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Annie Sewell-Jennings
E-MAIL: Auralissa@aol.com
SUMMARY: After the world is destroyed by nuclear apocalypse, Buffy and Spike meet up in Australia for what may be the last summer on Earth. Buffy/Spike
RATING: NC-17
SPOILERS: Post-"Restless"
Author's site: http://geocities.com/anniesjennings/index.html
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This story was inspired by the story of "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute, as well as the updated version of the story as soon on Showtime, starring Armand Assante, Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown. The film is poignant, exquisitely shot, and subtly moving, as it displays the end of humanity in a very calm and remarkable way. I can't stop thinking about the movie. I dream about it. I contemplate it. I fear its possibilities. And I am inspired by it.
Thanks to Phillip-Morris, the unwitting sponsors of this work. Without my Marlboros, I don't know where I'd be. <plug plug> Also thanks to Alanna, for making me read "Iolokus" (XF genre by MustangSally and RivkaT, and a truly inspired piece of work) and therefore helping me acquire the bitterness that inspired Buffy and Spike's dysfunctional relationship in this piece. The Mooselet will always kick ass. Most of all, thank you Heather, for keeping me on the right track and keeping me writing this story, no matter what reservations I may have had about writing two fics inspired by the same film. This one is the fleshed-out version of what I truly wanted to write, and I'm glad that I could take the time to write this story in the way I wanted to write it.
Soft lips caressed hers, never asking, never demanding, only
giving. Smiling happily, she kissed him back, her hand moving
across his chest, never able to record the broadness of it or
scale the landscape of his body. Lovingly, she caressed his
cheekbones with her mouth, clinging to him and all of his beauty.
"You know that I've never loved anyone the way that I love you,"
he murmured, his voice dark as velveteen midnight. "You're
everything that the world needs."
Chuckling softly, she wrapped herself inside of him, passing her
hand absently over the spiked mass of his hair. "I'm not the
sun," she said, her voice light and carefree, a smile in her
voice. "No one should be expected to be a galaxy."
Laughter poured so freely out of his mouth that she wanted to
drink it to see if it would get her drunk, like a dark red wine
with a bouquet of fresh fruit. Cranberries and apples... That was
his laugh. "But you are a savior," he said, and she tipped her
head back, hoping to catch another kiss from her darkly beautiful
lover. She loved him like the moon and stars, like he was
celestial and silvery, someone beautiful and rapturous. He always
tasted the same, like plums and faint coppery blood. Life, she
thought while kissing him. He tastes like life.
Softly, he pulled away and murmured in her ear. "You're a
failure."
Pain, deep and pungent, exploded inside of her chest, and she
pulled away, shocked and destroyed by his harsh words. Hurt, she
craned her neck away and looked down at him, and what she saw
took her breath away.
A face ravaged by disease looked at her with accusing and
bloodshot eyes. Teeth were missing from his mouth, blood seeping
out of sores that had exploded on his pearly mouth. Patches of
his spiked brown hair were missing, and sores were erupting on
the surface of his scalp. The face of her lover... The face of an
angel...
*****
Glass slammed shut as she closed the door to the medicine
cabinet, and her reflection stared back at her incriminatingly.
Bereft of makeup, her face was fresh and yet like a ghost to her
- she didn't recognize herself. The strraight nose that flared
like a flattened star at the end, the soft cheekbones rounded by
baby fat that she'd never lose, and the thick eyelashes covering
eyes the color of the Great Coral Reef's water. Frowning, she
took in her expression, hair slicked back so that the colors
didn't show, and she thought for a moment that she caught a
glimpse of her old self in the mirror.
The girl who liked lilies and springtime, and wore the scent of
freshly cut peaches behind her ear. The girl who would dance like
a live flame and laugh while she did it, who stole hearts on a
regular basis but loved her collection dearly. The girl who saved
the world...
Buffy sighed.
Whorls of color sat inside of the makeup chest, bowls of
shockingly dark lip colors, sticks of blueberry violet and whore
red, and Buffy stared at herself with the dull glare of a girl
who's lost everything, and then picked up the lipstick.
A stirring from the bed interrupted her slow dissection of
herself, and Buffy turned her head, seeing a naked back covered
halfway by vermilion linen. Spike... His peroxide blond hair
turned on the pillow as he slept, the broad muscles of his
shoulders pale and bright in the evening light. Black fingernails
clutched the sheets to him, but they dipped low enough in the
back to see the rise of his taut buttocks. He was exquisite.
