Ye Olde Abandoned Fanficke
Aug. 11th, 2003 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anxietygrrlI have so many abandoned fics just wasting away in their sad little My Documents Orphanarium, I thought I might as well let a few of them get out for some exercise once in a while (but always behind a cut tag, because you're such a nice class of people, you shouldn't have to look at those filthy orphans if you don't want to). Our first pitiful urchin is, inevitably, a Buffyverse story. It was my whimsical, redemptiony, dual-series-ending crossover thingy that I started in fall 2001, and it's...hrm...not very good.
* * * * *
THE END
The stars were bright over the woods outside Sunnydale. Insects hummed, and a soft wind rustled the grass of the hilltop. But the grass was trampled under the feet of warriors; the natural breeze caused by warm air meeting cool was blasted away by the swirling gusts that came as a byproduct of the workings of magic. The buzz of insects was drowned out by the sounds of combat, the invocation of spells, and the deeper, stronger hum of magical energy drenching the hillside. And the stars were outshone by the lurid green light emanating from the form of a sixteen year old girl levitating high above the battlefield.
* * * *
Clang!
The vibration thrummed up Buffy's arms and shook her upper body as her broadsword blocked Krandokc's weapon. She staggered back from the force of the blow, her heel landing in a dip in the uneven terrain. Stumbling, she lost her center of gravity and for a split second fell backward uncontrollably. The demon general's scimitar sliced through the air in the exact spot her head would have been if she'd kept her balance. It was the kind of ironic serendipity that had characterized the entire battle so far, but she didn't have time to appreciate it. Having regained her footing almost immediately, she used her enemy's moment of disorientation to swing her sword up into his torso, where it lodged between the plates of his scaly hide, and she shoved away with her foot. Krandokc fell back, all the way to the ground, and clutched at his wound, his claw-like hand trying to reseal the plates and staunch the flow of ichor.
Buffy had time to glance to her left and see Angel, demonic face snarling, wrenching his ax from the hulking corpse of his newly fallen opponent, Krandokc's second. She caught his eye and his human visage returned, his glance questioning her need for backup. She shook her head and then tilted it to her right, indicating where he should deliver his support. As Krandokc rose to his feet - hooves, whatever - and charged her, Angel grabbed up the dead demon's weapon and hurled it through the air, shouting, "Spike!" and followed after it while Buffy and the demon continued trying to kill each other.
Spike was trying to kill something smaller, spinier, and very, very fast. Slasznak was his name, and if you asked him, he should have been Krandokc's second. He was smarter, meaner, and currently a lot less dead than that big dumb slag Angel just killed. There wasn't time to ask him, though, and his credentials wouldn't hold out for long. Spike caught the wicked looking short handled scythe that Angel threw him and sliced off a row of Slasznak's spines. Three of those spines still happened to be embedded in Spike's other arm, however, making his battle-ax next to useless. But his legs still worked just fine, and he managed to dodge the demon's attacks and continue to hack away at him with the scythe. Pieces of Slasznak thudded to the ground around them, but he kept coming. Spike swung at the frenzied demon and growled, "Will you just...die already!"
A crossbow bolt whizzed through the air and hit home in Slasznak's center eye. He howled in pain as blood spilled down his face, obscuring his vision. Spike took the opportunity to drive a good hard kick into the demon's face, ramming the bolt into its brain. Then, just for good measure, he lopped off its head.
He wiped some gore off his face and then winced as he remembered the three demon spines still buried in his right arm. He turned and saw Angel behind him, crossbow in hand. "Thanks, Peaches."
Angel shrugged. "Lucky shot." He wasn't being sarcastic.
They both grabbed up whatever weapons they could and ran toward Buffy, who was still fighting General Krandokc at the center of the clearing.
"Surrender, Slayer," the demon rasped.
Somehow, though she was exhausted, bedraggled, blood-spattered, and generally scared as hell, Buffy managed to find it in her to roll her eyes. "Why," she grunted, "do you guys always want to talk about this?!"
