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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.
The mirror dissected her, quartered and drew her, leaving her a
girl staring at herself with an image of ruined purity and
destroyed joy. There she was, placed on the mirror, her hair
flooding down her back in a mass of magenta, red, and newly dyed
blue. It was all there, a multitude of color and frivolity, of
something that he considered terribly stupid and she considered
her. She couldn't return to the past. She never would be able to
do that. She would have to find joy in who she was now, in the
warehouse girl that she had become. The girl who danced under
flashing lights and had a particular fondness for chain-smoking
and screwing vampires - that was what Buffy Summers was now. The
old girl who'd quipped her way out of situations was dead,
leaving a stoic and sour girl in her place.
"Better," she proclaimed, and Spike stalked behind her, frowning
at her hair.
"You look bloody stupid," he said, and she rolled her eyes at him
in the mirror.
"Kiss my ass."
Slowly, Spike dragged his eyes away from the slender girl with
the spill of frenzied hair and looked in the mirror, seeing only
her reflection and not his own. It hurt to know that in many
ways, he did not exist. He had died years ago, but he was still
here, still in existence, and yet the mirror refused to give him
any evidence that he was still alive. Death frightened him more
than he confessed to the revivified Slayer. The notion that he
was dead before he had even succumbed to the starvation that
faced him was disturbing in a profound manner.
He'd wreaked havoc on the world for over a century, damning
whoever crossed his path to a lifetime of absolute misery and
chaos. Spike's reign of terror had been notorious, something to
be written and recorded in the Watcher's Diaries, and now he
would fade away into nothingness with nothing to remember him by.
A whisper of a man, something unnoticed and unmemorable. Just
another statistic to record, but no one would be around to count
the masses of people who would die when the winds brought the
radiation to Sunnydale.
She had become slightly nocturnal during her week with him, but
she still woke an hour or so before he stirred. Whenever he did
finally climb out of her bed and descend down the stairs, the
daylight was oftentimes still strong and deadly. He oftentimes
stood in front of the darkened sheets and windows and dared
himself to part the sheets that she had so carefully hung,
exposing himself to the blistering rays of the light. She would
remember his death then, carry the memory of William the Bloody
with her into her grave, but he found himself unable to end his
own unlife. It was pathetic - a vampire who couldn't even kill
himself.
A vampire terrified of the coming storm...
Shuddering, Spike scowled at the deceitful mirror, and she caught
onto his sudden flinch. Frowning, she turned around and looked at
him with the serious intensity that she possessed, furrowing her
brow and looking at the arrogant man who'd somehow made it into
her bed. "What?" she asked, and he shook his head, still looking
past her at the mirror that refused to show him for who he was.
"Nothing," he said darkly. "Fuck, I need a cigarette."
The Marlboro Reds lay on the nightstand beside her bed, next to a
glass ashtray blown in an unusual shape, something resembling a
fish or another aquatic animal. She had acquired a collection of
eclectic and unusual ashtrays, something to do in her idle time
between the morning and the frenzied night, though Spike didn't
understand the point in collecting when the collection would soon
be nothing but a lingering menagerie of junk. Spoils of mankind's
culture and creativity would be left as remnants of a society
gone bad.
Sighing, Spike looked in the pack of Marlboros and saw that only
five remained. Enough to get him through the remainder of the
night, but he'd want them when the next twilight fell. "Bloody
hell," he muttered under his breath. "I'm almost out of sodding
smokes."
She frowned and checked her own pack of cigarettes. "So am I,"
she said. "Fuck. I'll run into Melbourne tomorrow and scrounge up
a couple of cartons."
Arching his eyebrow at her, Spike gave her a look. "You actually
want to go into that mess?" he asked. "You've seen the news
reports, pet. Melbourne's shot to hell."
Dryly, Buffy smiled. "Is there anywhere left in the world that's
not?"
He didn't have a good answer to that.
*****
When she'd first bought her plane ticket with Giles's stolen
money, the travel agent had given her a pamphlet describing to
her the beauties of the Australian city. There were luscious
landscape shots of the beaches with their crags and rocks, the
cliffs that delved into the edge of the sea and the swaying
palmetto trees that reminded her of the beaches near Los Angeles.
Aerial photography captured the essence of the city at night, lit
up with a thousand different lights that twinkled with the
bravado of a Christmas tree. Everything was clean and modern,
with lush beaches and magical possibilities. It was a salvation.
