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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 wind whispered through the trees with calmness, softly
rustling the summer leaves and gently loosening the blossoms from
their boughs, bringing down a gentle rain of pastels onto the
green grass of the cemetery. Gravestones carved from marble and
angels sculpted of stone were dusted with minute pastels in
violet and in pink, beautiful and gentle. It was a scene that
seemed almost holy in its ethereal light, and there was a
perfumed sweetness in the air that seemed projected by the calm
inside of her body. She stood before a gravestone, looking at the
antiquated scripture that marked the body of a Sunnydale
resident, and felt a sudden eerie shiver up her spine, as though
she was walking on her own grave.
A voice startled her from behind. "What are you doing, Buffy?"
Startled, Buffy turned around to see Willow standing there,
dressed in a long pink satin skirt and a white tee shirt, her
slender throat decorated by a candy necklace. Sheepishly, Buffy
shrugged, a little embarrassed. "Enjoying my own morbid
fascination with how pretty tombstones are," she confessed, and
Willow gave her a quirk of her mouth, threading her arm through
her best friend's.
"And your mother says you have no appreciation for fine art."
Grinning, Buffy joined her friend, eyes still lingering on the
tombstone that had unsettled her with its very presence.
The two girls threaded through familiar tombstones, Willow's
satin skirt swishing back and forth with the percussive sound
that only water and satin could ever produce. "So how's living
with your mom working out?" Willow asked, and Buffy grinned,
stuffing her hands in the pockets of her light suede jacket,
shrugging her shoulders a little.
"Working out well," she admitted. "Mom's been on the June Cleaver
bend, with the exception of the fact that she's not baking
brownies 24/7, which I'm *very* grateful for. Otherwise, I'd
never leave the house and vampires would run amuck."
Willow frowned and shook her head. "The absence of chocolate is
actually a good? I think that Satan just put on mittens."
Grinning, Buffy lightly elbowed her friend and Willow giggled.
"Seriously though, I think that Mom's grateful to the fact that
I'm home during this time, what with all the stuff going on in
Taiwan. I don't know who told her that someone was going to press
the button, but they deserve some major slaying, ASAP." Joyce's
concerns over her daughter's safety and the general safety of the
world had been bothering the Slayer, as though her mother's
paranoia was an inherited trait that could be transferred over
through osmosis.
A shiver passed through the redheaded witch's body, and Willow
wrapped her arms around her, visibly disturbed by the whisper of
a mention of the politics going on around them. Buffy understood
her fears, understood the eerie sensation of lying in wait, and
it was what propelled her to Slay with such frequency.
Helplessness and hopelessness were two states of mind that Buffy
didn't want to cope with, and she had been feeling increasingly
useless as the standoff between America and China intensified.
Televisions were turned on everywhere, and even the Bronze had
started to show CNN all day and all night on a TV set to keep the
Sunnydale citizens updated on the situation. Someone had
whispered of sirens being strategically placed in the town in the
event of an emergency. Just in case...
//Ring around the rosy...//
The child's nursery rhyme flitted through her head with a
suddenness that was disturbing and upsetting, and Buffy snapped
her eyes open, shuddering and wrapping her arms around herself as
she walked with Willow in the cemetery. The slabs of stone and
molded marble gazed at her forlornly, and Willow turned her head
to her best friend, tilting her face to the side with worry and
concern. "You okay, Buffy?" the girl asked, her red hair flaming
around her face in a conflagration of red, and Buffy suddenly saw
a flash of the girl dead, skeletonized and reduced to nothing but
a bone structure where a girl had once been. It was brief,
fleeting, but it was still there.
"No," Buffy whispered. "Just..." She shook her head and
turned
away, refusing to linger on her rampant and paranoid imagination.
The slideshow of morbidity wasn't going to get her down. Not
today. Not now. She had a life to live and a job...
A scream broke the air, and Buffy snapped her head up, eyes
darting across the cemetery. She removed the stake tucked into
the waistband of her fashionably frayed blue jeans and raced
across the graveyard, her hair flying behind her in a banner of
pure gold, speeding toward the sound of the cry.