"The hour of your defeat is at hand."
She swung her sword at the towering green bulk of her opponent, adding words between parries and thrusts. "And why...are you always so...damn...pretentious!"
On her next swing Buffy underestimated her reach. The general ducked down and deflected her sword with one of his horns. The vibration this time rattled Buffy's teeth, and the sword flew out of her grasp. She crouched and rolled away before Krandokc could grab her, and when she stood she felt the paradoxically reassuring presence of vampires on either side of her.
Before her stood the demon General Krandokc, self-proclaimed lord of all the demon armies, and one really ugly son of a bitch. He didn't advance, and then, just when she thought she couldn't be any more sick of him, he laughed.
"A pathetic arsenal you bring against me, Slayer."
"Here now," Spike interjected, casually pulling a spine from his arm with a wet sound. "Watch who you're calling pathetic. We killed your little playmates nice and dead, didn't we?"
Krandokc bared his teeth in an attempt at a facial expression. "My two best lieutenants bested by a miserable pair of vampires. It is an embarrassment, yes."
"So hard to find good help these days," Angel said.
"And once again, watch your adjectives. He's the one who's miserable - "
Buffy shut Spike up by reaching over and yanking out another of the spines and tossing it to the ground in disgust.
"I don't know, Krandokc. I think my arsenal's pretty impressive." She gestured behind him where hundreds, perhaps thousands of demons lay dead or dying, struck down by violent thunderbolts of magic from Willow's very effective big gun. "They look impressed."
"They are nothing," Krandokc sneered. "Your dark witch is depleted, and no longer a threat."
At the edge of the clearing, an exhausted Willow slumped against Xander. Her eyes were still black, and she was trembling from the effects of channeling more magical energies than she had touched in almost two years. Xander held tightly to her, wishing he could help her, wishing he could run to fight Krandokc for Buffy, wishing he hadn't run out of ammo for the meager amount of artillery that he and the appropriately named Gunn had managed to collect before the battle. Once Buffy and her friends had gained the high ground, the two men had been responsible for repelling any demonic forces that made it through Willow's terrifying magical barrage and might have had a chance of getting through the protective force field that Tara had erected around the group. The force field was barely noticeable to the eye as a faint shimmer in the air; a shimmer quickly becoming a flicker.
"Your white witch tires as well. Soon the barrier that my lieutenants and I breached will fall completely, and there are enough survivors among our ranks to kill you all quite effectively."
Buffy folded her arms. "So you're just biding your time with chit-chat until then."
Back near the trees, Willow sucked in a sudden gasp and sat up, her eyes fading toward their natural color. "Tara? Is Tara okay?"
"She's fine," Xander assured her. "She's right there, see?"
Willow looked and saw Tara, eyes closed in concentration, arms slack beside her, as she held up the barrier. "I should help her. She needs my help." She started to get up, but Xander pulled her down.
"She's doing fine. You should rest a while."
Her eyes seemed to stare right through him. Hollow-voiced, she said, "I killed them. I killed a lot of them."
"Yeah," he nodded, smoothing back her hair. "Yeah, you did. It was a good, Will." But would it be enough?
Krandokc chuckled, a sound like snot and sandpaper. "I'm merely waiting for you to unleash your 'ultimate weapon.' A floating child. How quaint."
Buffy looked up at Dawn and her stomach twisted. She could barely make out her sister's face. There was only the swirl of her hair like dark flames in the green cloud of light that held her aloft, and the burning emerald voids where her eyes should be.
A cool hand clasped Buffy's own, and she was able to tear her gaze away from Dawn, doing something she'd stopped finding bizarre some time ago: thanking God for Spike.
Several yards away, sheltered behind a large rock, Wesley frantically shuffled through leaves of parchment and computer printouts.
"What's taking so long?" demanded Cordelia. "Wesley, just do the damn spell already!"