Now, she saw only destruction.
The streets of Melbourne were bereft of cars, as hardly anyone
had any petrol left with which to fuel their automobiles. Cars
were being pulled by horses, brooding mares sullenly toting their
masters and mistresses wherever they chose without any hope of
ever being released. Faces that were haggard and almost skeletal
from starvation and despair refused to meet her eyes, thinking
that she was nothing special, just another girl without any hope
for the future. And in a respect, they were right. Because Buffy
had no chance or opportunity now.
The taunting words of Angelus floated back to her across a sea of
memory. "No friends, no family, no hope... Take all that away,
and what's left?"
She knew the answer now as she knew it then: She was all that was
left.
And it wouldn't save her this time.
The smell of burning glass and metal wafted down to her, and the
Slayer craned her neck upwards, looking at a skyscraper as it
blazed without any control. Smoke curled up to the sky in wafting
grains of gray, dissipating into the lackluster blue of the sky,
hazy with clouds that blocked out the sunlight. Broken glass
alerted her attention next, and Buffy jerked her head around,
watching a crazed young man with a baseball bat break a window
and steal a bottle of Jack Daniels from the window display.
Alarmed, the former Slayer approached the boy.
"There's no need to do that," she said. Upon hearing her American
accent, the boy's face distorted into a snarl, and he spat
furiously on her shoes.
"It's all your fault," he said contemptuously, and took the
bottle, running away from the situation, leaving Buffy stunned
and heartbroken. It wasn't safe for her to be here. It wasn't
safe for her, with her California eyes and voice that could only
be a product of the United States. Bowing her head, she looked
down at the spittle running across the heavy Doc Marten she'd
worn, and closed her eyes briefly, allowing the boy's saliva to
stain her shoe. She deserved it. She would shoulder the blame for
this, be a walking target, because no one was more innocent than
these anguished citizens doomed to death because of another
country's stupidity.
Miserably, she continued walking, trudging down the streets among
with the rest of the bedraggled city. Some were bleeding from
attacks, others were weeping, and some, like her, were numbed to
the entire situation. Melbourne was in a state of absolute chaos,
of wreckage and apathy, like a fallen angel who'd been left to
bleed to death. Carelessly, she stepped over broken glass,
hearing it crunch and fragment further underneath her boot, and
she felt numbed and hollowed by the city's massive descent into
Hell itself.
It was a reminder of all that had happened. The world had changed
around her, suddenly and painfully, reduced to nothing more than
tumbled towers of glass and fear, and the eyes of the Australians
around her were numbed and terrified. They'd lost their world as
certainly as she'd lost hers, no matter that hers had been killed
by a wave of radiation and theirs was destroyed by the rest of
the world's thoughtless atrocities. Silence was a common factor
in the city, as words were useless now.
City Hall stood like a crumbled mammoth, like a temple ruined and
ravaged by the Nazis' Kristelnacht, littered with citizens who
had nowhere else to turn. A small string quartet played a low and
mournful song on the building's steps, musicians with a song left
in them who could express their emotions and terror through the
stroking of strings, and Buffy stopped for a moment, watching
them play. The violinist stroked his instrument with an
expression of absolute resignation, eyes quietly grieving, and
the cellist sat on a small stool, her hair brushing her shoulders
in a paintbrush of burnished copper as she added low harmony to
the violin's weeping.
Above it all, this scene of helpless despair, a large blue banner
hung, proclaiming a statement that was awful to read:
"THERE IS STILL TIME."
The Australians of Melbourne knew otherwise. They knew that the
hourglass was slowly emptying, sands falling through the narrow
funnel in a constant gush of precious seconds and minutes, and
that time was slowly running out for them. Time was of the
essence now, not because there was any time to save them, but
only time left in which to live. And her time was running out as
well.
Shuddering, Buffy walked away, her shoulders heavy with the
burden of being a citizen of the country that had fated them all
to an early death.
The convenience store's windows had been effectively shattered,
and the clerk tending the counter was holding a rifle to prevent
from any looting. He lowered it when he recognized Buffy, and he
sighed, scratching the side of his head with relief. "I'm telling
you, Yank, there's nothing worse than today," he said, and Buffy
smiled wryly at him.