The source of the cry was a young girl in a colorful dress being
attacked by a vampire, black hair fanning across his face and
still in his burial garb. He snarled and dropped the girl, blood
splashing out from the sloppily-opened jugular, running for her
with the stupidity of the newly risen. Instantly, Buffy rolled
underneath him as he lunged for her, gracefully rising as Willow
ducked behind a gravestone. The Slayer pulled the stake out and
stabbed him swiftly, cleanly in the back, watching as the vampire
spun around with a stunned expression, startled at his sudden
disappointment with immortality, and fell to pieces.
Buffy took no time to gloat over her victory, turning instantly
to the girl who had been attacked. Dashing across the grass,
Buffy leaned down and looked down at the girl, realizing with a
numbing horror that the girl had been drained to the point of no
return. "Willow, go get help!" the Slayer called, and the redhead
sucked in a sharp breath upon seeing the awful wound on the young
woman's neck. When the witch didn't move, Buffy whipped her head
around and looked at her friend with a desperate glance. "Now!"
Startled back into motion, Willow stumbled away, running through
the graveyard for help.
The girl gasped as she lay there, her eyes wide as a doe's,
smudged with shadows of embracing death, and Buffy smoothed the
girl's hair with her hand, pressing her other palm to the slowly
dying fountain of blood gushing from the girl's destroyed throat.
"You're going to be fine," Buffy soothingly said, not believing
the lies that she had concocted to protect the dying girl, and
the girl shook her head slowly, wearily, gazing past the Slayer
towards the stars.
"Not gonna be fine," the girl murmured, razors of brown falling
down her brow to cover her eyes. "None of us gonna be fine."
//Pocketful of posies,// the childlike voice sang insistently
inside of her mind.
Disturbed, Buffy frowned, feeling her skin crawl across her bones
at the girl's dreamy despair. "Just hold on, stay with me," she
urged desperately, watching blood spill forth from the girl's
mouth to stain her lips the color of disemboweled strawberries.
The color was passionately beautiful, as though death was always
colored so brilliantly and boldly, and Buffy felt her stomach
twist in knots while she held the dying girl in her arms.
"Please, just hold on..."
Slowly, the girl's mouth trembled, not out of fear, but out of
utter desolation. "Doesn't matter," she murmured. "Doesn't
matter... I'll just die later on... Anyway..." Her voice lowered
to nothing more than a murmur, and Buffy had to strain to hear
it, lowering her ear to the girl's mouth, feeling the liquid silk
brush her ringed earlobes. The words that she spoke combined with
the sensation of the girl's spilled blood made Buffy feel as
though she had been turned inside out.
"We're all gonna die now."
And with that, the girl's breath hitched in her chest, and she
gasped loudly, startling Buffy so that she jerked her head back,
looking down at the brunette as the life slowly ebbed out of her,
eyes glazing and breath stilling. "No," Buffy whispered, removing
her hand from the girl's throat, looking at the red staining the
palm, and she felt like crying for the loss of this innocent
victim. "Oh, no..."
It was too late.
*****
The water was clear carmine, transparent and translucent, as the
blood slowly poured from her hands and thinned in the plain tap
water. Furiously, Buffy rubbed her hands underneath the faucet,
her fingertips wrinkled and pruned from soaking, and her skin
smelled heavily of peaches and bananas as she tried to clean her
skin of the girl's blood. Streaks of it were found in her hair,
and her palms were stained with borrowed stigmata. Numbly, she
looked in the mirror, seeing the brunette's despairing, hopeless
eyes reflected back at her in her own seafoam-colored orbs.
Startled and hurt, Buffy turned away from the mirror, fingers
dripping blood-tinted droplets of water onto the tiled floor as
she walked out of the bathroom.
Her mother stood in the hallway, hair tumbling to her shoulders
in piles of fallen curls, lines marking her face with gentle
etchings of time and worry. Concern pinched her soft mouth, and
Joyce reached out her hands to touch her daughter, smoothing
Buffy's hair away from her shoulders in a gesture of concern.