He was in the process of laying out his papers on the ground, holding each sheet down with a stick or a pebble. Fred knelt beside him, furiously scribbling away on graph paper and checking her results on a calculator. Every once in a while she looked up to consult with Wesley, who appraised the order of the documents, frowned, and rearranged them again.
"It's not a spell. It's an invocation, and it must be recited exactly, without a single error, or the results could be disastrous."
"Disastrous, huh? Like the end of the world? Hate to tell you, English, but we're already there."
Cordelia muttered, "I hate the end of the world."
"Ah ha!" Wesley exclaimed. "I've got it! At least I think... No, no I'm sure I've got it. Unless... Fred?"
Fred quickly scanned the layout, her face scrunched in concentration as she chewed on her pen. Suddenly a wide grin broke across her face, and she switched the places of the last two pages.
"Of course! Why didn't I see it before?"
"It was all in the math." Fred smiled. "Now you've got it."
Gunn and Cordelia waited expectantly. "Well?"
"Damn it, Wesley, if you've got it then get to it!"
Wesley's face fell. "Oh. I can't. It's not that simple, you see."
Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Of course not."
"We have to wait for the right moment," explained Fred, "when the mystical forces are properly aligned, and the angles of intradimensional flux are --" Seeing their expressions, she trailed off. "It's not time yet."
"And when will it be time?" asked Gunn. "Soon, right?"
"We don't know," Fred admitted.
"And when will you know?"
Wesley shook his head helplessly. "We don't know."
Suddenly Cordelia's posture straightened, and her eyes gave off a slight glow. "Heads up, guys, message coming through!"
"This the signal?"
"No...." Then she gasped. "Dawn!"
Angel and Buffy both whirled around at the warning, but as Spike was turning to do the same he spied movement to his right. Well I'll be damned. That bugger Slasznak had reattached his own head. It was on a little cockeyed, but it seemed to be serving him well enough as he raised his spine covered arm toward the sky and - Oh, shit.
With a furious roar Spike launched himself at the demon, thudding into it with full force. A long spine shot from Slasznak's arm, high into the air, but it went wild, missing Dawn and landing somewhere out of sight.
Buffy turned to the sound of Spike's roar just in time to understand what had almost occurred. Her knees weakened at the thought, but as she watched Spike hack at the demon in a rage, cutting it into enough pieces that it would never be able to put itself back together again, her own anger filled her. It wanted to boil through her skin. On nothing but instinct she bent down and swiftly plucked up the two demon spines that had been pulled out of Spike's arm. She ducked deftly as Krandokc took advantage of the momentary distraction to swing his weapon at her. Guess he was done chatting. Good. So was she.
Spike stood up, wiped gore from his face, and fixed his gaze on Buffy. A long, wicked spine gripped tightly in each hand, she advanced on the general. She seemed to sense his movements before he even knew what they would be. His sword danced around her as if it was nothing but a breath of air. Spike had never seen her more focused, more desperate, or more deadly. He'd never loved her more.
Buffy rolled on the ground, sprang up behind her adversary as he was still bent forward trying to strike at her, and slammed her weapons home between the plates of his armored back.
The demon screamed in agony and fell to the ground. Buffy stood over him, her face drawn and exhausted. Still, she managed to raise her wrist and glance at her watch. "What was that about the hour of my defeat?" She glanced up and saw Spike grinning and striding toward her. That boiling rage instantly evaporated, and she felt light, almost as if she would float away. She felt herself return his grin as he stood before her, dirty, torn up, and worn out. "You look like I feel."
He reached out and brushed some loose hair behind her ear. "You look bloody beautiful."
She ducked her head, strangely embarrassed. Wiping her hands on her jeans, she muttered, "Well, you got the 'bloody' part right." She looked down at Krandokc's corpse. It couldn't be this easy, could it? Then she remembered, and her eyes went to Dawn. Spike followed her gaze.
"What now?" he asked, his jaw tight with worry.
