Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. I bow in the direction of California, where Joss lives. Mutant Evils rules! Selat.

Psychomachia

Part Six

It had been so long, or so it seemed, that what was around Buffy struck her as blinding, like a paradise once lost. Sunlight. Blue sky. Green grass. Prodigies all, akin to miracles.

The hour of the day itself astonished her. Not the eternal noontime of the nunnery which she thought of, half-consciously, as her own--it was mid-morning, and the world was greenclad. Bowls of lawn cradled in the hands of hills. Pools of water enticing as wine. Sheltering slopes of mountains that gathered everything close, seeming to hover protectively over the peaceful land. Even the trees dotting the lush pastures seemed to stretch out their limbs in a blessing.

She felt newborn here, meek as a spring lamb. When she ventured a few steps, her feet went every which way before she recaptured the knack of walking. Instead of dancing.

But this, this was an earth that seemed made to be danced upon.

And look at Spike! Spike in sunlight was so unfamiliar that she barely knew him. All that creature-of-the-night cool was just gone, stripped away, leaving him blinking at Buffy, pink-faced and his eyes a different shade of blue. His cheekbones looked wrong, and that rocked her world. His whole face looked rounder and younger. Softer, with a blush to his skin that was aw, so cute. And he wasn’t looking at her. In fact, when he saw her gawking at him, he turned his back and walked a few steps away. She couldn’t blame him, either.

As for Angel, he had floundered off the table, paler by far than Spike and more appalled, feeling his own pulse, gasping in deep breaths apparently for the sheer shock of breathing. "Alive," he said. He patted his face, grabbed his wrist and took his pulse again. "My skin is warm. My heart--it’s beating. The sun! That’s the sun up there! But how--?"

Spike had tilted his head far back and seemed to be searching for some truth floating in the sky above. The curve of his throat was beautiful, and his old coat, the black leather soft as wings of cotton, hung off his shoulders in folds like a girl’s party dress. And he sighed.

"I was dead." That was Angel again. "What--how--?"

"Seems like we’ve all changed," Spike said to no one. "Death does that, I guess." With a slash of a glance in Angel’s direction: "It’s usually called ‘decay’."

Buffy jumped in. "No way, Spike, I’ve been dead. Been to heaven, and this isn’t it--"

But Spike just shrugged.

"I’ve been to hell myself," Angel said in a lower-than-usual voice. "This isn’t it either."

"And I left my heart in San Francisco," Spike snapped, "but at least I’ve still got half a wit left. ‘Course it’s not hell, everybody knows what hell looks like. I think it’s some kind of limbo. Weren’t we fighting the apocalypse? And we . . ." He turned a hand over. ". . . died. That’s what."

"That’s dumb. And wrong. I didn’t die, I--" Angel stopped talking. Instead he took his pulse again.

"If you didn’t die, how come you’re alive again?"

"That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Buffy? You have twelve shadows," said Angel, pointing at Buffy‘s feet.

"You’re way ahead of me in the shadow-business yourself, mister." In fact, he cast so many shadows--like spokes in a wheel, spreading circular around him--that he seemed to stand in a pool of blackness. Spike, on the other hand, cast no shadow whatsoever. And he looked way better than Angel. Healthier. A hundred percent more, well, alive.

Angel didn’t look good, in fact. Buffy stared at him, harder and harder. He was green in the face, and kept fidgeting and shading his eyes from the sun, which was strange because you’d think he’d be enjoying being in the light, Angel being Angel and always yearning after what a vampire couldn’t have. And that was alarming and made Buffy’s stomach fret. She started toward him, and just as she did, his shading hand began to wobble and then his whole body started to list sideways.

She caught him, both hands pushing him up and his limp weight resting on her shoulder. "Oof, he’s put on a few pounds. Spike, I think it’s the sun that’s making him woozy. We’ve got to get him some shade somehow--"

But before the sentence was out of her mouth, Spike had thrown up his hands in exasperation, saying something she didn’t think she heard properly. Buffy looked up, up, and a cool shadow fell upon her face. Above her, leaves filled the air with their green sighs, coins of light dancing as they breathed out. A tree. There was a tree. Its roots humped themselves beneath thick moss, as if they had always dug there; the ground in its rain-shadow was as sparse of grass as if it had always been that way. She pushed Angel to equilibrium and let him balance on his own, marveling. "How did you do that?"

"You just have to say some words," Spike muttered.

"I heard them." Angel was already looking feistier, and his tone was certainly combative enough. "’I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree?’ What’s next, roses are red and violets are blue?"

"I know six words," Spike snapped, jumping up off his rock, "that can turn you into a sheep, you pillock. Enough, already? Give it a rest."