Memory flashed and interrupted her gaze, showing her a vision of
dark hair printed over the blonde, of larger muscles and darker
breaths, and Buffy flinched, stumbling backwards, propelled by
the ferocity of her remembered dream. Angel... So accusing and so
heavy...
The cigarette lit in the darkness of the shaded loft, and Buffy
took in a deep breath of mentholated tobacco, exhaling a cloud of
smoke into the misted bedroom. It smelled of sex, but so did
Spike. He always carried the heady aroma of utter sensuality,
misted slightly with the soft aroma of spent cigarettes. Quietly,
Buffy walked to the bed, not making a sound as she padded across
the carpeting, bare feet sinking into the soft rug as she
crouched by his side, the wings of her robe folding around her
arms and legs as she sat there.
Moaning softly in his sleep, Spike turned on his side, facing her
now, black lashes closing over startlingly blue eyes, mouth
pouting boyishly in slumber, as his black fingernails clutched
his pillow and he dreamed of the past. The mouth that spat harsh
insults to her earlier was now closed in his fitful repose, and
Buffy stroked her fingernails through his hair. She wondered
briefly what it would be like when he died. Would he explode into
dust, dissolving into nothing more than a remnant of the man he
used to be? Would be just fade into oblivion, turning into a
corpse in the cruelest of deaths?
Bitterly, she closed her eyes, listening to the silence of his
dead breath. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. No
matter how he tried to ignite the dead fire, no matter how
harshly he taunted her or how softly he held her, she was still
dying. They were both dying. They were *all* dying.
The whisper of her ghost came murmuring on the wind, his wine-
flavored voice carrying to her across the wastelands of the
Northern Hemisphere and down to her doomed sanctuary in
Australia. "You're a failure..."
Mouth twisted in an empty sneer, Buffy answered him softly, her
voice murmuring inadvertently in her lover's childe's ear. "No
one should be expected to be the sun."
And with that, she dressed and left.
*****
Lights flashed...
Noise continued...
And she was still in the club.
Vodka was her poison tonight, a substitute for the tasteless
radiation that would later choke her to death. A temporary
reprieve from the promise of her oncoming death, and a better way
to drown the guilt than... Heavily, Buffy picked up the shot
glass and tipped her head backwards, swallowing the liquefied
fire that burned down her throat in a clear potion of potency.
Her many bracelets jangled as she drank, glowing with the
fluorescent light that flowed through them.
Leather coated her body, from her flared carmine pants that rode
low on her hips to the matching top that tied in the small of her
back. Glitter covered her shoulders as usual, so that she
sparkled to hide the tarnish that no polish or love would ever
remove. Her fingers shook slightly on the glass, but not from
drunkenness. No, whispers of the past had done this, from the
slow murmurs in her ear in her dreams to the peroxide blond
vampire sleeping stilly in her bed.
Spike... The burn of the liquor wasn't enough. It was a
conflagration inside of her body, what he had done to her,
burning her to a holocaust until she was an immolation of a girl,
and then softly kissed her with a gentleness foreign to her as
far as he was concerned. Taken away the guilt, taken away the
pain, and yet he couldn't see that that was what she needed. She
needed to take the blame and wear it like the glitter covering
her skin. She needed to fill herself with the misery or else
she'd be empty and frail. Hollow and worn. But in so many ways,
Buffy was already vacant and barren.
She was already dead.
Loud, pulsing music pumped through the warehouse, and Buffy
somberly turned her head, her hair falling in her face in its
multicolored mass of braids. The dance floor was full, bodies
twisting and turning in time with the rhythm, beautiful youths
clothed in rags of designer clothing, easily accessible for
whoever cared about what they wore. Everyone wore jewelry that
glowed tonight, given away outside by some teens who'd found the
box in an abandoned nightclub. Bracelets, necklaces, and anklets,
so that everyone was artificially incandescent. Buffy had woven
luminescent pink and green through her hair, like a halo made out
of false fluorescence, and she was radiant in her own harsh way.
Wincing, Buffy felt the first glimmerings of a buzz coming on,
and tapped her shot glass insistently, calling for another shot
of vodka. The clear liquid was poured into her glass, and she
threw her head back with a vengeance, intent on drinking herself
into a frenzy tonight. She was insistent upon losing herself in
liquor and lust tonight, intent on losing the past that she'd
only hours ago demanded from Spike. God, even thinking his name
hurt. It hurt because she knew him, and tonight she needed
something foreign to steal her memories from her.
"Rough night?"