She shook her head, at a loss. "I don't know. Maybe -"
"Angel!"
Cordelia's cry drew everyone's attention to the vampire, who had collapsed to his knees in the center of the clearing. He rose, staggered forward a few steps, then fell once again. Cordelia easily broke free of Gunn and Wesley's uncertain restraint and ran to him. His shaking hands clutched at her shoulders for support, and she held his face, searching his glassy eyes for answers. "Angel?"
Through his muffled hearing he caught Cordelia's voice and held to it, and thought faintly that it should never sound that scared, that small. He tried to focus on her face, but his vision was blurred. He felt a tremendous pressure in his head, as if he were underwater, and a burning constriction in his chest.
"What's happening?" Cordelia was frantic. She turned to Buffy and demanded, "What's happening to him?"
"I- I don't-" Buffy stammered. 'What now?' she thought. 'Dear God, what *now*?' All she could do was stand helplessly by and watch as Cordelia talked to him and checked him for injuries.
"Angel, I can't find anything wrong, so you have to talk to me, mister. What's going on? How do you feel?"
He would have answered her, if he could have thought of any way to describe it. It was like he was filling up with... something. The pressure built and built until he half-wondered if he was about to explode into dust in her hands. And then, it stopped. He took a breath.
"Angel? You're sorta scaring me here."
He could see her clearly again. He could hear her voice. But he couldn't smell her soap, or hear her heart beating. It was like a blanket had been thrown over his senses, just heavy enough to soften the world. He liked it.
But he was going to have to get used to that breathing thing.
"Don't be scared," he said, as he took her hand in his and placed it over his heart.
She was confused for barely a moment before her eyes widened in shock, and a brilliant smile lit up her face.
"Angel..." She shook her head, dazed, but happy. "But how? There was nothing, no prophecy, no vision, nothing to tell us this was coming."
He matched her confusion, but his hand tightened over her own. "I don't know. Maybe... maybe I just finished whatever it was I was supposed to do."
Buffy watched the two of them, feeling like an interloper. "Um, would someone mind telling me what just happened here?"
"Shanshu," they said in unison, in tones of hushed awe.
Buffy's brow wrinkled. "What shoe?" She looked back at Spike, who just shrugged.
* * * * *
THE END
The stars were bright over the woods outside Sunnydale. Insects hummed, and a soft wind rustled the grass of the hilltop. But the grass was trampled under the feet of warriors; the natural breeze caused by warm air meeting cool was blasted away by the swirling gusts that came as a byproduct of the workings of magic. The buzz of insects was drowned out by the sounds of combat, the invocation of spells, and the deeper, stronger hum of magical energy drenching the hillside. And the stars were outshone by the lurid green light emanating from the form of a sixteen year old girl levitating high above the battlefield.
Clang!
The vibration thrummed up Buffy's arms and shook her upper body as her broadsword blocked Krandokc's weapon. She staggered back from the force of the blow, her heel landing in a dip in the uneven terrain. Stumbling, she lost her center of gravity and for a split second fell backward uncontrollably. The demon general's scimitar sliced through the air in the exact spot her head would have been if she'd kept her balance. It was the kind of ironic serendipity that had characterized the entire battle so far, but she didn't have time to appreciate it. Having regained her footing almost immediately, she used her enemy's moment of disorientation to swing her sword up into his torso, where it lodged between the plates of his scaly hide, and she shoved away with her foot. Krandokc fell back, all the way to the ground, and clutched at his wound, his claw-like hand trying to reseal the plates and staunch the flow of ichor.
Buffy had time to glance to her left and see Angel, demonic face snarling, wrenching his ax from the hulking corpse of his newly fallen opponent, Krandokc's second. She caught his eye and his human visage returned, his glance questioning her need for backup. She shook her head and then tilted it to her right, indicating where he should deliver his support. As Krandokc rose to his feet - hooves, whatever - and charged her, Angel grabbed up the dead demon's weapon and hurled it through the air, shouting, "Spike!" and followed after it while Buffy and the demon continued trying to kill each other.
