. Shouting British obscenities as loud as he can, as many as he can. A flash of white bursts behind Buffy's eyes, and the vision of Spike and the demons pops back up, then sort of swishes back and forth--like some cameraman trying to be pretentiously artsy with his shot, full of that real-life, down-to-the-dirty-detail grittiness.
Another splash of black, followed with a lightening show of color. Spike's surrounded. Black again. Black and black and black and then, briefly, she sees Spike fumbling forward. Being pulled down or pushed down or knocked over. Everything has turned silent, everything, from the screams she was hearing to the sound of the steady rainfall that'd incessantly been falling, but she can hear Spike. Hears him shouting for Angel, hears him yelling at the various demons. He calls for Charlie again, for something called 'Illyria'.
It goes black again, but just for a second, and the next thing she sees is Spike back on his feet. Unsteadily so. There's a mixture of rain water and red, red blood dripping off of his face, most of it freely falling from a large gash in his forehead, but Spike doesn't seem to notice. He's grinning from head to toe, never mind the fact that he's drenched through... never mind the fact that he's still surrounded, still enclosed by more than a half dozen demons, most at least a good foot taller than him.
"C'mon, then," he says, winded and out of breath. His eyes flare, this open invitation for violence. This catcall for destruction. "You've got a job to finish, don't you?"
Buffy's eyes snapped open, the sound of a distant car alarm blaring off blocks away pulling her out of her dream.
"Not again." She pulled a nearby pillow over her head, not caring about the bedhead hair it produced, and let out a lengthy groan of why me? proportion. It was the third time she'd had that dream in a week. Maybe a little less And they all lived happily ever after as the previous other ones had been, this one a big blinking emphasis on a not-so-epic-Hollywood-ending, but the basic structure was the same.
1) Angel. He was there. Usually a bit more vocal, if not actually helpful.
2) Spike. Apparently logic wasn't something her inner-self cared for, because while Buffy knew Spike to be a very dusty, very dearly departed memory that she'd left behind in Sunnydale, somehow he was looking quite alive and healthy in her dreams.
3) Demons. Loads of them, possibly to degrees that made the Sunnydale Hellmouth look the equivalent of a nightly patrol and nothing more.
Stir it all together and you have a recipe for Slayer dreams.
Buffy flung the pillow away from her, letting the covers slip loosely away from her body.
It was time to see Giles.
*
"I keep having these dreams."
While Buffy had initially struggled with a more catchy opening, or maybe something casual and mundane to start the conversation off, the above words were what she instead blurted to her sometimes-Watcher. Which, retrospectively, were kinda catchy on their own. Sorta Martin Luther King JR-ish, give or take some leisure with the past and present tense.
"Dreams?" said Watcher replied back, settling comfortably across from her into a cushy-looking armchair. She'd arranged to meet him at the new Council Headquarters early that same morning, conveniently located just a few blocks to the West of her moderately medium-scale apartment.
Buffy relaxed in her own chair, ignoring the cup of tea he'd set out for her. "About Spike." Off of Giles slightly uncomfortable look, she quickly, and with a healthy dose of embarrassment, added, "No! Not those... Giles! Dreams," she repeated more firmly. "Scary with the details, big with the vague? I think they might be Slayer dreams."
"Slayer dreams?" Giles was genuinely taken aback, as well as more than a little skeptical. "Starring Spike? But he's..."
"Dusty. I know." She blew out a deep breath, one that sent her recently, adorably cut bangs blowing away from her face. "It doesn't make any sense, but I'm telling you: Slayer dreams."
"And what are they about?"
"Oh, you know, the usual: death, mayhem, apocalypse. But it's Spike. He's there, and he's fighting with Angel. Which, believe me, is a whole new level of death, mayhem, and apocalypse." Her voice lost some of its amusement, growing more serious. "I know it sounds crazy, but it feels real. More than real."
"Buffy, we left Sunnydale without him. The town collapsed unto itself, nothing could've survived. Not even Spike."
