De-Evolution
A/N: I never intended to write a sequel to Evolution, but I got so many people asking for one that the Muse decided to oblige. I have never had a story write itself so fast in my life, so this story is dedicated to all the people who kick started the Muse into a writing frenzy. You guys rule!
This story takes place 200 years after Evolution. Much of the story will be told in various flashbacks, but the time line will skip around. Clues will be given as to what year it is and such, but please assume nothing just because you haven’t been told it yet.
XXX
Chapter 1
It’s all over but the crying
Fade to black I’m sick of trying
-Garbage
Attempt number twenty four was a knife dipped in battery acid that she’d siphoned from their transport. She slashed her way vertically down both her arms. Then she worked her way down her legs. She hit the veins dead on. The knife had melted into mush by the time she finished. The spilling blood bubbled and burned its way out of her flesh. It took a moment for her to realize that the echoing sounds bouncing off the walls were her own screams. She blacked out.
XXX
“Close yer eyes, luv.”
Buffy giggled and leaned closer to where she sensed Spike was.
“Hey, now. It’s not a surprise if you keep trying to suss it out.”
She pouted behind the hands that lay pressed over her face.
“And no pouting. I can sense when you do that you know.”
She couldn’t help but smile at that.
Spike moved to stand behind her. He wrapped his hands around her wrists and pulled them away from her face. “Happy anniversary, luv.”
Buffy gasped at the scene before her. He had recreated their wedding day…well, as best he could. Most of the guest list was long gone.
The grassy hill held two rows of plain, white folding chairs separated by a pathway of smooth stones. At the end of the path was a white wooden chupa interlaced with pink and white roses. Behind the chupa was a small pond, although there was no Willow to help the lit candles hover just above the water.
“Oh, Spike...It’s,” She turned to throw her arms around him only to find him kneeling if front of her.
“Buffy, will you do me the honors of giving me your hand in marriage a second time?” He held up a small emerald ring that made Buffy’s eyes tear up. It was Dawn’s engagement ring. She had thought Dawn had been buried with it. “Nibblet…she gave it to me just before…she wanted you to have it someday and I thought this would be a good,” Spike swallowed hard and didn’t finish his sentence. .
“Sssh, I love it…I love you. I love you and I’d marry you a million times over.” Buffy dropped to her knees in front of him and threw her arms around his neck.
“Well, we could do that, you know,” Spike murmured between kisses. “Got eternity to spend marrying you over and over again. Could do it once a year if you like.”
“No. Not every year. Just like this,” she said. “Once a century, you and me and this grassy hill.”
“Happy one hundred, pet.”
XXX
It was dark when she opened her eyes. Time didn’t matter anymore. It was light. It was dark. She was here, he wasn’t, and she couldn’t join him.
Buffy looked down at her arms. Completely healed. Not ever a raised line to show where she ripped her veins apart.
She stood up and surveyed her kitchen. Not her kitchen, their kitchen. The battery acid had eaten a hole through the island. Tears sprang to her eyes. Spike loved that island. He said it reminded him of the island in her house back in Sunnydale when he used to sit with her mom and drink hot chocolate. It was the one thing he had asked they install in every place they’d ever lived, and she had ruined it.
“’M sorry, ‘m sorry,” she sobbed as she began filling cups of water to pour on the smoldering hole. “I’ll fix it, and it will be right as-as rain, you’ll see, and when you come back you won’t even know the hole was there…” Buffy dropped the glass and covered her face with her hands. Her knees hit the floor as she collapsed. “Please give him back to me. Please,” she begged to the empty air. “I’ve been a good Slayer. I fought the good fight. I killed your demons and stopped your apocalypses. Please let me have him back. He’s my everything.”
XXX
“Hey, Buffy?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen my duster? I can’t find it,” Spike called out from the bedroom.
“Which one?”
“The one you got me last Christmas. I want to wear it when we go out tonight.”
Buffy walked into the room and leaned against the door frame. She watched in amusement as Spike crawled under the bed, then peered behind the dresser before looking under the bed again.
“Where did you see it last,” she asked, trying to maintain a straight face.
“Night before last. I came home, took it off, and draped it on the dresser. Now it’s not there. I can’t understand it.”
Shaking her head, Buffy walked over to the closet, opened the door and pulled out the jacket. “Oh,” she said in a mocking tone. “Look what I found in the closet…right where it belongs. I wonder how it could have gotten there.”