Spike was trying to kill something smaller, spinier, and very, very fast. Slasznak was his name, and if you asked him, he should have been Krandokc's second. He was smarter, meaner, and currently a lot less dead than that big dumb slag Angel just killed. There wasn't time to ask him, though, and his credentials wouldn't hold out for long. Spike caught the wicked looking short handled scythe that Angel threw him and sliced off a row of Slasznak's spines. Three of those spines still happened to be embedded in Spike's other arm, however, making his battle-ax next to useless. But his legs still worked just fine, and he managed to dodge the demon's attacks and continue to hack away at him with the scythe. Pieces of Slasznak thudded to the ground around them, but he kept coming. Spike swung at the frenzied demon and growled, "Will you just...die already!"
A crossbow bolt whizzed through the air and hit home in Slasznak's center eye. He howled in pain as blood spilled down his face, obscuring his vision. Spike took the opportunity to drive a good hard kick into the demon's face, ramming the bolt into its brain. Then, just for good measure, he lopped off its head.
He wiped some gore off his face and then winced as he remembered the three demon spines still buried in his right arm. He turned and saw Angel behind him, crossbow in hand. "Thanks, Peaches."
Angel shrugged. "Lucky shot." He wasn't being sarcastic.
They both grabbed up whatever weapons they could and ran toward Buffy, who was still fighting General Krandokc at the center of the clearing.
"Surrender, Slayer," the demon rasped.
Somehow, though she was exhausted, bedraggled, blood-spattered, and generally scared as hell, Buffy managed to find it in her to roll her eyes. "Why," she grunted, "do you guys always want to talk about this?!"
"The hour of your defeat is at hand."
She swung her sword at the towering green bulk of her opponent, adding words between parries and thrusts. "And why...are you always so...damn...pretentious!"
On her next swing Buffy underestimated her reach. The general ducked down and deflected her sword with one of his horns. The vibration this time rattled Buffy's teeth, and the sword flew out of her grasp. She crouched and rolled away before Krandokc could grab her, and when she stood she felt the paradoxically reassuring presence of vampires on either side of her.
Before her stood the demon General Krandokc, self-proclaimed lord of all the demon armies, and one really ugly son of a bitch. He didn't advance, and then, just when she thought she couldn't be any more sick of him, he laughed.
"A pathetic arsenal you bring against me, Slayer."
"Here now," Spike interjected, casually pulling a spine from his arm with a wet sound. "Watch who you're calling pathetic. We killed your little playmates nice and dead, didn't we?"
Krandokc bared his teeth in an attempt at a facial expression. "My two best lieutenants bested by a miserable pair of vampires. It is an embarrassment, yes."
"So hard to find good help these days," Angel said.
"And once again, watch your adjectives. He's the one who's miserable - "
Buffy shut Spike up by reaching over and yanking out another of the spines and tossing it to the ground in disgust.
"I don't know, Krandokc. I think my arsenal's pretty impressive." She gestured behind him where hundreds, perhaps thousands of demons lay dead or dying, struck down by violent thunderbolts of magic from Willow's very effective big gun. "They look impressed."
"They are nothing," Krandokc sneered. "Your dark witch is depleted, and no longer a threat."
At the edge of the clearing, an exhausted Willow slumped against Xander. Her eyes were still black, and she was trembling from the effects of channeling more magical energies than she had touched in almost two years. Xander held tightly to her, wishing he could help her, wishing he could run to fight Krandokc for Buffy, wishing he hadn't run out of ammo for the meager amount of artillery that he and the appropriately named Gunn had managed to collect before the battle. Once Buffy and her friends had gained the high ground, the two men had been responsible for repelling any demonic forces that made it through Willow's terrifying magical barrage and might have had a chance of getting through the protective force field that Tara had erected around the group. The force field was barely noticeable to the eye as a faint shimmer in the air; a shimmer quickly becoming a flicker.