"You don’t get to give me orders, junior." Yep, Angel’s feist-o-meter had shot way up, back to normal. He jabbed at Spike’s chest, and Spike was up off his slab, snarling in his face. "You keep a civil tongue in your head!" "Says who!?" "Says me, and it doesn’t matter if I’m dead or alive, I can still--"

"Both of you, pipe down!" Buffy shouted, getting between them. She knew what happened when the two of them mixed--knock-down, drag-out stuff. "Raw-is-war-time can come later, okay? ‘Cause I’ve got, uh, I think I’ve got marching orders for us." Spike still wasn’t looking at her! She plowed on, anyway, "When I got here I was, like, accident-scene in Confusion City, garbled pictures at eleven. But someone back in the Haunted Mansion, they called her the Maid of the Black Book, she told me stuff. What to do. To go out and fight monsters, and there’s a dragon. A dragon on the road ahead? And we already did that part--I mean we faced the dragon--but she was pretty clear that we had to go somewhere."

"We can’t go anywhere," Angel said, slumping down on the granite slab, and jabbing at the ground with one heel, as if he hated it. "Can’t get out of the valley. I’ve certainly tried."

"Spike can get us out," she said, with more confidence than she really felt. "Can’t you?"

"Yeah." Spike was kicking at the ground too, just like Angel. She was bracketed by angry vampires, mirror images of each other, oh joy.

"What’s up with this place?" she asked. "Where are we, anyway?"

"It’s nowhere I’ve explored, and I hunted through the whole valley," Angel said. He was looking around, suspiciously. "I couldn’t get past the high hills at the valley’s edge, there were cliffs--" He made a gesture expressive of sheer cliffs, impossibly high. "Too high to climb. Whenever it seemed I had a chance to get into the mountains, I met black knights. And there were--other things. Monsters."

"Really?" Buffy said, thinking So, what? Monsters were monsters, no big deal.

"There were snakes, okay? Lots of really big snakes."

"Hate to burst your bubble, Indiana," said Spike, "but there’s lots of ways up beyond the cliffs, especially if you follow the road? You know, the road. That great big road that runs smack across the valley and into the mountains? That road."

"That road doesn’t go anywhere!"

"Maybe after dark," Spike said nastily, "a bloke can get confused easy, doesn’t see so good, that it? That road isn’t that easy to spot." He shrugged. "Anyway, look, soon as I got my feet under me, I busted out of the big house, whatever it was. Big empty place, gave me the creeps. I figured out how the books in the library worked, and I was out of there . . . Started hearing this man’s voice, he told me what to do, I did it. Fighting monsters, mostly. Was like home. I steer clear of the valley though, black knights running all about the place."

"Oh," said Angel, "scared, huh? I should have guessed."

"No. I quit messing with them," said Spike rapidly and without pause, "the black knights, right after I pried the hat off one and got a good look at his face okay? Enough said."

That took the steam right out of Angel; for a funny moment he looked like a punctured balloon. Buffy almost burst out laughing. But then he sagged again, and she jumped to prop him up. "Hey!" To Spike, she said, "He’s really sick--" Back to Angel: "Angel? What‘s wrong with you?"

"Isn’t it obvious?" She could barely make out Angel’s voice. "I’m not the real Angel, that’s what’s wrong. The real Angel . . . is back there in the castle. Turning it into hell. Is Angelus." Even lower, he finished, "I’m just another of his shadows."

Buffy tried to grab his hand, but he pulled it away with a grimace. "Spike!" she said. "You have to take us on this road, whatever it is."

"No," Spike said.

"What? Aw, c‘mon, Spike, for the love of--"

"You heard." He had, at last, turned to face her. "I’ve been here longer than the both of you, and it seems like, if you can’t get out of the valley on your own, you’re not supposed to be going somewhere else." Then he jabbed out a finger, straight at Buffy--an accusing finger. Her big mistake in the garden of desire sprang to mind, not-so-pretty pictures that made her drop her own gaze and examine the grass at her feet. She rolled a pebble under her bare heel, picked it up between her toes. Spike snorted. "And don’t try to wheedle me round, Slayer. Cause, seems like you’ve lost your looks."

"Spike!" But it was too late. All he did was take a step backward, and his silhouette became a doorway--and he had vanished. Leaving her with Angel. Stranded.

He hated her. Oh God. Buffy pulled at her own hair, distraught. But it was the shape of her hands--all sinew and sharpened nails, and tough with callus on the palms and the ends of the fingers--that caught her attention. "These aren’t mine! Where’d they come from--?" A horrible conviction hit her. She pawed at the rough blanket of her shift, stood suddenly on one foot and peered at the sole of the other--a hard, narrow dirty foot with long agile toes--and yeeked. "A mirror! I need a mirror, this isn’t me, I’m . . . what happened to me?"

