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Triptych
by Minim Calibre
1. Spoils of War
He's waiting in the wreckage of her living room when she returns to the
house.
"Tell me how to kill him." Flat voice, no preamble.
She doesn't have time for this. The girls are waiting, Giles is waiting,
the end of the world is waiting, but not for long. It never waits for
long. She raises weary eyes to his, ready to tell him as much, but
freezes when she gets a good look at him.
Thin has turned to downright gaunt, and he's aged a decade in the
handful of years since she saw him last. There are shadows under his
eyes and bruises fresh and old on his cheeks so she can't tell what's
from exhaustion and what's from injury.
When a minute or more passes and she still hasn't answered, he speaks
again. "Tell me how to kill someone who wears the face of a loved one,
Buffy. Tell me how you did it; I need to know."
Laughing or crying, one of the two, seems to be the right response, but
she can't manage either. She can't be hearing this, not now, not with
what she's up against. "What happened, Wesley?"
"Angelus happened. I trust you remember what that was like."
And she realizes that she knew it the moment he opened his mouth.
There's a how and a when and maybe even a who missing. She doesn't want
to find them; it's bad enough knowing the what.
"Fire, stake, beheading, forced ingestion of Holy Water in a pinch. You
know all this, so why are you here? I can't help you, not now." Maybe
not ever.
"You're the only one who can. You're the only one who's had to do it."
There's no easy way to answer him. If there was, she'd tell him what he
needs to hear and go about her business. She never thought she'd have to
tell a Watcher how to kill a vampire.
A Watcher.
Well, ex-Watcher, if she wants to get technical, but right now, pretty
much all of them are ex-Watchers. At least this one's still breathing,
even if he looks like death warmed over. She wonders if he knows just
how lucky he was, getting canned.
"You want to know how to kill him? Fine, I'll tell you, but I need your
help with something."
"Buffy, I have an apocalypse on my hands and Angelus loose in Los
Angeles. I don't even have the time it's taken me to come and ask for
your help."
"And I have an apocalypse on my hands, a few scared potential Slayers
hiding out at an undisclosed location, and the First trying to kill us
all where we sleep. The world's ending. What else is new?"
Something's gotten through, and she sees him go paler, revealing still
more bruises. "Where are their Watchers?" Calm, quiet words, the kind of
calm that means hysteria is waiting around the corner. Shit.
"Dead. Council HQ blew up."
She's not prepared for his reaction, for seeing his knees buckle and his
arms reach into nothingness looking for something to grab hold of. She
manages to get to him before he falls and helps him to one of the
less-damaged chairs. Hopefully it will hold his weight, not that there's
much of him for it to hold.
Belatedly, she realizes he probably had friends who were killed in the
blast.
"Family, actually." She must have spoken out loud, either that or what
she was thinking was written in huge letters on her face. Family. She
should have known.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. He wasn't much of a loss. Besides, I've been dead to him for
some time." But he's shaking, whatever blood was left in his face has
drained from it, and the words sound more like he's trying to convince
himself than like he believes them.
"Wesley?" He looks up at the sound of his voice, lost and bewildered.
She needs to snap him out of it if he's going to be any use to them, any
use back in his part of the end times, but she can tell harsh won't
work, not right now. "When did you last eat?"
His brow furrows as he puzzles it out. "I found her last week. I'd just
had a sandwich--chicken and lettuce on brown bread, because that was the
only thing left at the only establishment open." Enough blood returns to
his face for it to flush slightly. "But it didn't stay down, not after I
found her. He wrapped her in plastic and left her for me to find." A
bubble of humorless laughter escapes his lips. "Quite thoughtful of him,
really."
"You haven't eaten in a week?"
"Four days."
"When's the last time you slept?"
"Last night." Before she can feel relief, he continues. "For about
twenty minutes."
She does some rapid calculations. They still have a couple of hours
before sunset. "You need to eat, and when you're done eating, you need
to sleep."
When she realizes he's too shattered to even nod, she goes to the
kitchen and searches for something edible. They cleared out most of the
food when they went into hiding, but she finds some stale peanut butter
and staler bread. In his state, she doubts he'll even be able to taste
it, so she makes a couple of sandwiches, sets them on a plate, and grabs
a glass of water for good measure. She's right. He chews and swallows,
but the food might as well be cardboard for as much as it registers.