"Your white witch tires as well. Soon the barrier that my lieutenants and I breached will fall completely, and there are enough survivors among our ranks to kill you all quite effectively."
Buffy folded her arms. "So you're just biding your time with chit-chat until then."
Back near the trees, Willow sucked in a sudden gasp and sat up, her eyes fading toward their natural color. "Tara? Is Tara okay?"
"She's fine," Xander assured her. "She's right there, see?"
Willow looked and saw Tara, eyes closed in concentration, arms slack beside her, as she held up the barrier. "I should help her. She needs my help." She started to get up, but Xander pulled her down.
"She's doing fine. You should rest a while."
Her eyes seemed to stare right through him. Hollow-voiced, she said, "I killed them. I killed a lot of them."
"Yeah," he nodded, smoothing back her hair. "Yeah, you did. It was a good, Will." But would it be enough?
Krandokc chuckled, a sound like snot and sandpaper. "I'm merely waiting for you to unleash your 'ultimate weapon.' A floating child. How quaint."
Buffy looked up at Dawn and her stomach twisted. She could barely make out her sister's face. There was only the swirl of her hair like dark flames in the green cloud of light that held her aloft, and the burning emerald voids where her eyes should be.
A cool hand clasped Buffy's own, and she was able to tear her gaze away from Dawn, doing something she'd stopped finding bizarre some time ago: thanking God for Spike.
Several yards away, sheltered behind a large rock, Wesley frantically shuffled through leaves of parchment and computer printouts.
"What's taking so long?" demanded Cordelia. "Wesley, just do the damn spell already!"
He was in the process of laying out his papers on the ground, holding each sheet down with a stick or a pebble. Fred knelt beside him, furiously scribbling away on graph paper and checking her results on a calculator. Every once in a while she looked up to consult with Wesley, who appraised the order of the documents, frowned, and rearranged them again.
"It's not a spell. It's an invocation, and it must be recited exactly, without a single error, or the results could be disastrous."
"Disastrous, huh? Like the end of the world? Hate to tell you, English, but we're already there."
Cordelia muttered, "I hate the end of the world."
"Ah ha!" Wesley exclaimed. "I've got it! At least I think... No, no I'm sure I've got it. Unless... Fred?"
Fred quickly scanned the layout, her face scrunched in concentration as she chewed on her pen. Suddenly a wide grin broke across her face, and she switched the places of the last two pages.
"Of course! Why didn't I see it before?"
"It was all in the math." Fred smiled. "Now you've got it."
Gunn and Cordelia waited expectantly. "Well?"
"Damn it, Wesley, if you've got it then get to it!"
Wesley's face fell. "Oh. I can't. It's not that simple, you see."
Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Of course not."
"We have to wait for the right moment," explained Fred, "when the mystical forces are properly aligned, and the angles of intradimensional flux are --" Seeing their expressions, she trailed off. "It's not time yet."
"And when will it be time?" asked Gunn. "Soon, right?"
"We don't know," Fred admitted.
"And when will you know?"
Wesley shook his head helplessly. "We don't know."
Suddenly Cordelia's posture straightened, and her eyes gave off a slight glow. "Heads up, guys, message coming through!"
"This the signal?"
"No...." Then she gasped. "Dawn!"
Angel and Buffy both whirled around at the warning, but as Spike was turning to do the same he spied movement to his right. Well I'll be damned. That bugger Slasznak had reattached his own head. It was on a little cockeyed, but it seemed to be serving him well enough as he raised his spine covered arm toward the sky and - Oh, shit.
With a furious roar Spike launched himself at the demon, thudding into it with full force. A long spine shot from Slasznak's arm, high into the air, but it went wild, missing Dawn and landing somewhere out of sight.
