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| Longer, Then Forever - Prologue/Chapter 1 by Demonica Mills (18 Reviews) | | - - - abc |  | | | Longer Then Forever
*thanks to Starshine for the name
Prologue
(Some dialogue borrowed from “The Gift”)
Buffy pulled Dawn tightly into her arms and stared at the swirling portal in front of her. The thought of how she was going to fix this and manage to save her sister at the same time loomed in front of her. Blood.
Your blood.
It all came down to blood, didn’t it?
My blood.
And she knew what would close the portal.
Summers blood.
She pulled Dawn out of her arms and stared into her sister’s eyes. She knew what she had to do, but making Dawn understand was a different story. She was a Slayer, had been since she was fifteen. Saving the world was what she did.
“Dawn, listen to me.” Buffy paused long enough to brush the hair out of Dawn’s face. This was the last time she would ever see it, and she wanted to remember her sister’s face…wherever she ended up. “Listen. I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do. Tell Giles ... tell Giles I figured it out. And, and I'm okay. And give my love to my friends.” Buffy paused again and looked over the edge of the platform. She could see them all below. Anya was injured and being cradled in Xander’s arms, Willow and Tara were holding hands and warding off a few left over minions, Giles was wiping his hands on his pants, and Spike…Buffy held her breath a moment as she watched Spike trying to run on his injured leg back to the tower. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. No regrets. Buffy turned back to Dawn. “You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. Dawn, the hardest thing in this world ... is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.”
With a final kiss to her sister’s forehead, Buffy ran full speed toward the end of the tower. She raised her hands over her head and did a perfect swan dive right of the edge.
Buffy didn’t know what she had been expecting, but the portal had been made of pure energy and it surged into her body making every nerve scream in pain. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She must have curled into a ball because when she hit the ground, she rolled twice before finding herself face down in the dirt.
Slowly, Buffy picked herself up and looked around. She was alone. The sky above her was black, illuminated only by the occasional flash of lightening. There was a forest of dead trees directly in front of her.
The forest of no feelings. She thought to herself.
A sharp pain sliced through her shoulder, and she turned to find a…well, she didn’t know what it was, but it had a beak and it was headed back her way. Buffy took off running towards the trees. The bird broke off its chase as she made it behind the first tree, only to trip on a branch. Immediately, one of the branches moved to scratch her arm, which was when Buffy realized that she hadn’t tripped over a tree but some kind of being that looked like a tree. She started running again.
Oh, God! Where am I?
XXX
Gotta get up that tower. Got to save Buffy, save the bit. Gotta move faster. Spike was chanting in his head, one hand clutching his leg, as he tried to get back to the stairs of the tower. He heard the niblet scream, and he looked up to see Buffy diving off the tower.
“NO!”
Was that his scream? He wasn’t sure. Might have been his, might have been one of the others. He could feel them around him as he collapsed to his knees in the rocks, his injured leg finally giving out. Mesmerized, Spike watched Buffy’s body convulse inside the portal. It was like a bad horror movie he wanted to turn off but felt compelled to keep watching. It was only when Dawn threw herself into his arms that he turned away to bury his face in Dawn’s hair, so he missed the finale. Instead, he waited for the sickening thump of her body hitting the ground. He covered Dawn’s ears so she wouldn’t have to hear.
“Where did she go?” Willow’s whisper barely heard, but echoed inside the heads of the rest of the group.
Spike looked up. The ground in front of him, the ground where her body should have landed, was empty. He looked to the sky. That was empty too. Buffy Summers was no where to be found.
XXX
Chapter 1
Giles rubbed his eyes in frustration and slammed the book down. How long had it been? Oh yeah, one hundred and forty six days. Spike had been counting, and everyday that they didn’t find Buffy, he would remind the group how long she had been gone. On one hand, it annoyed him to no end that Spike felt the constant need to repeat his statement day after bloody, eternal day; “Buffy wouldn’t give up if it was one of us.” On the other hand, he found it almost sweet the way the vampire was so sure they would find her…almost.
The tagline had become their rallying thought, and each member of the group found themselves saying it to each other when ever they became frustrated. Even Xander used it, although with trepidation that Spike had coined it, but he used it because it was true. Buffy would never give up if it were one of them.
It no longer struck Giles as odd that Spike had never left that group after Buffy’s disappearance. The first few hours had left them all in a daze, but once the daze broke, Spike went into overdrive. He threw himself into research. He patrolled the Hellmouth. He made sure that Dawn was eating, sleeping, and going to school. When the bills began rolling into the Summers’ home, Spike nonchalantly paid them all and never mentioned it. Where he got the money from, Giles never asked and truthfully didn’t care. Spike was the first one up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night. Actually, most nights he never made it to bed, falling asleep face first in some book.
In all the confusion, it took weeks for anyone to figure out that he wasn’t eating. Tara noticed it one day when Spike passed out mid-sentence at her feet. She was horrified, and had taken great pains since then to make sure that she warmed him up three mugs of blood a day. She even stood over him to make sure that he drank them, and didn’t put the mug down on the table to remember hours later when it had coagulated.
Xander had once confronted the vampire. The hysterical young man had punched Spike in the chin and demanded to know why he had stayed where he wasn’t wanted. Spike had simply rubbed his jaw and mumbled a response before walking away.
“Made a promise to a lady.”
The words still echoed in Giles’ head. What had Buffy made him promise? He had asked, but Spike merely responded that it was between him and the Slayer.
“I GOT IT!” Willow’s shout echoed through out the room, bringing Giles out his train of thought.