After he's finished, she pulls him gently to his feet and leads him
upstairs to her room. Helps him get his shoes off and get under the
comforter. He's asleep almost as soon as he's horizontal. And almost as
soon as he's asleep, he starts thrashing, struggling against something
or someone.
This is ridiculous. She needs him rested and lucid, and a couple hours
spent trapped in nightmare country isn't going to get him any closer to
either, as she knows from bitter experience. Knows it the same way she
knows what will work.
G-d knows, it won't be the worst sacrifice she's ever made.
She strips quickly, efficiently, and crawls into the bed. It's easy
enough getting him undressed: he wakes up when she's got his shirt
tangled around his chest and helps her get the rest off. No words, just
frantic hands and needy kisses from dry, cracked lips followed by hard,
urgent sex. She wonders if he's even aware enough of his surroundings to
know who he's with.
While he sleeps, she dresses and gathers the last of the weapons and
supplies from the chest--they're what she came here for in the first
place. She puts them in a duffel bag and sets them next to the door so
she can grab them when it's time to go. Makes a list of things they need
researched to send with him to Los Angeles. Half an hour before sunset,
she wakes him.
"You want to know how to kill him? Don't think about him, about what he
means to you. Focus on what will happen if you don't kill him, on all
the people you love who will die because of him. It'll be easier for
you, because he's still Angelus, but that doesn't mean it will be easy."
She hands him the list. "Here's everything I can think of that we need
answered. My cell number's on the bottom. When you're done in L.A., call
it."
He nods. As he puts his clothes back on, she can see that the injuries
to his face are minor compared to the rest of them. She reaches into the
duffel and grabs a length of bandaging. "Sit down," she orders. He
complies, and she binds his ribs, then pulls his shirt back down.
"Thank you." A lot of meaning in two terse words, some bad, some good.
"Go," she tells him. "Do what you need to do."
When he's gone, she grabs the bag and lets herself out of the house. She
hopes she's done the right thing. They're going to need all the help
they can get if they want to get through this.
***
2. Life in Wartime
These days, Sunnydale is practically a ghost town. The official news
reports claim gas leaks and other understandable disasters are behind
the destruction, but if the local populace is running scared, you know
things have gotten bad. Worse than bad, if that's possible. It's a
struggle to just keep breathing, and even more of a struggle to keep
fighting.
She's figured out a few things that work since the shit hit the fan.
Some were things she'd kind of known for a while, some were new
insights, but they all pretty much boiled down to one hard and fast
rule: do what needs to be done, repent at your leisure when and if you
survive. There's no time for thinking beyond the immediate future, let
alone time for regrets.
Act first, ask questions later, if at all.
Giles gets it. The rest of them haven't quite grasped what's happened,
what's changed, but Giles gets it. She doesn't think he's happy about
it, though. Oh, he's happy that she's finally really seeing the big
picture (and it's not that she wasn't aware of it, but before, she was
always too far inside the frame to see anything but the details). That's
not his problem with the situation; it's her methods that--he
claims--give him pause.
As much as she hates to disappoint him, right now her methods are the
only thing keeping them alive.
Wesley brings her information and armaments whenever he can spare the
time and the weapons--L.A. is in almost as bad a shape as Sunnydale, not
that anyone's noticed a difference, and he's stuck in the middle of the
fight. In return, she provides him with comfort and promises to get
Willow's help recreating the ensouling spell.
After his first rush of grief and guilt had passed, he tells her, he
realized it would be short-sighted to go for the kill instead of the
capture. There's too much at stake, he says, and they need Angel back.
She suspects there's more to it than that, but it's not relevant, so she
doesn't ask for clarification.
Not worrying about unnecessary details is just one of the many
variations she's discovered for the main rule. There's too much
happening for her to be able to sort it all out, even if she wanted to,
which she doesn't.
She's pretty sure he'd still be helping her, even without sex, but it
keeps him sane and focused while everything's falling apart. Besides,
it's the only way she has to relax anymore, and she's learning that when
neither side has any emotional investment, there's nothing to feel
guilty about. It's refreshing, though she wishes it hadn't taken the end
of the world for her to figure that part out.
She shifts beneath him, her hips thrusting hard against his, her hands
gripping him and pushing him closer. The bedroom reeks of sweat and sex,
with the faint scent of blood mixed in--exertion tends to open wounds,
and they've both got plenty of those. The smell will cling to her like
smoke for the rest of the day, and a cruel streak she didn't realize she
had until recently revels in it, in knowing that when she's back with
the group, one of them can tell exactly what it is she's been doing,
even if the only thing he ever does with the knowledge is suffer.
