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Chapter 29
The Worst of Friends
Buffy finally gave up trying to sleep. It was no use. Too many worries, too many responsibilities, too many random, stray thoughts, and casting its shadow over all of it, the towering, distant Abstract. Besides, her bedroll was decidedly uncomfortable on the hard stone floor of the armory.She rose and found herself drifting toward the Situation Room. There was something quiet and meditative about the place, she thought. Maybe it would help her sort things out.
Spike had beaten her to it. He sat on the edge of the dais, looking distantly at the Abstract slowly rotating out on the plain beyond the city walls as he sipped a Heineken long neck that he must have smuggled in his backpack. A low base hum came from the Abstract, suffusing the chamber with a deep, almost imperceptible vibration.
“I thought you’d be talking with Elisa all night,” said Spike.
“She’s asleep. Been up several days straight now and the fatigue, fear and stress finally caught up to her.”
“How about you? How are you holding up? It can’t be easy for you.”
“I’m doing about as well as I ever do, Spike. Treading water and looking for the way home.”
“I guess to one degree or another, that’s about as well as any of us ever do.”
“Except that most people don’t have to worry that if they drown they’ll take the rest of the world with them,” said Buffy.
She glanced around at the Situation Room’s artificial representation of the external world and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we were actually outside.”
“Amazing bit of work, isn’t it?” Spike asked. “You think of the kind of benefits magic has to offer, and what do these bastard demons down here do with it? Blow each other the hell up and bring misery to everyone else.”
“Probably learned the trick from us humans,” said Buffy wryly as she sat next to him.
Spike nodded at the unnervingly realistic image of the Abstract.
“It’s been stable for a couple of hours now,” said Spike, tilting the bottle toward it. “I just hope Lillith didn’t overestimate how much time we have.”
“You and me both.”
“You think her plan will work?”
“I don’t know. She thinks it will. The theory, what I understand of it, is sound. It’s our best shot. It’s probably our only shot. Maybe if we fail here the Elder Powers and the Archangels and the Furies and who knows what else can stop it — if they’ll even bother this time. But for us, this is it,” said Buffy.
They were quiet for a time, then Spike said, “I wanted to thank you in case I don’t get the chance later.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“For treating me like a human being. You don’t know what that means to me after what I’ve been for so long.”
“You spared my life when you could have killed me easily. That won you the benefit of the doubt.”
“Still, I’m not sure Angel would fancy you hanging about with me,” said Spike. “I don’t think your Angel likes me any more than mine did.”
“Give him time. I expect he’ll forgive you long before he ever forgives himself.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve it. You ever think of that?”
“Sure. Maybe none of us do. I’m just big on second chances. Call me a sentimental fool,” said Buffy.
“I had second chances. And thirds. And I still screwed my life up, still crossed over — willingly — to evil. What makes you think I won’t do it again?”
“At least for the first time in a long time, it’s your choice, not that of the thing inside you.”
Spike looked out into the night.
“I’d really like to make a go of it this time. I’m tired of screwing up my life every chance I get,” he said.
“If we get out of this, you can count on me to give you a hand. You won’t be in it alone unless that’s the way you want it.”
“Alone. I am that, aren’t I? No more Dru. No anybody,” said Spike. “You know, I can’t help wondering if she’s down here somewhere, or at least in my universe’s equivalent of this place. She doesn’t deserve it, really. She was a good girl before Angelus got to her. Should she have to pay for what she was forced to become, for what he made her into? Me, I was a bastard long before I ever crossed the threshold. I deserve whatever I get. But not her. It doesn’t make sense. Is it supposed to make sense? Any of it?”
“Maybe not. I don’t know. I never did understand how it all works,” said Buffy. “I wish I did. It might have made my life easier, knowing the rules. Instead I’ve just been killing on faith since I was sixteen, and I don’t know if whether for all those years I’ve been slaying my way to reward or damnation. And after Lucifer, I’m less certain than ever.”
“Don’t let that piece of shite get to you, ducks. It’s a pretty clear reading on the old morality meter, killing my kind. Even I’m willing to grant that,” said Spike.
“It’s not that simple anymore. Not for me. Not after Angel, and Cordelia, and now you. Dru deserved better from me than a bullet in the head, Spike. I’m sorry. I should have found another way. There was a time I would have found another way. Or at least tried.”