"Are you going to be okay, honey?" her mother asked, and Buffy
slowly wrapped herself in her mother's embrace, touching her
cheek and noticing the ashen color of blonde that Buffy had
inherited. United by their hands and their hair, by their
stubbornness and smiles, and by their joint love of papaya. "I
know how it must have felt for you..."
Softly, Buffy shook her head, resting her cheek on her mother's
slender shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of jasmine perfume
and coconut oil conditioner, and Joyce soothingly stroked her
daughter's hair as Buffy clung to her. "She said that there
wasn't any point," Buffy murmured, remembering the words that the
dying girl had whispered to her on a breath of final air. "That
it was sooner or later for us..."
"Oh, Buffy," Joyce said softly, hugging her daughter tightly to
her. "It's not going to come to that, I promise you. There's no
need to worry about it." Gently, she pulled away from her
daughter and Buffy saw the gentle waves of the Pacific in her
mother's eyes. The eyes that she had inherited, only her eyes
would never be so clear and tranquil. There was always a storm
brewing inside of Buffy. "There's no point in thinking about it.
Everything's going to be fine, sweetie. Go to bed and get some
sleep - you need that right now."
//Ashes, ashes...// the frail soprano murmured, and Buffy saw her
mother, hands clasped in prayer to a God that knew no mercy, eyes
closed with utmost benevolence, falling to her knees in the wrath
of a God that fell in radioactive clouds. She bit down her lip to
keep from flinching, to keep from screaming, and Buffy closed her
eyes, exhaling deeply, loosening the thought from her mind and
releasing it from her imagination.
When she opened her eyes, she saw her mother again, soft face and
gentle ashen hair, beautiful and tender, and Buffy smiled a
wavering smile at her. "Right, Mom," she said softly. "You're
right." After giving her mother a soft kiss on the cheek, Buffy
turned around to walk in her bedroom, the blood of the girl still
imbedded in the whorls and spirals of her fingerprints.
June breezes blew in from outside as Buffy slid her window open,
the curtains billowing and dancing across a canvas of stars and
winding branches. The perfumed scent of the outdoors in humid
summertime wafted through the open window, and Buffy let it drift
inside of her room, mulling and turning like the bouquet of a
good wine. She leaned out the window, looking down at the world
in its sweet lull of night, in its quietude that was deceptive
and traitorous. Quietly, she looked down at her hands and read
the misfortune of the girl still sunken into her fingers. She
still heard the whisper of the girl's voice as she got in bed and
pulled the covers over her body, turning on her side, away from
the open window.
//We all fall down...//
*****
Flash.
Red, carmine pure and malevolent, pulsated thickly and angrily.
Lightning descended from the sky with a fury so thick that it
encompassed rather than struck, surrounding all who witnessed it.
Dead grass crackled, broken slabs of marble and stone tumbled and
crumbled to the ground, and blackened branches clawed to the
ground before disintegrating into nothing but rotted wood.
Flash.
Barefoot, she walked through the ruins of the cemetery, naked and
crowned with a halo of thorns that dug into her skull and poured
blood down her body in rivulets of red. The sky was stained the
color of blood from the masses that had been slaughtered, and she
walked on a carpet of skulls and soot, blackening her feet and
cutting into her heels, leaving a red trail wherever she walked.
She was bleeding everywhere, draining herself, and she continued
to walk through the scarred angels and the charred cherubs.
Flash.
Nude as well, her skin a soft wash of light vermilion, the
vampire sat in a circle of tumbled tombstones, scattering runes
on the grass with absent grace, the runes falling with a sound
that was likened to a porcelain waterfall. The runes cascaded
down from her outstretched palm, her raven hair shimmering with
the light of the bloodied skies, and her mouth moved without
making a sound. Complicated twists and curls flickered and
flashed like a live being, a Medusa made of silk. Red rose
blossoms threaded through her hair, the petals descending from
her dark locks in a soft rain whenever she moved, like she was
unfurling and shedding.