When they collapse against the increasingly stained and tattered sheets
(she's down to the one set--the rest having been turned into bandages
and fuel--and there's nowhere left to wash them), she's sore, exhausted,
and sated. Her thighs are sticky with perspiration and semen, and it's
going to take her the better part of an hour to untangle her hair.
They've avoided talking much beyond business for the most part. It keeps
things safe, balanced, detached. So she's a little surprised when--after
they're through fucking--he tells her he needs a favor.
"I need you to shelter someone."
"More refugees weren't part of the bargain, Wes."
"I know, however, there are extenuating circumstances." He looks
troubled where he's normally unreadable.
"I can't take on someone who can't fight."
"Buffy, it's Cordelia."
"That doesn't make a difference." It might have, at one time. Not
anymore.
"She's vulnerable in a way we hadn't anticipated."
She's finding it hard to imagine Cordelia as vulnerable in an expected
way, let alone an unexpected one. "What aren't you telling me?"
"It's not my place to divulge the specifics. If you agree to take her
in, she'll explain."
"I can't. It's too risky." She hasn't even told Wesley where everyone is
holed up, and she's not about to introduce someone else to the mix.
Frustration and irritation flash briefly in cold blue eyes, and she
realizes he's not going to take no for an answer on this one. "She can't
fight, but I can send someone with her who can, though I can ill-afford
to lose the manpower."
Another body for the fight is a tempting offer. "How good a fighter are
we talking about?"
"Better than any you have on hand, although he is prone to not following
orders." He watches her consider the words, then adds, "He'd also take
responsibility for Cordelia's care. All I'm asking for is a safe
location outside of Los Angeles in which to put them."
She looks around the bedroom and makes her decision. "They can stay
here, in the house. If they cause trouble, or try to follow me when I go
back to base, they're gone. I don't care how vulnerable she is, or how
strong he is."
"Fair enough."
"You owe me," she grouses.
That earns her an unexpected grin. "I know, and I can assure you I'll
find some method of repayment."
She shrugs, her shoulder brushing against his chest. "That's pretty much
the only reason I'm agreeing to it." Her eyes close as she thinks about
what they need now, and what they'll need in the days to come. "When you
bring them here, bring food and clean water, if you can find any."
"Weapons as well?"
"Whatever you can spare, same as usual."
"Will that be everything, or am I paying this off in installments?"
There's not a moment's hesitation before she answers. "Installments."
With the negotiations completed to her satisfaction, she allows herself
the luxury of a nap. They'll be on the move again in the morning, after
all. Time to save some strength for the battles ahead.
***
3. End Game
The whole problem with the end of the world is that it didn't. End, that
is. Turns out there was something worse than that waiting for them when
the Hellmouth opened. Devouring them all seems to have been more of a
figurative description for some people. She envies the dead. They got
off lucky.
For half a second, the thought pushes away the gnawing guilt.
"There was nothing else you could have done."
She hates it when he can tell what she's thinking. "Thanks, but that
doesn't help."
"Neither does sitting around and dwelling on the things you can't
change." He sounds far too sure of himself.
"Please." She looks up at him in disbelief. "Like you're not guilty of
the exact same thing." She's right, and he knows it. She can tell by the
way his face flushes and hardens at the reminder. "Do as I say, not as I
do, Wes? Is that it?"
"In this case, and given my history of bungling things, yes. You're
better off not following my dubious example."
There's no sense arguing with him when he gets like this, so she changes
the subject. "How's Cordelia?"
"Asleep."
"Fred?" She can't keep the faint sneer out of her voice, but it's her
house, and she'll be petty if she feels like it.
Even if it does cause his brow to raise and a smug smile to appear on
his face. He treats every time she displays an emotion as if it was some
sort of huge victory. "My, we do seem to be touchy and territorial
today, don't we? I gave her a box of crayons I found in the basement.
They should keep her occupied for a few hours, at least."
This is what her life has come down to: sitting on her porch trading
weak verbal punches with her lover (she uses the term loosely, but she
can't think of a better one), while a knocked-up ex-cheerleader sleeps
in her old bed, and an insane physicist scribbles formulas and
pictographs on what used to be her sister's walls.
"They should have included an undo function."
"I beg your pardon?"