The voice was Australian, distinctly so, and unfamiliar. Slowly,
Buffy turned her head to find a man sitting next to her, a young
man, with blond hair the color of crystallized sand and eyes that
were indistinguishable in the pulsating lights. Fluorescent
bracelets twined over his wrists, and he wore a cream-colored
jersey shirt along with khaki cargo pants, reminiscent of
Xander... But she wasn't going to think about Xander tonight. She
was going to smile at this boy and forget the ruin of the world.
So she *did* smile, and she put the shot glass down on the table,
pulling a cigarette out of a slightly crushed pack of Marlboros.
"Isn't it always a rough night?" she said, injecting coyness into
her voice.
From the shadows of the club, amidst the dancing bodies, he
watched her with the boy, glaring at her with the anger of seeing
someone intent on destroying themselves. No matter how he loved
chaos, he didn't care for its taste anymore, not after all of the
ruin that he'd witnessed. He looked at her ridiculous appearance,
with the leather clinging to her legs and the glowing necklaces
threaded through her hair and twined around her wrists and
ankles. Beautiful but stupid - what with her glittering eyeliner
and lip gloss. She was a fractured gemstone.
The boy was stealing her smiles, basking in her artificial glow.
Silently, he moved through the shadows of the club, the dark
wings of his trench coat fluttering around him in an incognito of
darkness. Nothing glowed about him, disintegrating into the
shadows, with the possible exception of heated blue eyes,
drinking her in like the vodka that she was consuming. Did she
think that she could keep him tied up in her crimson sheets?
Tangled and twined inside of the vermilion... Oh, Spike wasn't a
fool. He knew that she had panicked, run away to her foolish
nightclubs and her lifestyle of fucking and drinking. Her death
before death... Oh, Buffy was truly screwed up now.
However, the voyeur inside of him fed off of her, watching her
heavily lidded and drunken eyes flirting with the foolish boy
wearing khaki like the whelp the world had killed in California.
He was basking in the ray of her lying sun, of the nonexistent
light that radiated off of her. Some people would think that
there was a fire underneath her skin, but Spike knew otherwise.
He knew that she was running off of fumes and nothing else.
Crossing his arms, Spike leaned against the doorframe, watching
the lights flicker and flash across the dance floor. The former
Slayer stood up and took the boy's hand, drawing him to the dance
floor as her braided hair glowed with the luminous neon lights
she'd carefully woven through her hair. Slowly, she sidled up to
him, running her hands through his spiked hair, styled in a
fashion similar to Spike's old sire's, the great and fabulous
poof. Angel...
She'd screamed his name when she woke up today, and only he knew
that.
Languidly, she ran his hands over her hips, purring in false
satisfaction, and Spike watched as their dance continued, feeling
a strange ache to be the object of her affection and attention.
That was his dance. His tease and taunt, his seductive smile lit
by missing kerosene, and Buffy was giving it all away to the
whelp that she was dancing with. The whisper of a leather-clad
girl ran her hands up the sides of her body, and Spike watched
with building anger as she took the boy off the dance floor. She
had other plans for him.
Fog curled through the back alley, sheathing her in thick smoke,
and the distant sound of sirens could be heard from miles away.
He followed her out there incognito, careful not to reveal his
surveillance of her. Braids fell down her shoulders in a cascade
of decorated color, pouring over her slim and glittered back, and
she wrapped her arms around the boy, pulling him to her in a
rough and volatile kiss. Anger surged through him, not jealousy,
but rage at the fact that she could be so absolutely useless and
worthless. She possessed nothing but her thin sensuality, using
every trick she knew to make herself forget. To lessen herself so
that she was as villainous as she wanted to be. To make her a
worthy vessel for her cargo of guilt.
This was what she needed, she thought as she undid the boy's
leather belt. No pity, no empathy, no reminder of who she had
once been. That girl had died with the rest of them in Sunnydale,
an escort to their unwilling and innocent cadavers. She was
another victim of the nuclear war, another shadow to be cast on
the sundial of the world. Time was running short... Desperately,
she kissed him, her fingernails digging into his shoulders and
insistently propelling him towards her. No words, no clever
repartee, no soft lovemaking. Just this rough and tumble coupling
against the brick wall of the warehouse...
Sharp cries echoed against her teeth, probably from his drug-
addled ecstasy, and Buffy kissed him anyway, undoing the fly on
his khakis and keeping her hands fastened to his hips, and she
could sense danger in the air. Could taste it with a tangibility
that was marvelous to behold. And then...
The boy fell, fell to the side, blood dripping down his neck in a
cascade of crimson, and Spike stood above her, eyes glowing an
iridescent gold, face disfigured to reveal the demon within. The
boy was not dead; he'd live, but only for a short period of time
before the world claimed his life. "You *bastard*," Buffy
growled, shoving him with her hands before going slightly mad and
beating him into a frenzy. "You piece of *shit*!"