Flash.
Slowly, the girl crouched down by the vampire, entering the
circle and dragging her bloodied train behind her. Slowly, the
vampire looked up at the girl, luminously empty eyes smiling
serenely at the blonde crowned with thorns. "Ring around the
rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down," she
sang softly, slightly off-key, like wind chimes. Slowly, the girl
looked down at the runes that the vampire had scattered on the
ground, and found them all blank. No inscriptions were written on
the ivory.
"These runes are blank," the girl murmured, and the vampire
smiled at her, rose petals falling from her thick mane of twists
and curls.
"What good are runes when we have no future to foresee?" the
vampire said absentmindedly, and she slowly began to bury the
runes underneath a pile of dried earth, creating a makeshift
grave for her fortune-telling materials. "Bury it all, no need
for it now..."
Flash.
Clouds moved overhead with the speed of comets and meteors,
passing the scorched earth by for better pastures, and the girl
tilted her head backwards to drink in the sight. "Who stole our
future?" she asked, and the vampire shrugged her slender
shoulders, shedding rose petals like a beautiful thing left to
wither and die.
"Miss Edith and I aren't staying for the ball," she said
absently, her voice light and airy. "We're going to go be sharks
in the reefs. We're going to swim and survive. We're going down
under and wait until it's all over, and then we're going to paint
new toys and cast the runes again."
Flash.
Images of blue skies unmarred by the violence of red, of bridges
and reefs that were visible from underneath clear layers of
water, of cliffs that glittered like emeralds and a city alight
with possibility. A city safe from the world's insanity, a city
with painted runes rather than the horrid ghosts of fortune, and
a city where she could be protected. Not this horrible, ruined
place where all life ceased to exist.
Quietly, the girl and the vampire stood and faced each other, one
shedding rose petals from mahogany lit with flame, the other
spilling blood from her pure golden hair. They examined each
other, the vampire and the human, and the vampire smiled slowly,
placing her hand on the other girl's shoulder. "The world is a
silly place," she said. "I don't fancy it."
The bleeding girl, the martyr crowned with thorns, shook her head
as a blackened angel looked on. "I don't understand..."
Flash.
Bombs falling from the skies like a rain of fire. People
screaming and falling to their knees, blasted apart as the bombs
hit. Cities crumbling like houses of cards, death and disease
sweeping the lands, the winter approaching with its blanket of
nuclear fallout, and the world dying a slow and miserable death.
Her lover wandering the world dressed in black before stepping
into sunlight. Her friends standing in the middle of red bombs.
Her mother bowed in silent prayer before being shattered apart.
And with that, the vampire darted out her hands and crushed the
thorns to the girl's head, the thorns digging into her scalp and
wrenching a strangled cry from the girl as blood spurted down her
face and stained her hair.
Drusilla smiled. "Wear them *well*."
Flash.
******
She woke.
*****
"The world is going to end," she said to them, and silence fell
as she stared out the window.
Daylight felt like an intruder on her skin, something unnatural
and unreal, the world so whole and complete as she walked
outside. Sunshine and butterflies, summertime kids laughing and
playing in sprinklers, wearing neon-colored bathing suits as they
frolicked in wet grass. Innocently, beatifically, beautiful
little children with their hair of gold and hands like tiny
cherubs. Chasing each other and pretending at war, when they had
no idea of the threat that faced them with utmost certainty.
But she did.
Softly, she pushed the curtain back with her fingertips, letting
the linen descend as they stared at her. She felt their eyes on
her, felt the shock and the horror as it pressed down on her with
an intense suffocation. Numbed, Buffy spoke with flat
intonations, a monotone devoid of the emotion that she had
swallowed in order to carry this to them. "I dreamed of it last
night. I dreamed of Drusilla in the graveyard, burying blank
runes, talking about how she and Miss Edith were going down under
and that we were all fools."
"And if Drusilla calling us fools isn't a perfect display of
hypocrisy, I don't know what is," Xander quipped, and no one
replied. She couldn't do anything but look out the window at the
children playing in the sprinkler, watching the water flood on
their smooth skin.
