TITLE: To Cross the River Styx (4d/?)
AUTHOR: Chazzman
E-MAIL: charles.parise@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters in this story. They all belong to Joss and the WB network. Please don't sue.
SPOILERS: Open season on Season 4.
SUMMERY: I'm re-inventing season 4.
RATED: PG
DISTRIBUTION: Just ask me, please...
FEEDBACK: Is very welcome.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: All right folks, when I started, I was expecting to finish 'Hush' with this section, but it looks like I've got to have at least one more part. Please tell me what you think.
To Cross the River Styx
Chap 4d
Previously...
"Buffy! Wake up!" Willow screamed out as she tried frantically to pull out the black strand from her own back. "Come on fight it! Please God! Buffy!"
They moved though another pair of doors into a dimly lit hallway. Buffy paused for a second as if to contemplate something before she moved into one of the rooms. She floated over to the side of the patient and reached out to rip open the patient's hospital gown. Willow tensed up as Buffy carefully placed the scalpel against the girl's left breast, just above the heart. She had to stop Buffy, but there was nothing she could think of that would stop her. Why didn't the girlwake up?
Then she saw the face of the girl who Buffy was about to kill.
It was Faith, and she was still in a coma.
~~~~~~~~~~
Willow would never actually be certain what it had been that gave her the idea. The sight of Buffy wielding the scalpel. The sight of Faith whom Buffy had stabbed with her own knife. The memory of Faith holding that same knife against her throat.
It was an epiphany. She existed in a state where thought literally formed existence as she knew from being able to change whatshe appeared to be wearing. The line by which the creature had attached itself to her was created by a thought and it therefore stood to reason that it could be broken with a thought. At least she hoped so. She no longer had the luxury of time for experimentation. As Buffy began to press the scalpel into Faith, Willow willed into existence the largest, sharpest pair of scissors and with both hands snapped the blades closed, cutting through the black strand.
Buffy stiffened and collapsed to the floor.
To say that it hurt would have been a grotesque abuse of the term in relation to the pain that Willow felt. In fact, it would have been fair to say that if she had not snapped the scissors closed as fast as she had, she would never have been able to do it. It was as if she had cut off a finger... or maybe a hand... or possibly a leg.
The strand that was still attached to the creature zippedoff and disappeared through a wall. Willow hoped that the damn thingwas in as much, if not more, pain as she was at the moment. The strand that was attached to her, and through her to Buffy, hung limply in the air but did not vanish as she had hoped it would, and now Buffy lay unconscious on the floor.
"I can do this," Willow whispered to herself with a firm conviction. Although was it was that she was going to do was less clear. Holding the limp strand she whispered a quick prayer for some divine guidance from whoever was monitoring the celestial switchboard tonight. Concentrating, she first tried to will the thread to detach itself from wherever it had affixed itself to Buffy. Nothing. Five minutes later, she had still no success.
Willow was starting to worry that maybe she had permanently damaged Buffy. Perhaps the shock of the severing the evil cord hadoverloading her mind. Willow examined the end of the cord only to see it was comprised of hundreds of tiny strands the seemed to gleam and ooze. Hesitantly, she poked at the ends with her finger. An abrupt,cascade of images began to flash before Willow's eyes, startling her so much that she yanked her hand away. The images had been accompanied by feelings of anger, hate, grief and despair.
For several minutes, she stared and the strand like it was a poisonous cobra. For several long minutes, she thought about whatshe had seen and felt. The creature had tapped into Buffy's negativeexperiences and emotions and, from there, had controlled the rest of her mind and body. Now it was up to Willow to fix it.
How? With magic, you had to balance the forces in order to prevent a destabilizing of the spell. Here, it looked as if there was no balance, only an overwhelming of negative emotions. Couldshe simply counter the negative emotions with positive ones? Could it be that simple? She had, after all, just severed the link with a pair of shears that she had simply thought up out of thin air. Still, Willow tried to think about but nothing else came to mind.