Spike shrugged and sipped his beer. “I don’t imagine she left you with too much choice. She was all the way round the bend, I’m afraid. I knew it. Getting her soul back didn’t change that. I don’t know that there was anything anyone could have done to help her. I hated you for killing her, but inside I knew you’d given her a peace I’d never be able to give her. Except, now I see this nightmare and it makes me very sad to think she might be in a worse place than she’d left.”
A long silence passed between them, then Buffy said, “We sure are a couple of bastards, aren’t we?”
“The worst, love. The worst.”
“The thing is, I don’t remember where exactly I stepped over that line between what I was and what I am,” Buffy continued. “I’ve got so much blood on my hands, Spike. It was easy when it was all black and white. Vampires and demons, I could tell myself it wasn’t killing. But it was. Justified killing, but killing nevertheless. It’s corrosive, isn’t it? Before you know it, it’s eaten through your soul and there’s nothing human left. Just a killer. Was that how it was for you?”
Spike passed his beer to her and she took a long swallow as he said, “It’s an old story, love. We start down a road thinking we know where we’re going, but we’re just fooling ourselves. Whistling past the graveyard. And then we’re too far along to go back.”
“You think I’ve become what I’ve fought?”
Spike looked at her evenly. She saw compassion there, and it shocked her to see something so human in him when for so long he had been nothing but a monster.
“If you can still ask the question, you haven’t. You’re a killer, love, not a murderer. There is a difference.”
Buffy felt old sorrow and frustration build inside. “Back in your world I was alone most of the time, and I’d sit in my office watching the rain, or lie in bed in my apartment watching the neon sign across the street dance strange luminous ghosts across the ceiling, and I’d think. I’d think about the things I’d left behind and lost, and then I’d get upset because I was being so self-pitying. And I’d try to take stock of what I had, where I was, where I was going, but I never could figure it out. It always seemed an endless road with the same background scenery over and over, endlessly, like you see in cheap cartoons. And I never liked that scenery because it was always ugly and violent, with me killing killers and wading hip-deep through every terrible and evil thing the universe could spawn. But now I’ve come to some sort of crossroads, a chance to take a different route. If any of us survive, then maybe, just maybe, it can be different. There has to be another way.”
“I’m not sure the universe is giving you a whole lot of say in the matter, love.”
“Screw the universe.”
“A sentiment I find difficult to argue with,” said Spike.
They regarded the distant Abstract wordlessly for a few minutes before Buffy broke the silence.
“We’re probably going to die here, you know.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” said Spike.
“I can’t cheat death forever, Spike. I don’t have a contractual guarantee. When my luck runs out, it runs out, and I think this might be the time. If Lillith’s plan doesn’t work, I can’t kill that thing,” she said, nodding toward the dark, slowly rotating mass of the Abstract. Its pulsating bass hum seemed to come from a long way off, as if for the moment the evil of the thing had in some strange way receded for a time.
“No, you can’t. None of us can, because we all carry one of those things inside us, demon and human alike,” said Spike. “You can’t kill the darkness, Buffy, not without killing the light too. Nevertheless, I suppose it would be nice to give this one a good, swift kick in the arse. The existentialist angst thing is a nice riff now and then, but eventually you’ve got to put down the Sartre, grab the universe by the short and curlies, and give ’em a nasty twist.”
“You got a way with words, Spike, I’ll give you that much,” said Buffy.
“Bloody poet-laureate of Manchester, I am,” agreed Spike.
They shared a smile before Buffy glanced at her wristwatch and rose.
“Well, we’ve got an awful lot of work to do in the morning. I hope we all live through this one, Spike. ’Cause you know something? I think I might actually come to like you,” she said.
Spike smiled. “Universe is a bloody frigging lunatic asylum, isn’t it?”
“The biggest,” agreed Buffy as she headed back to the others. “That’s what makes it so much damned fun.”
* * *
Within the swirling, oily blackness of the Elemental Abstract, a shadow stirred. The shadow became more defined, resolving itself into a man as it emerged from the dark depths. Black robes billowed around him, whipped by an ether wind induced by the towering manifestation’s slow rotation.
The man stepped clear of the Abstract into the very different darkness of Hell’s unnatural night and set his cold gaze on the distant, brooding, desolate city. His quarry was there. He could feel it. Then something else caught his attention, something still distant and at the edge of his senses. He smiled. The Mind was coming. And in a few hours, there would be nothing in the universe that could stand against the Abstract. Not all the Archangels and Elder Powers and Major Aspects combined. Nothing at all.
Cade smiled a cold, ruthless smile.
“It begins,” he said.