"The war will escalate," Buffy continued, and all attention was
lavished on her once again. "Peace talks will fail. The President
will assure that everything's fine, but no one will back down.
Taiwan will press the button first, and we'll retaliate.
Everything goes. The whole world goes up in flames." Darkly,
despairingly, she turned her head out to look at the others in
the room. "And there's nothing we can do to stop it."
The scene was an assembled mass of shock. Giles stood in his
cranberry sweater, a handkerchief pressed to his glasses that
remained smudged in lieu of what she had said. Willow's fingers
threaded through Tara's with an intensity, the two girls looking
fearfully at Buffy. A head of strawberry blond rested on Xander's
shoulder as Anya closed her eyes, and Xander looked at her with a
sudden seriousness, realizing that there was nothing funny about
anything Buffy was saying.
"Good God," Giles finally said. "Buffy..."
Her eyes lifted up to her ex-Watcher's, seeing the familiarity
and the warmth, the trust and the respect looking back down at
her. "There's more than that, Giles," she said. "We have to get
away from here. We're not safe here; nobody is. We need to go to
Australia before it all goes down. It's where Drusilla said she
was going."
She was met with silence, silence as they stood there, looking at
her with worry and concern tinted with palpable fear. Startled,
Buffy looked around the room, realizing with horror that they
didn't believe her. Desperately, Buffy walked to Giles, looking
into the eyes of the man she had grown to love and trust more
than anyone else in the world. "Giles, you have to believe me,"
she whispered. "I know that it sounds crazy, but it's true."
Softly, Giles shook his head, placing his hand on her shoulder
gently, looking into her eyes without ever seeing the truth.
"Buffy, I understand that you're afraid," he said. "We've all
been having these nightmares. They aren't necessarily prophetic,
what with the influences of the media. And witnessing that poor
young girl's death last night must have been quite traumatic..."
Frustrated, she shrugged his hand off, her heart racing when she
realized what was happening around her. They thought that she was
overreacting, that she was insane with fear, and they thought
that her visions were merely flights of fancy and not of any
portent. Pleadingly, she walked to Tara, looking into the demure
blonde witch's gentle blue eyes and hoping for some sort of
refuge or confirmation. "Tara," Buffy said, picking up the young
woman's hand and threading it through her own, "you're in touch
with the spiritual realm more than any of us. Don't you see
things? Don't you dream?"
Uncertainly, Tara looked out the window, her eyes clouding over
with what Buffy thought was hidden knowledge, but Tara closed her
eyes, bowing her head so that a braid of fine gold fell in her
eyes, tied with a small peacock feather. "N-no," she said. "I
don't... I don't see anything like that, B-Buffy."
A hand with painted fingernails swept sweetly through Tara's
hair, and Buffy looked up to see Willow soothing her lover, her
eyes darkened and clouded with worry and fear. "Buffy, I
understand," Willow said, looking in her friend's eyes and trying
to make her understand that her dreams were lies. "It's terrible
what's going on in the world around us, but you can't just tell
us that we have to pack up our lives and move to Australia - it's
insane."
A flash of remembered lightning crackled through Buffy's mind,
bringing visions of Willow descending to the floor in a pile of
ash, her head tossed back in a disarrayed flurry of vermilion,
clutching her lover's body to hers as the women were destroyed by
a blast of nuclear proportions. Hissing in her breath, Buffy
turned her head away from her collected friends and looked at
Xander. "Xander," she whispered, and Xander shook his head, eyes
stormy and thick.
"Buffy, I think that you're starting to scare everyone," he said,
and Buffy groaned, walking away to the center of the room,
pleading with everyone to listen to her.
"I know you think I'm crazy," she said, "but I know what I saw.