Willow tried to meditate and calm herself. When shefelt she was as ready as she would ever be, she picked up the strand and placed her hand over the end of it. The onslaught of sensations hit her again but this time she was ready for them. Willow strove to keep her mind calm and focused as images flooded her thoughts. Buffy running into their dorm room and finding it a wreck and Willow gone. A darkbasement with a voice telling her how she should give up and that everyonehad abandoned her. Angel walking away as the high school burned. Stabbing Faith on the rooftop. Faith betraying her and going to work for the Mayor. Giles confessing to injecting her with the muscle relaxant. Acathala. Kendra. Angelus. Jenny. Ford. The Master. Her parent's divorce. Merrick dying. Her friends at Hemery distancing themselves from her as she developed her Slayer skills. On and on, further and further back they went.
Willow began to concentrate on remembering the good moments that she had with Buffy, their friendship and their support of one another with each of their own strengths and love. Slowly, the rush of images from Buffy began to slow. Willow's delight in this gave her a feeling of happiness that she fed back into her link with Buffy. With ever-increasing speed, the black strand began to dissolve and fade, but a fewpieces appeared not to be affected. Willow could still sense Buffy'ssadness and feelings of abandonment and the fear demon Gavrock telling herhow everyone was going to leave her. Dominating this thought was theweeks of fear she had bottled up inside of her for Willow's safety and theslowly growing despair that she would never find her.
Willow began to speak in order to focus her thoughts. 'Buffy. Please listen to me. Gavrock was wrong. I haven't left you. Even if I were still alive, my heart would always be with you. Yes, I am dead. It's a little strange, not exactly whatI was told would happen. But hey, it looks like I'm going to be withyou now for the rest of your life, and I want it to be a good long one, Buff. We've got a lot of evil still to fight. I can still fight it too, apparently. You're gonna get better and we're gonna go back tothat clock tower and you're gonna kick evil's butt in the real world whileI take out a certain blobby parasite. If it thinks that it can just stick its ugly little tendrils into us and make us do whatever it wants, well it's just got another thing coming."
As Willow babbled, the last of the black strands began tofade, first to a grayish color, but slowly brightening until they shone with a clear white light. If she had still had a real body, Willow would have said she was beginning to feel lightheaded and weak. She beganto ramble as she continued to talk to Buffy.
'It's weird Buff. Most of the time, I don't feel too bad being dead and all. I just wish I could talk to you. Tellyou I'm OK with it, and that you need to start living again. I feel like I'm waiting for something. Like my death has been put on hold. Of course, since I have no idea where my body is, maybe it's cause I haven't been buried properly. There's one for Giles to figure out. Or maybe the Greeks had it right and I need some coins to pay the ferryman. I wonder if he still uses a wooden ferry or if he used all that money to get himself a bigger more modern boat. You think maybe he's got a hovercraft now? Bet that be pretty cool. Course he's pretty much got a monopoly on the whole crossing the river. Of course why I would need to ride a boat across when I could just fly over it.'
A half-remembered poem came to mind, as Willow grew more tired. Slowly her head started to drop, and she closed her eyes as she concentrated on remembering the poem.
'So do not weep when I am gone,
My shade shall wait for thee.
Though I can see Elysium,
I'll not pay Charon's fee.
For I am waiting for you, my dear,
Beside the river Styx,
And with our love, we'll need no boat,
To cross the river Styx.'
As she softly murmured the last few lines from the poem, Willow drifted off to sleep and her spirit retracted back inside the slumbering body of Buffy Summers.
****
Buffy awoke to the sensation of something cold and hard pressing against her face. After a few seconds, she realized that her face was pressing against the floor. 'Why am I on the floor,' she thought. 'I don't remember a fight.' Her body, however, felt exhausted. While she didn't exactly feel sore in her muscles, the commands to move and sit up were not being obeyed rapidly. Her eye caught the gleamof light off of the scalpel near her hand. There was blood on it. 'Blood?' The image of her cutting into Faith flashed across her mind and suddenly she was sitting up and saw that she was in a darkened hospital room and a body was in the bed.