She hears her thoughts so loudly that she often forgets she's the only
one listening to them. "The monks, when they made Dawn. They should have
made it so that when she was unmade, the memories would go away."
Unmade. That's one way of putting it. It's easier to say out loud than
eviscerated while her sister tried and failed to keep the mouth of hell
from opening. Eviscerated, gutted, disemboweled, sacrificed.
Slaughtered.
Now that Buffy finally has the time to think, she can't seem to stop.
The hell outside seems almost comfortable compared to the one inside her
head. Today's hell wears a schoolgirl's face, numb with shock and pain
and betrayal. Yesterday it was Xander, the day before, Giles. And
always, Willow's face is there, looming in the darkness that swallowed
her whole before the other darkness folded the whole of the world in its
embrace.
Everyone she loves is gone--dead or changed beyond recognition. There's
no one left, and her hell is an empty place, all shadows and illusions.
Months ago, after Los Angeles fell and Wesley dragged his crippled band
of comrades to Sunnydale to fight alongside hers, they started keeping
score, tracking their losses in a sick game of one-upmanship. She thinks
she's ahead; she'll have to check the books. There's still some debate
about who gets to count Angel. Wesley was closer to him towards the end,
but she thinks she gets bonus points for having her last girlish
illusions shattered by the whole Cordelia thing. Maybe they should just
flip a coin.
Not that it matters. He still has two people left to lose, so he'll win
in the end. Three if she counts herself, which she doesn't.
She stares out at the empty street. Night and day have lost all meaning,
and it's hard to keep track of time. Even Wes has given up on wearing a
watch--as sure a sign as any that they're living at the end of days.
Cordelia's belly serves as their calendar: almost three quarters of a
year now since the beginning of the end.
Cordelia's close to term, and Buffy realizes she's jealous again. Not of
the imminent motherhood (the very idea is one of the few things that can
still scare her--since her pill prescription ran out, she's been playing
Russian roulette with five chambers loaded and somehow getting the empty
one each month, but she knows even that small amount of luck will most
likely dry up sooner rather than later), but of the reasonable chance of
death associated with it. It just seems easier than slowly starving from
the lack of food and hope.
The lack of the latter hurts more than the former. Even Pandora's box
released hope with hell.
The touch of his hand on her shoulder breaks her out of her reverie.
"It's safer inside," he says.
By which he means he's not ready to let her give in to the inevitable,
not yet. Maybe because if she does, he'll be dragged down right along
with her. He's still clinging to the possibility of continuing the fight
from sheer stubbornness. She knows he finds the idea of failure
intolerable, even when it's already gone from idea to reality.
It's another thing she's tried arguing with him about, when she was
trying to make him see that maybe death wasn't such a bad option. She
even brought up her own experience to try and prove her point. He just
quietly informed her that it all depended on where one was going.
She lets him lead her back into the house, where they feel their way up
to the bedroom in the darkness. Their supply of candles is limited, so
they make do the best they can without light whenever possible. He helps
her undress, lights one of the candles, and then leaves the room.
When he comes back, he's balancing two bowls of water and her toothbrush
in his hands. He tries to keep all of them focused as much as possible
on the mundane realities of life as it's become. Which, apparently,
means being careful about oral hygiene. She doesn't think he really
believes that they'll live long enough for tooth loss to become an
issue, but she brushes and flosses twice a day to keep him happy.
While she's using one of the bowls to rinse her mouth, he's dipping a
washcloth into the other. He waits until she's done, then washes her
face with something approaching tenderness. Watches her in the
flickering light as he moves the cloth to her neck and shoulders. She
closes her eyes so she doesn't have to see it, because she's close to
breaking down completely. The terrycloth is cold and soft, like dead
kisses against her skin.
She waits until she's started shaking to open her eyes. His expression
is unreadable, but she still knows what he's doing--he does it every
night. It works, of course. She already feels heavy and damp, almost
languid. He keeps stroking her with the cloth, brushing the tips of her
breasts and the slight curve of her hips until her jaw grows slack and
the noise in her head finally subsides.
He backs her towards the bed. Pushes her down and kisses her like it
could somehow keep her tied to the world. Works her with his hands until
the lassitude vanishes and she's twisting frantically beneath him again.
She can taste the desperation on his lips, can feel it inside her as he
tries to keep her with him.
It works, for now. But it won't be long before he can't pull her out of
it, before she finds enough strength to give up the fight.
It's just a matter of time, and she's counting the days.