But she already knew. She had become the Maid of the Black Book.

Hours passed and the sun never moved, fixed in the sky as if nailed up there; immobile as Buffy, trapped like her. Angel sat on his stone and brooded, and eventually she ended up sitting next to him, facing in a different direction, brooding. She was as ugly outside now as she was on the inside. Over and over, she examined her hands with their claws of nails, grime trapped under them that she scraped at till she whimpered with pain. She couldn’t get them clean. They were so sharp that she cut herself, trying. They were knives, and her limbs were all muscle, sinew and bone. When she pried at her own mouth, she cut her fingers again, because her teeth were nothing but edges. Her skin was hard as leather, she didn’t feel cold or heat, and she could walk over sharp stones without realizing it. Even her hair was like a nest of spikes and thistles. Every part of her body had become a weapon.

The world around her was beautiful, even though she wasn’t. It seemed to her that her steps bruised the tender grass underfoot, and yet ripe fruit fell off the trees and rolled enticingly toward her. Buffy slept on pillows of moss and juniper; they seemed to embrace her springily. Angel, following her around like a morose thirteenth shadow, seemed to dislike everything about this place just as much as she liked it. He said the apples stung his mouth. Maybe it was because he was human now and the taste of everything was different, maybe it was because he just didn’t like Spike.

Spike wasn’t beyond reach. Buffy spotted him several times, walking across the morning pastures, and once she saw him climb a tree.

She didn’t dare approach him. How could she persuade him of anything, the way she looked now?

There was no way of telling if hours passed, or days. The sky above never changed at all. Not even the clouds moved. She marked the passage of time from the earth instead, because it was in a boil of constant transformation. Stones grew into stonecrop under her feet. Trees walked--she would have sworn to it on a bible--when she turned her back. Even the hills walked, moving around in the blue distance, changing their places. The changes were not random. If Buffy exclaimed aloud over something she liked, even something as small as a new kind of flower, next time she turned a corner she would be surprised by whole fields of the same. Once. she woke into the everlasting mid-morning, and found birds singing all around, every little bush full of sudden birds. There had been no birds at all before then. Once, without warning, butterflies and bees and every kind of ladybug enlivened the hills, along with all the insect life that should have been there, but hadn’t been. Everything changing, everything, all the time. She could only approve of this earthbound weather.

She understood why Spike didn’t want to leave.

She had injured him, wronged him. She also understood why he shunned her. But they had to get back to their own world . . .

At last she got up the courage to confront him.

Angel had talked to him, she did know that. She’d heard the shouting and hurried toward it, but when she arrived all she found was an empty hollow fenced in by heavy-boughed pines. With drops of fresh blood on the thick green moss. So the two vampires had come to blows. Hard to tell if Angel had been injured; he was dimmer by the day, fading to a ghost, a surly ghost. Once he told her, "I’m unclean," and ran from her as if he would infect her. Somewhere, in the other world where, maybe, her nuns still existed--defenseless--the black knight Angelus was waiting.

When she found Spike, his face was unmarked. No black eyes from Angel’s fist, no split lip. He was as handsome as ever, sexy beast--of the three of them, the only one who could say so. He was walking down a steep path near one edge of the valley, and Buffy knew--she had explored the whole place by then--that the way he came from led to nothing but a dead end, but he strolled along whistling as if he’d just come a long way. He was twirling a stalk of wild iris, its flowers as blue-violet as evening or memories. Buffy had thought to gather a bouquet of wildflowers, which she now quickly hid behind her back. The stems were mangled, she now realized, and the blossoms were half-crushed. She let them fall.

He didn’t speak when she fell in behind him, but his sidelong glance wasn’t hostile. Buffy followed him silently. She didn’t really know what to say. They walked on. Finally, he sat down with his back to her, on the bank of a stream, or maybe it was a brook, but at any rate it was new since she’d last explored this way. Spike dipped his stalk of iris till the blue flowers met their blue-ruffle reflection. She hung back, wavering like the water’s surface. Then she stole up behind him and bent over him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

"So."

"Yeah."

"You said it," Buffy agreed. Feeling the conversation lacked something, she cast around and came up with, "Absolutely right."

Ha ha, now he was definitely hiding a smile. Emboldened, she crouched beside him. She didn’t want to see even a hint of her reflection in the stream, but she did want to be with him. Long minutes passed, Spike waving his wand of flowers through the water, and gradually she relaxed.

"This is a really great world," she ventured.

"Think so?"

She nodded emphatically. "I think it’s amazing."

"It’s not cosy like where you were, maybe."

"My nunnery? Oh, that wasn’t cosy."

"You had a nunnery?" said Spike. "Heh." He started to laugh, but cut off fast when she shot him a glare. "Er. Sorry. Forget I said that."