Spike sat back on his haunches, a sheepish grin on his face. “Er, sorry ‘bout that, luv. Meant to hang it up and all that.”
“Uh-huh,” Buffy replied. “You know that might have worked in the beginning, but after almost two hundred years, I’ve given up on hoping that you’ll ever, ever, ever learn to hang your damn duster in the closet.”
Spike looked up at her through his lashes. “I guess I’ve been a naughty man and you’ll have to punish me.” He crawled toward her, and ran his hands slowly up the backs of her legs and under her skirt.
Buffy moaned when he began to pepper her lower regions with kisses, and she felt her knees begin to weaken.
“I must always, always remember to hang up my clothes when I’m not wearing them,” Spike murmured between kisses.
“Oh,” Buffy closed her eyes. “Mmmm, not that I don’t, oh, love where this is, ooh, going…” She fisted her hands in his hair as his tongue entered her. “Oh, Spike…We’ve got to…go…made…oh, right there…plans.”
Spike growled into her thigh and ignored her, sinking his teeth into the tender skin before lathing it with his tongue.
“Yes! I mean…oh, God. Spike…promised…”
He pressed his tongue flat against her clit and she came, screaming his name and shifting into game face. He stood up quickly and sank his fangs into her neck. She came again, sinking her own fangs into him.
“Mine,” he growled.
“As you are mine,” she whispered back.
They stayed frozen in each other’s arms for a moment before Spike spoke again. “Do we really have to go see Angel?”
XXX
Angel stood outside the door to Buffy and Spike’s accommodations and ran his fingers through his hair. He wanted to go in. He wanted to help her the way she had helped him after Cordelia’s passing, and then Connor’s passing after that.
For the first day she had been in shock. She didn’t move, didn’t blink, barely seemed to breathe. He’d tried to feed her, both food and blood, but she wouldn’t open her mouth. Just sat still as stone and stared off into space.
The second day, she’d began screaming. Long, angst filled screams that shook his entire being until he thought that his soul would break under her sadness. He’d tried to hold her, but she knocked him across the room. She pulled at her hair and scratched welts into her arms as she shredded her clothes with her nails. He’d sat in the corner of the room and watched her, unsure of how to help.
Her first suicide attempt had been on day three. He should have known better then to fall asleep. To sleep meant there had been quiet, quiet meant Buffy had stopped screaming, no screaming meant badness all around.
The first attempt was a simple slitting of the wrists. He’d found her lying in the bathtub, her hair floating in the blood red water around her like a golden halo. She sat straight up, sputtering on the water as he entered the bathroom.
“Not dead,” she mumbled. “Didn’t work, not dead.”
She stepped out of the tub letting the blood drip down her body in small rivers as she walked toward the door.
“Don’t get blood on the carpet, Spike,” she mumbled. “It’s my bloody carpet too, and if I want to drip blood all over my bloody carpet I will,” she answered herself, lowering her voice and giving it a British accent. “No ‘cause I always have to clean it up.”
Angel watched in morbid fascination as Buffy held the two sided conversation with herself.
“Buffy?” he said softly.
For a moment she acted like she hadn’t heard him, but the she’d pivoted slightly to face him.
“Your fault,” she said. “Your fault! Your FAULT! YOURFAULTYOURFAULTYOURFAULTYOURFAULT!” She’d catapulted herself at him, clawing at his face and shrieking. “Went out to meet YOU! Still be here if you hadn’t wanted to go to dinner.”
Angel fended her off the best he could without hurting her. “Buffy! Think about what you’re saying. We always meet for dinner at this time of year. The first-OW-Friday of –OW- June to do the memorandum for the gang. It was your idea. We’ve been doing it for a hundred and fifty years.”
She’d thrown him out of the house, literally. The moment he was out the door, she began muttering the dis-invite spell. A beating heart meant demons needed an invitation to her home. The invisible field had been up before he could get his bearings, and he’d been forced to spend the past two weeks with his face pressed against her windows as he watched Buffy try to kill herself again and again.
“The dolly is all broken.”
Angel jerked out of his thoughts at the sound of the voice.
“Poor dolly,” Drusilla said, stepping out of the shadows to stand beside him. “But don’t worry, Mummy’s come to make it all better again.
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