Buffy turned to the sound of Spike's roar just in time to understand what had almost occurred. Her knees weakened at the thought, but as she watched Spike hack at the demon in a rage, cutting it into enough pieces that it would never be able to put itself back together again, her own anger filled her. It wanted to boil through her skin. On nothing but instinct she bent down and swiftly plucked up the two demon spines that had been pulled out of Spike's arm. She ducked deftly as Krandokc took advantage of the momentary distraction to swing his weapon at her. Guess he was done chatting. Good. So was she.
Spike stood up, wiped gore from his face, and fixed his gaze on Buffy. A long, wicked spine gripped tightly in each hand, she advanced on the general. She seemed to sense his movements before he even knew what they would be. His sword danced around her as if it was nothing but a breath of air. Spike had never seen her more focused, more desperate, or more deadly. He'd never loved her more.
Buffy rolled on the ground, sprang up behind her adversary as he was still bent forward trying to strike at her, and slammed her weapons home between the plates of his armored back.
The demon screamed in agony and fell to the ground. Buffy stood over him, her face drawn and exhausted. Still, she managed to raise her wrist and glance at her watch. "What was that about the hour of my defeat?" She glanced up and saw Spike grinning and striding toward her. That boiling rage instantly evaporated, and she felt light, almost as if she would float away. She felt herself return his grin as he stood before her, dirty, torn up, and worn out. "You look like I feel."
He reached out and brushed some loose hair behind her ear. "You look bloody beautiful."
She ducked her head, strangely embarrassed. Wiping her hands on her jeans, she muttered, "Well, you got the 'bloody' part right." She looked down at Krandokc's corpse. It couldn't be this easy, could it? Then she remembered, and her eyes went to Dawn. Spike followed her gaze.
"What now?" he asked, his jaw tight with worry.
She shook her head, at a loss. "I don't know. Maybe -"
"Angel!"
Cordelia's cry drew everyone's attention to the vampire, who had collapsed to his knees in the center of the clearing. He rose, staggered forward a few steps, then fell once again. Cordelia easily broke free of Gunn and Wesley's uncertain restraint and ran to him. His shaking hands clutched at her shoulders for support, and she held his face, searching his glassy eyes for answers. "Angel?"
Through his muffled hearing he caught Cordelia's voice and held to it, and thought faintly that it should never sound that scared, that small. He tried to focus on her face, but his vision was blurred. He felt a tremendous pressure in his head, as if he were underwater, and a burning constriction in his chest.
"What's happening?" Cordelia was frantic. She turned to Buffy and demanded, "What's happening to him?"
"I- I don't-" Buffy stammered. 'What now?' she thought. 'Dear God, what *now*?' All she could do was stand helplessly by and watch as Cordelia talked to him and checked him for injuries.
"Angel, I can't find anything wrong, so you have to talk to me, mister. What's going on? How do you feel?"
He would have answered her, if he could have thought of any way to describe it. It was like he was filling up with... something. The pressure built and built until he half-wondered if he was about to explode into dust in her hands. And then, it stopped. He took a breath.
"Angel? You're sorta scaring me here."
He could see her clearly again. He could hear her voice. But he couldn't smell her soap, or hear her heart beating. It was like a blanket had been thrown over his senses, just heavy enough to soften the world. He liked it.
But he was going to have to get used to that breathing thing.
"Don't be scared," he said, as he took her hand in his and placed it over his heart.
She was confused for barely a moment before her eyes widened in shock, and a brilliant smile lit up her face.
"Angel..." She shook her head, dazed, but happy. "But how? There was nothing, no prophecy, no vision, nothing to tell us this was coming."
He matched her confusion, but his hand tightened over her own. "I don't know. Maybe... maybe I just finished whatever it was I was supposed to do."
Buffy watched the two of them, feeling like an interloper. "Um, would someone mind telling me what just happened here?"
"Shanshu," they said in unison, in tones of hushed awe.
Buffy's brow wrinkled. "What shoe?" She looked back at Spike, who just shrugged.