I
*know* that there's not going to be some happy-ever-after ending
to this. I see things in daylight, in waking. I dream of them at
night. The whole world's falling apart right now and I'm giving
us a solution that no one wants to accept! Please, just listen to
me..." All that she saw was Giles's sadness, Willow's fear, and
Xander's anger. She heard Anya whisper to Xander about the Slayer
finally having lost it, and she saw Tara's fearful eyes, and
Buffy knew then and there that it was hopeless.
It was over for all of them. They were living on dying time,
waiting for the sands to filter through the hourglass and the
glass to then shatter. She could see it all, knew the truth, and
knew in her heart that there was nothing that she could do to
convince them. Fear twisted her stomach and destroyed her
insides, making her sick from the hellish notion that they would
all be dead in weeks, and she closed her eyes briefly, hearing
the sound of sirens that only she could hear. Like Cassandra, she
was cursed to know the future, and no one else wanted to believe
her.
"Fine," she whispered, opening her eyes to look at the room.
Buffy gave a wavering smile, and walked to the door, her fingers
shaking from the force of the terror freezing her veins. "You're
all probably right. I'm just... Upset. I need to go home and get
some sleep, and not watch the news for a while. I just need to
get myself under control and... I'll be okay."
Giles approached her, and she looked into the familiar, worn
lines of his face, the softness of his eyes behind glass, the
stray strands of hair that were slightly grayed with silver
falling across his brow, and she wanted to cry. "I think that's a
very good idea, Buffy," he said softly, and she had to look away.
Had to shut out the visions of him dead. Had to.
Softly, she smiled, and walked away, not looking back. Never
looking back.
*****
The night fell slowly, achingly slowly, and until then, she sat
in the graveyard, in a circle not of blank runes, but of fallen
greenery, of boughs of wildflowers that had grown up around a
grave. Her legs were crossed Indian-style, and she felt the
twilight move in, deepening the sky to an almost violet hue, wind
murmuring through the trees and ruffling her hair. A dead calm
had befallen her as she waited for midnight, the wooden stake in
her hand as she waited for the time to pass.
And when the night finally came, when the hour was late enough
and the world was asleep, she began to walk toward her Watcher's
house.
Her choice was difficult. Her world was dying. The duffel bag
filled with her belongings weighted heavily on her shoulders as
she walked, dragging her back in time to the last day she had
left Sunnydale in such a fashion. Remembering the feeling of not
being good enough to stay, of sinning so heavily that she could
never return, and knew that her crimes this time would outweigh
even murder. Betrayal was her greatest burden.
The garden outside of his house had flourished in the summertime,
and Buffy stood in the middle of it, inhaling the various
perfumes of oleander and lilac, and looked at his house with the
heartbreaking knowledge that she would never return. There would
be time to regret later on, but never an opportunity to redeem
herself for what she was going to do. She knew what sort of life
she was condemning herself to for this, and she accepted it with
a shrug of her shoulders and a tilt of her chin as she walked
into his house in the middle of the night for the last time.
Darkness surrounded her as per usual, as she had never been meant
for daylight. Silently, she tiptoed through his house, almost
praying for him to walk out of the bedroom and find her, and
Buffy walked to the small aluminum box in his laundry room,
lifting the lid and looking at the cash that she would need for
her escape. Green paper stamped with the faces of dead presidents
looked at her forlornly, at the product of this country that was
damning itself to death, and Buffy resignedly reached inside and
took it all. Over three thousand dollars disappeared from Giles's
emergency cash, and she robbed him with unwavering hands.
She didn't leave a note. She didn't leave a calling card. All
that she left was a stake, a sign of her resignation and
retirement from her fated trade, because where she was going
Slaying wouldn't matter. She closed the lid slowly and locked it
up again, and when she turned around, she saw Drusilla again, the
black-haired vampire nude and showering dying rose petals on the
ground, as the thorns bit into the Slayer's skull. Instead of the
rest of Giles's laundry room, Buffy saw that the vampire was
gesturing to a world of dingy streets and sullen fog, beckoning
Buffy to walk with her into the desolation of her future, the
blank runes carving a path of white porcelain.
Quietly, Buffy stood, the duffel bag heavy on her shoulders, and
followed.
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