"Feels that way, doesn't it?" she said softly, and the clerk
smiled at her in return, with the camaraderie of being sentenced
to death. "Can I get two cartons each of Marlboro Reds and
Marlboro Menthols?" The clerk nodded and turned behind him,
unlocking the glass doors that contained his stockpiled
cigarettes.
"You know, I didn't start smoking until the bombs started
falling," the clerk said conversationally, putting the cartons
into a brown paper sack for her. "I figured that if I started now
and smoked until the radiation hit in Melbourne, maybe I'd die of
lung cancer instead of poisoning." Buffy grinned at him in
response.
"I started smoking because I knew that it wouldn't ever happen,"
she said, and the clerk grinned at her.
"You're a smart little bugger, you know," he said, and then a
wolfish grin spread across his face. "Even if you are one of
those bastard Americans."
Snickering, Buffy took her cigarettes, resigning herself to the
fate that she would always be a target, no matter if she herself
was falling to pieces from being the target of too many arrows
and knives. They deserved the opportunity to spit on their
murderers, and she had been designated the martyr. If she
couldn't be a savior, then she'd be on the cross - if Buffy were
religious, she'd be drawing parables left and right, though she
knew that she was just a flawed parody of Christ.
After all, Christ saved the world. Buffy had failed. Quite
miserably, in fact.
She remained in the city until the sun set, watching it descend
between two obelisks of glass and metal, the swollen globe of
lush vermilion falling slowly and sensually in between the cradle
of skyscrapers and technology, into the distant seas. She
wandered the streets in twilight, opening up her carton of
Marlboros and procuring one pack of cigarettes, absently packing
the box as she walked down to where the warehouses were.
An addict always returned to the scene of the crime, and Buffy
had quite cheerfully been addicted to the warehouses and their
endless fun and games. The parties, the drinking, the easy
lifestyle of coming and going whenever she pleased and not
thinking about the future or the past, of screwing whoever was
there and of returning in pieces of herself...
Shuddering, Buffy turned away, the wind tugging at her rainbow-
colored hair and throwing it around her face in thin tendrils of
wispy magenta and blue. The strap of her shoulder bag ached
against her skin, and she shifted it anxiously, resisting the
urge to walk inside and rejoin the festival that she could hear
beginning. Electronic bass and throaty vocals poured from the
club, too loud to possibly be contained in the concrete
warehouse, and she sat on the steps outside, frantically reaching
for her cigarettes, substituting tobacco and nicotine for the
pulsation of the club.
Accusingly, Spike's cartons of cigarettes dug into her hipbone,
and she was reminded of the viciously vibrant blond vampire she'd
abandoned in the glass house on the beach. He would have wakened
by now and found her missing, his white-blond hair endearingly
rumpled by his day sleep, the red linen clinging to the svelte
and sinuous lines of his slender body, clinging to him with the
addiction that only he could inspire. She was an addict in so
many ways now, addicted to nightclubs, cigarettes, and a peroxide
vampire. She was succumbing to two and battling the first,
wanting what she knew would destroy her.
She'd been close with the boy that he had almost killed. She'd
been on the brink of damnation, on the edge of hurting herself
and killing what she was, and she needed that sort of
conflagration. It was nothing in comparison to the immolation of
the world. Just a spark dying. She would have crushed herself in
the boy's drug-addled fucking, and returned to her life before
Spike, the life of taking shots of tequila and firing bullets
into her soul.
Painfully, Buffy flicked ash from her cigarette, her other hand
stroking her hair angrily. She needed to get home, get back to
the train station before the last train left, and he would be
waiting for her at the train station with a snide remark waiting
on his arrogantly beautiful mouth. She stood up, preparing
herself to return home and sighing, when a hand struck out and
clamped fingers against her mouth. Shocked, Buffy struggled, eyes
widening and cigarette falling to the ground, and a steel-toed
boot reached out, gritting it to the concrete.
An Australian voice whispered in her ear snidely and spitefully,
like acidic smoke. "Give me the bag and I'll let you live," the
voice said, and she trembled in the boy's arms, a shivering hand
reaching upward to remove the bag...
And then she bit him.
Crying out, the boy released her, pushing her forward, and Buffy
whipped her head around, clutching her bag protectively while
smiling dangerously at the boy who'd captured and tried to rob
her. Her sea-colored eyes flashed at him like electrified liquid,
and her scarlet-tipped fingernails gripped the shoulder bag,
preparing to defend the cigarettes like a pirate guarding its
loot. "You *really* picked the wrong girl to rob," Buffy said,
and the boy narrowed his eyes, still clutching his bleeding hand.