“You sure this time, Red?” Spike didn’t look at her as he flipped another page in the book he was reading, and gently rearranged Dawn’s sleeping head on his shoulder. This wasn’t the first time Willow had yelled that sentence out, and it was usually followed with an ‘oh, no…sorry, thought I had it’ directly after it.
“No, I really have it. You guys, I have it!” Willow gave a little jump of excitement and waved her hands in front of her. “Come on, look! We can do this! All we need is a few supplies from the Magic Box…er, as long as Anya hasn’t sold the Amulet of Valero or the Urn of Altec.”
“Oh, I still have those. The stupid Ad’vak demon that ordered them disappeared and he STILL owes me for them.”
“Great! Xander can go with you to get them,” Giles muttered.
“You mean for free? Are we going to make money on this?” Anya gave a bewildered look toward the glances she got from the rest of the group. “What?”
“Ahn, not the time. Let’s go,” Xander pulled her to her feet and out the door.
“Wait,” Willow called after them. “You need the rest of the list.” When they didn’t come back, she bolted out the door after them.
Spike quietly woke Dawn up before standing up and moving about the room. It took both Tara and Giles a moment to figure out what he was doing. Spike. William the Bloody, part of the Scourge of Europe, appeared to be cleaning the Slayer’s house.
“Um, Spike? What are you doing?” Tara asked.
He paused and looked at her, one hand balancing a pile of books while the other was using a dirty shirt to wipe off a counter.
“Can’t have her coming home to a messy house, yeah?”
XXX
She awoke with a start, and sat up so fast that she nearly hit her head on the top of the cave. She’d had the dream again, the one with the strange people and the giant ball of light. The dream had been coming to her for longer then she could remember. She thought that it might be about the place she had lived before she came to be in…well she didn’t really know where she was.
With a grunt, she stood up and made a mark on the wall of her cave. She couldn’t remember why she did this. It was another thing that she had done for longer then she could remember, but she did know that everytime she hit the number 365, she made a big circle and started over. She didn’t remember what 365 meant…or any of the other things that came before it, but she did know that she had hit 365 exactly 147 times as of today. Tomorrow she would start over.
Everyday was the same. She would wake up, hunt down some food, and then spend the rest of the day staying alive. Sometimes she would try and draw the pictures from her dreams on the wall using the various colors of mud that covered the ground. She would draw a girl with red hair shooting wavy lines out of her hands. Other times, she drew a man with white hair and blue eyes. She liked drawing him best. His picture was all over her cave. Well, him and a girl with long brown hair. The girl was always dripping in red when she drew her. She vaguely wondered what it all meant, but in the end, she didn’t care. Pretty pictures in her mind to keep her entertained while she destroyed anything that crossed her path. Everything here was evil. Everything here tried to kill her. So, she simply made it a point to kill everything first.
She picked up her killing stick and sharpened it on her special rock before heading outside. There was a bi-lok sitting a few feet from her cave. She smiled. Bi-loks were the tastiest creatures to eat for breakfast.
With a guttural yell, she attacked the creature. To her surprise, the bi-lok turned around quickly and countered her attack. She screeched as it sank its razor sharp teeth into her arm, and embedded her killing stick deeply in its neck. The teeth released their grip as the last breath exited the creature. She stabbed it over and over again, her anger causing her to rip the creature to shreds before she stopped.
Sighing, she licked the red off her arm before covering it with more of the mud she wore as camouflage. She hated when she had to lick the red stuff. Something in the back of her mind said that it was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out why. The red stuff was always all over her food, and that didn’t bother her as much as it being on herself. She shrugged her shoulders, dragged the bi-lok into her cave, and began to eat breakfast.
She had almost finished eating when the light appeared outside her cave. She knew that light. It looked the same as the light that had brought her here. Slowly, she got up and approached it. She was afraid of what was on the other side. What if it was worse?
She put her hand into the light, and then immediately drew it back. She inspected her hand. It looked okay. She backed up a few steps, took a deep breath, and ran full speed into the light.
XXX
Willow took a deep breath and frowned at the book in front of her.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Dawn asked.
“Nothing, it’s just…well…”
“For heaven’s sake girl, tell us what it is,” Giles demanded.
They were standing in a circle at the base of Glory’s tower. Willow was squatting in the middle, arranging the various items needed for the spell. She looked up at the group.
“Well, there’s something in the spell that I didn’t notice before…”
“And that would be?” Xander asked, hoping from one foot to another. It was kind of chilly outside.
“We…we need the blood of an enemy and a loved one freely given.”
“Take mine,” Spike offered. “We were enemies long enough, should work.”
“But you have borrowed blood. Will that count?” Anya asked. “Does the blood you drink become yours once it’s inside you?”
“Blood’s blood. It should count.”
“And you can take mine,” Dawn offered, stepping forward.
“Well, um, see…we need a lot of blood…Spike should be okay, I mean, we can get him more blood later, but…I don’t know about one of us…We need to bleed until the spell is complete and Buffy returns to us. That could be seconds or hours.”
“And this wasn’t something you thought to mention before? Honestly Willow!” Giles chastised her while he mentally kicked himself for not double-checking the spell.
“She didn’t know. S-she was t-trying to help,” Tara muttered.
“You can still have mine,” Spike declared.
Giles walked into the middle of the circle and picked up the book. This was the third time that Willow had dragged them all out here, only to have the spell fail at the last second. He wasn’t sure how many more times they could take it. Giles adjusted his glasses and began to read.
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