***
~Coda~
Cordelia did not survive the birth of her child. With Buffy's help, he
removed the body to one of the nearby cemeteries for disposal.
Afterwards, while Buffy tended to the infant, he burned the blood-soaked
bedding and Cordelia's personal effects. Five weeks later, the child
passed on, unnamed and essentially unmourned. No assistance was
necessary in disposing of the tiny corpse.
The following week he abandoned his efforts to find a functional portal
to anywhere. The opening of the Hellmouth had sealed all the recorded
ones, and, in all likelihood, all the unrecorded ones as well. Shortly
thereafter, he realized that Buffy's last courses had predated
Cordelia's death by about a week. Had it not been for the fact that she
was having difficulty holding down water, he might have been tempted to
attribute it to stress, grief, or starvation rather than the most
obvious cause.
"You've caught."
"Yeah." Resigned lightness tinted her words. "But I'm not going to live
long enough for it to matter."
He fumbled for her hand in the pitch-black and offered up the only
comfort he could. "You're probably right."
He felt the movement of her smile against his chest. "Want to take bets
on how much longer we've got?"
"Not especially, no." His free hand moved to stroke her hair. "Just
because I'm resigned to the fact that we're going to die, doesn't mean I
feel like making light of it."
Her fingers traced the outline of his ribs, soft pads against the sharp
bone and tight skin. Her fingertips were one of the few things on either
of them that still felt almost normal. He closed his eyes and tried to
imagine her as she'd been before, all gentle curves and bright skin.
Pity he hadn't known her well enough to wipe the picture of her pale and
practically skeletal from his mind. At least their rations only needed
splitting between three people now. Though he supposed prolonging the
inevitable wasn't going to earn him any thanks.
"We need t-shirts," she said. "I survived the end of the world, and all
I got was this lousy lingering death."
"If we gave Fred some fabric and some markers, perhaps she could produce
something."
"For someone who doesn't feel like making light of the fact that we're
all doomed, you're pretty good at it."
"I can't help it if you're a bad example."
"And I can't help it if you're a rotten liar."
Lips nearly as soft and normal as her fingertips covered his with slow,
languorous kisses. Her movements no longer contained any of the
desperation and worry about the non-existent future that had defined so
many of their actions in the past. Instead, they were hazy, narcotic
touches disconnected from time and space. Morphine in motion.
He found the dream-like stupor of it almost as comforting as the
knowledge that everything would be over soon. His hands skimmed the
sharp ridge of her spine, folded over slender hips and he pulled her on
top of him. Her weight barely registered: a ghost of a girl, save for
the tight, wet heat of her body and the uneven rhythm of her breath.
Everything existed in a halfway state now. Halfway between waking and
sleeping, between life and death. In a rare moment of lucidity, Fred
compared them all to Schrdinger's cat, trapped in the in-between with
no one to open the box and determine the outcome. Trying to live while
waiting to die, which, as it turned out, wasn't as bad as it seemed,
once you gave up.
All consequences were essentially inconsequential to the walking dead.
He thought it explained quite a bit about both Angel and Angelus.
As the weeks passed, Buffy began to spend more and more of her time
asleep, sprawled shrouded beneath the makeshift bedding. With little
else to do, he would sit in the room and listen to her breathe.
Occasionally, he'd curl up beside her, his hand spread possessively over
her belly, states of potential layered like Schrdinger's nesting dolls.
It was funny, the efforts the body went to to propagate the species,
even with extinction 'round the corner. He'd never felt any particular
urge for children of his own--too many uncertainties and too much that
could go wrong. He still didn't, and didn't have any regrets knowing
they'd die before potential became reality. Just an odd disconnected
connectedness to the experience.
Days came and went in a blur, indistinct and shapeless. Fred slipped
from her room while he and Buffy were sleeping, leaving behind one last
drawing--on paper this time--of an elephant (at least he assumed from
the context it was an elephant, though it more closely resembled a
tapir) trudging off to a pile of bones. On the back was a short,
apologetic letter of explanation and the last lines of "The Hollow Men".
He burned it for fuel with the rest of her possessions.
On the last night, he gathered the remainder of the candles and set them
around the room. Lit them one by one until it was close to bright.
Buffy's wraith-like figure, all angles and bones except for the slight
curve of her stomach, glowed silver in the flickering light, the ends of
her hair faded to white from months without retouching. He watched her
until the candles began to sputter, then crawled next to the still form
and drifted off to sleep.
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