Easily, he blocked her rage-induced fighting, his face shifting
back to normal as he cornered her against the wall, placing his
hands insistently on her shoulders, not caring for her discomfort
or possible pain. "Is this what you want, Slayer?" Spike asked,
his voice rough as gravel, low and predatory. "Is this what you
think you deserve? You don't want someone to understand you, you
just want a good rough shag."
Grinning predatorily, the leather clinging to her skin in a
fashion that was decidedly appealing, Buffy sneered at him.
"You'll never understand me, Spike," she said viciously, lashing
out at him with words rather than fighting. "You'll never
understand anything at all. You're worthless."
He met her smile with an arrogant smirk of his own. "Ah, is that
the pot calling the kettle black?"
Growling, she kissed him, brutally assaulting his mouth with her
own, heat boiling inside of her belly in a mixture of anger and
carnal arousal. She wanted him, wanted him to pound into her, to
make her into something that she suspected she already was, and
she insistently rubbed her hips against his, feeling him harden
and ready for whatever she was willing to give him. "Just fuck
me," she said into his mouth, her hot breath panting onto his
lips. "Don't do anything else but that."
Spike pulled away from her roughly, his fingers bruised from
holding the powerful girl so closely, and he glared at her
coldly. "You're not worth it." With a final push, he slammed her
slender body against the brick, and she grunted with the force of
his hands. Disappointed, Spike turned away, leather coat covered
in mist, ready to leave her...
And a gunshot interrupted the scene.
Stunned, they both turned, Buffy running towards the point where
the gunshot had first rose from, only to hear two more join it.
Eyes widening, lips parting in an expression of true horror and
dismay, she ran, braids unfurling like a thousand serpents behind
her as she ran. He followed, startled by the sound, only to see
the results resting behind a bright orange dumpster.
Three bodies lay there, painted in an effigy of blood and blue
light, like holy statues tipped over and abused. A woman, her
dress ragged and worn, a gunshot clear through her head. A small
girl, golden hair stained crimson with spilled blood, held
tightly in the dead arms of her mother, blood splashed on the
woman's dress. And a man, a gunshot wound straight through his
graying temples, the weapon still warm in his loose fist.
Gasping, Buffy fell to her knees, her hair shimmering behind her
in a tapestry of braids, choking on her own breath and tears as
she looked down at the three. Shaking fingers hovered over the
three, but she couldn't bring herself to interrupt the picture
that they painted. "Oh, God," she whispered, realizing what had
happened. "Oh, *God*..." They were a family, the wedding bands
matching and glistening in the cool streetlight, the daughter
still clutching her mother and a stuffed bunny animal for
protection. There was no murder here, nothing but a desperate
attempt to flee the inevitable in a fashion more merciful than
what was coming. "Oh, Jesus, oh no, oh God..."
Sobbing wracked her body, and Spike stood numbly behind her,
looking at the defiled angels with an expression of stunned
horror on his face. Swiftly, he covered up his unexpected pain
and reached a hand down to touch the quivering Slayer as her
fingers floated over the dead child helplessly. "Buffy, this was
their choice," he said, his voice sharpened to try to make her
understand. "They made this decision... You can't do anything;
they're *dead*..."
Horrified, she shook her head, her braided hair tossing over her
shoulders as her eyeliner ran down her cheeks like stained oil
paint. "No," she whispered. "No, they're *not* dead; I can still
help them. I can still save them, just go for help *now*..."
Roughly, he pulled her to her feet, looking at the expression on
her face as she was caught in an insane spiral of grief and
terror, and she hit him with useless fists, screaming
incoherently at him for interrupting her impossible salvation.
"There's still time!" she screamed, and he slapped her,
ruthlessly, yelling back at her.
"No, there's *not*!"
With that, she dissolved into incomprehensible weeping, crying
for the family that lay beneath her in a tangled pile of limbs
and blood, and crying for her own damned future. She wept for
those who had no other way out, for the world that had tumbled to
its knees, and for the haggard and ruined girl that she had
disintegrated into. Covering her face with her hands, heavy
makeup staining her palms like stigmata, Buffy leaned against her
former enemy, clutching at him as she wailed, and Spike held her,
wrapping his hand through her hair and another one across her
lower back. All the while, he looked down at the family that had
taken their own lives, hypnotized by the way the dead daughter's
hair fluttered in the soft breeze like a white-gold banner of
surrender.
There wasn't any time left.
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