"It’s a lot more friendly here than my nunnery," Buffy admitted. "You’re, like, a magician. With a staff of power and everything, very . . . Masculine." She thought. "There’s only maybe one thing I miss about the other world."

"Yeah? What?"

"The sheep. They were cute--woolly white sheep on the hills, with woolly white clouds upside-down in the sky above them . . . I liked the sheep."

Spike lifted the stalk of dripping-wet flowers, touched the topmost blossom to his lips in a considering gesture. Then he said, leaning sideways toward her:

"Let down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

"Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told."

It was like he was talking love-talk to her. Addressing her as Death, yes, but with such tenderness in his voice! It didn’t even matter that she was ugly now. Across the brook, masses of white flowers--bushes loaded with mock-orange and spirea--had acquired outlines, curling horns, cleft hooves and suspicious flaring noses. Their blunt muzzles worked, ceaselessly chewing mouthfuls of leaves, and their yellow eyes stared unblinking. Then one said, "Maaaaaw," and they crashed off through the undergrowth, running in a flock.

Buffy had been holding her breath. She let it out now in a long huff. "Wow."

Was Spike preening? He definitely was.

"Spike. I, I have to tell you some things."

"Go on."

The words faltered out, her lips suddenly awkward. There was so much to explain. Yes, she’d spent most of her life mooning after Angel, even when she was sleeping with Spike himself, forbidden love more romantic and all that. And she’d treated him, Spike, badly. She admitted it. Of course it had been mutual, but he’d suffered at her hands.

Never mind that he‘d asked for it.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was something she’d come to understand during their last year together, after he won his soul back. She hadn’t been brave enough to tell him then. Or maybe she hadn’t been honest enough with herself. Or maybe, words not being her thing, she’d been unable to express what she really felt.

But she had felt an awakening. She’d looked back at her memories of Angel, and realized their Great Earthshaking Love hadn’t been earthshaking, hadn’t been that great, had mostly been a sixteen-year-old’s sugary illusions. With a whopping scoop of hormones on top. Then she had looked anew at Spike, silently fighting at her side--and she’d known, suddenly, that one man was always coming to her and the other was always retreating, that one’s love was affirmation and the other’s vows were always renunciation. And who she wanted to be with. Him. Spike.

Always Spike. The one she loved.

He heard her out, then said one word, "Bullshit."

Buffy’s jaw dropped. "What?"

"You heard me. Stop spouting that garbage, it’s just a pack of lies."

"It’s the truth!"

"Yeah? Prove it."

"But . . . How?"

"Easy," Spike said. "This place is full of magic. And that’s what truth is, innit? It’s what makes the magic happen. I know that now." He jabbed a finger at her. "If you’ve got something real in you, let it out. So. Go ahead."

Okay! She would. Her mouth opened angrily, and then she shut it with a snap. No words; her mind was blank. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, no poetry came out--not that she knew any poetry, really. Not even haikus.

Worse, unwarily, she saw herself reflected in the stream. The water had smoothed, calm as mirror glass; and there she was, the monster, looking over handsome Will’s shoulder. In this place, he was the human one. She was black brows and smoky eyes, primeval face made for a predator’s snarl. Her lips drew back soundlessly over demon teeth. She was a creature made only to kill.

She wished suddenly that love was her art--that she could make it, today, with her hands.

But her hands were crooked, black-taloned. Made to destroy, not caress. And her mouth was designed for biting, not kissing. Limpid tears rolled down the striped face of the monster reflected below her. Spike was looking at her, waiting. Because she could touch him no other way, she stooped without thinking and rubbed her cheek against his, rapturously, like an animal.

She stayed that way, cheek shyly pressed to his. Her hand still rested on his shoulder, but a great tear splashed across the dirty back of it. Buffy shut her wet eyes, wishing for the miracle required. Why didn’t the sky open up and rain with her tears? That would convince Spike. And she couldn’t think of anything else. Rain pattering on the surface of the stream, breaking up her detestable reflection--the sun blotted out, because she wasn’t that sunshine-smile golden girl any longer. It only made sense.

But it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen--

The miracle.

The magic.

As simple as the moment when he reached up, and she turned her hand over and clutched at his. That was when the fire lit, washing across her palm and between her startled fingers--a little dancing flame that didn‘t burn. Spike drew a deep breath, in the way he had when he was moved about something. His gaze met hers. With fire between them, just like that last moment in the Hellmouth. What was the truth?

"I don’t know if I love you. But. I." Desperately: "Want to find out?"

And the little dance of flames became a great wash of fire, a wreathed ball of sun linking their hands.

"Go get Angel then," Spike said, gazing into the sun they made. "I’ll take us where you want to go."

To be continued ...