While his words were full of sense, because, after all, she was a firsthand eye-witness to the now-crater that was Sunnydale, she couldn't shake off her own doubt.
"Then why is he showing up in my dreams all of a sudden?" she persisted. "I don't think it's the Powers That Whatever adding in a fun, 'hey, remember that guy?!' just for the sake of that really pleasant morning-after jolt of realization. It means something."
"You think Spike's alive?"
"Honestly? I don't even know." She sighed, frustrated and confused. "Any other time, I would say no. Of course no. But this is us, Giles. We die, we come back. It happened to me, it happened to Angel--"
"Under entirely different circumstances," he cut in gently. "With you... it was foolish, Willow harnessing magicks she had no fathomable idea the sheer magnitude she was even remotely dealing with. And with Angel..."
She used his hesitation to make her own point. "With Angel I shish kebabed him. I sent him to hell, I watched him go--and he still came back."
There was another, heavier pause, and when Giles spoke again his words were full of doubt. "And you think the same of Spike?"
"I don't know," she sighed, this time the desperation that'd been gripping her since this gut feeling first flared a week ago finally seeping through. "What if my dreams mean something, though--something huge? What if he's really alive and out there somewhere?"
"And if he's not?"
"Then he's not. Then perk up the dosage and call me crazy. I don't know. I think we should call Angel, though."
Now Giles looked flat out opposed to the idea entirely. He pushed forward in his chair, sitting on the edge of the cushion, all the better to demand her full attention. "Buffy, I don't think that's wise--"
"I know, I know. Angel, Angelus, pick a personality." She waved a dismissive hand. "Maybe you're wrong about him working at this... Wolfy Heart place. Maybe he's just channeling his inner Ally McBeal? You know: big honkin' law firm, zero-food diet, scary dancing babies?"
Giles didn't even bat an eyelash. "Or perhaps he's involved himself in something he has no right to be associated with?"
She'd had many long sit-downs with Giles about this particular subject already, him readily against Angel and whatever it was Angel was trying to achieve with his most recent foray into the business world, whereas Buffy took on the role of the sideless and detached. There was a part of her, very small and stupidly hopeful, that felt like Angel had a purpose. A reason. That he knew what he was doing, and that he was doing it for good.
"Maybe," she agreed, changing tactics. "But guess what? It's not my life, it's his. I can't judge what he does, Giles, the same way he didn't judge what we were doing in Sunnydale."
"You can't honestly be comparing the two--"
"I've compared. There are charts and pie graphs being made as we speak. I'm just saying that maybe we should, I don't know, get his side of the story before we throw down the gauntlet and declare war?"
"And your history with him has nothing to do with this decision? Were he anyone else, you'd feel the same?"
"Were he anyone else this wouldn't even matter," she argued back, maybe a tad more bitingly than she intended. She softened her voice and added, "But he's him, and... I trust him."
"I can recall your trust in a certain other vampire," he murmured lowly. It was a dig, she knew. An accusation of a relationship that Giles never fully approved of, in any small manner, not at the beginning or the end.
"Yeah, and look where that got us," she said sarcastically, "Oh, still alive! Spike saved the world because I trusted him. Because I believed in him, and he believed in himself. Is it really so hard for you to put a pause on the inner-Watcher and look at this levelly?"
"Levelly?" Giles echoed back, his own twist on sarcasm in the form of mild disbelief. "Buffy, Angel has taken over Wolfram and Hart... a law firm conspired from the very roots of evil. They represent all that is unholy in this world, quite literally, and now the one vampire in existence known to have caused so vast and such an impressive array of destruction is freely running it. So, sorry for my apparent lack of trust, but one doesn't look so levelly at such things."
"How do they look, then? Blindly? Not at all? Fine," she decided, and stood up to go. "You know what? I'll do it myself. I guess there's a reason why the Watcher's don't pick up the same dream reception the Slayers do."
"Buffy--"
"No, you're right," she cut him off. "Who are we to trust Angel? I think you taught me a while back that you can't trust anyone."
TBC
squawks
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!