"You're a bloody American," he said hatefully, and Buffy smiled
at him with an innocence so false that it was malevolent.
"No, I'm Canadian," she said. "And I'm *really* pissed that
there's not going to be any hockey this season."
When he snarled and charged at her, brandishing a switchblade,
Buffy took the bag from her shoulders and slammed it into his
head, kicking him in the stomach with a beautiful synchronicity.
It felt *beautiful* to return to the battle, to fight again. She
was an artist when she fought, and she felt relieved and reborn
to battle this boy who'd wanted to steal her bounty. He stumbled
backwards, and Buffy whipped the bag over her head like a sword
and lashed out at him again, her hair flying around her face in a
flashing halo of crackling color. Smiling, she ducked her head
when he attempted to punch her, and she swiftly lashed out a leg,
catching his knees and effectively bringing him to the ground
with a thud.
Triumphantly, Buffy tossed her hair out of her face with a
haughty nod of her head, and put her hands on her hips, settling
her shoulder bag back across her shoulders as she stood over the
groaning boy's body. "Never come between a smoker and her
cigarettes," she scolded. "It just gets ugly."
Shockingly, suddenly, the boy growled at her, and Buffy's eyes
widened with surprise as the boy's face shifted and changed,
revealing amber eyes and long, glittering fangs. "Wrong," the
vampire leered, rising from his position on the ground. "*This*
is when it gets ugly."
Its golden eyes gleamed in the darkness, penetrating the shadows
with its liquefied glare, and Buffy felt her past creeping up on
her like a cloak, deliciously familiar. "You know, I'm *really*
happy to see you," she said, smiling at him cheerfully. "I think
it's been at least a year since I last killed a vampire. I know,
I know, you're wondering if I'm a little rusty at the whole
slaying thing, but I think I can still manage killing you without
breaking a sweat *or* a nail, for that matter."
The vampire smiled at her, bangs of dark brown falling in his
blazing yellow eyes that glowed like glycerin. "You're the
Slayer," he said, and Buffy rolled her eyes.
"Well, state the obvious, why don't you," she said, and the
vampire rose from the ground, pulling out the switchblade and
jabbing at her with the weapon. Effortlessly, she skirted to the
side, avoiding the sharp weapon, and her eyes darted around the
alleyway, looking for any object that could be transferred to a
weapon. A discarded mop caught her eye, and she smiled, removing
her bag from her shoulder once more. She slammed the vampire in
the face with it, disorienting him briefly, and she raced across
to the mop, breaking it in half over her knee.
He saw it and snarled at her, and she shrugged. "Nothing
personal, but it's pretty much my job," she said.
"You were supposed to be dead!" the vampire said, and Buffy
smiled, tilting her head to the side, her fingers clutching the
stake with blessed familiarity.
"I've got a couple months," she said. "May as well make the best
of it."
And with that, she charged forward, kicked the vampire in the
face, and slammed the stake easily into the vampire's chest,
watching with a marvelous relief as the vampire shattered into
nothing but dust, falling to the ground in a shower of ashen
remains.
Slowly, a smile spread across her face, lovely and wonderful, and
Buffy closed her eyes briefly, the stake's splinters cutting into
the healed calluses of her hands with a delicious bite. This was
her element. This was her expression. No form of poetry or
painting could ever fit her as well as this moment, the joy and
adrenaline of battle, the feeling of being masterful and
talented, and the knowledge that this was truly what defined her.
She was the Slayer, whole and qualified, the champion of the
earth.
But there was no earth anymore. There was only this last
continent, these huddled masses of ruined people, waiting for
their death, and she couldn't protect them from that. Only one
Australian vampire who had already been vanquished by her
resourcefulness.
The sounds of a scuffle came from nearby, and she felt a tingling
sensation low in her belly. The sudden twisting of muscles, the
heightened senses, the feeling of sensing the preternatural...
Arching her eyebrow and lifting her stake, Buffy slung her bag
over her shoulder and crept down the alley, towards the signs of
struggle, embracing her old duties...
Only to find Spike, her lover and enemy, holding the limp body of
a warehouse girl in his arms.
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