'Oh god, please no,' she gasped to herself as she struggled to stand up. As Buffy stood, she saw Faith resting in her bed, hergown torn and a shallow cut upon her left breast. Buffy exhaled in relief as she saw that Faith was still alive. The wound was small enough that Buffy could see it would heal quickly, she just needed to clean up the blood and fix the gown. Ditching the scalpel in the needle disposal box, Buffy cleaned the wound that had already stopped bleeding. She looked through the room's cupboards for a replacement gown and came up empty. Finally, she decided the only thing she could do was switch gowns with Faith and invent a story that she must have torn it herself in her sleep. As she took a last look at Faith, before leaving the room, she remembered Faith's final words to her, 'You killed me'.
It occurred to Buffy that maybe Faith would rather be dead than in her current state of existence, for as it was, there was nothing waiting for her if she ever awoke. Normally, this line of thought would have depressed Buffy with it's futility, but for some reason she was feeling inspired. Angel had believed she could be redeemed. Of course that was before she tried to kill him, but even so, maybe he could think of something she could say to Faith to get her to listen. Faith would probably fight her tooth and nail, but she was going to listen when she woke up. A smile crept across Buffy's face. 'Why wait until she's awake?' Buffy thought as she left the room.
Five minutes later she was being guided back to her room by a concerned nurse who came across her staggering down the hall, apparently lost and confused. The nurse helped change her gown and went to fetch the doctor. When the nurse brought back the doctor on call, the doctor wrote out a series of questions about how she felt. Buffy smiled and wrote that she was feeling fine except for a feeling of being weak and tired. After half an hour of writing back and forth, the doctor finally said it would be OK for Buffy to try to get some sleep as whatever apparently had been affecting her seemed to be moving out of her system. Since the blood tests had shown no signs of drugs or elevated white blood cell counts, the doctor decided that whatever had affected Buffy must have been some form of stress induced exhaustion probably exacerbated by the sudden loss of everyone's voice. The doctor told Buffy that she would proscribe her some medication to help her relax and left her to sleep.
*****
In the morning Giles, Xander, Anya and Olivia showed up. Immediately, Buffy showed Giles the account she had written out aboutwaking up in Faith's room with the scalpel and the cut on Faith's chest. Giles paled as he read her story, then he showed her the morning paperand its announcement of two murders over night each with the victim's heart cut out.
Buffy stared in shock at the article before raising her eyes to look at Giles and ask if she had done it. Giles immediately assured her that she couldn't have done them since she had been here at the hospital. If there had been a victim here at the hospital then, perhaps, but apparently her Slayer abilities have overridden whatever had directed her to Faith's room. When she calmed down, Giles showed her what they had found out about the Gentlemen. How Olivia had seen one last night and had sketched it. Giles' own research had finally turned up information on them as fairy tale monsters. They were invulnerable to weapons but could be killed with a scream. Which was why they had stolen everyone's voices. He also theorized that, somehow, the Gentlemen had known of the Slayer's presence and had apparently taken steps to keep her from interfering with their 'Harvest' of seven hearts.
'So they are afraid of me?' wrote Buffy.
Giles nodded.
'GOOD!' She mouthed emphatically before writing, 'So let's get me out of here and figure out how to get my voice back.'
******
Although the hospital had been reluctant to release her, Buffy was able to check out by one in the afternoon. She was still feeling very sluggish and drained. As she sat in Giles' living room shewas beginning to worry whether she would be in shape to patrol that night. At the moment, Tara was explaining about her inability to break the silence spell.
'Either the spells I've cast keep getting countered by the original silence spell, or I just don't have sufficient power.' Tara wrote to Buffy. She hung her head down showing which explanation she believed.
Tara was feeling more self-conscious than she ever had inher life. She knew that she could do magic. Powerful magic. Toa degree. However, since meeting Buffy and being asked to help cast a single locator spell, everything she had attempted had ended up being a failure. The latest had been her attempts to break the silence spell.
Buffy reached out to tilt Tara's head up, looked her straight in the eye and waved her finger at Tara. She then wrote out, 'You're doing the best you can. That's all any of us expect. Don'tkick yourself. I appreciate your efforts.'
Tara smiled and then snapped her fingers as she remembered something and began to dig through her purse. She drew out an amulet and handed it to Buffy. She then wrote that last night when she had seen Buffy at the hospital, she had seen Buffy's aura looking fainter than it had earlier when Tara had looked at it, almost as if it was being siphoned off. This amulet was something Tara's grandmother had given her to helpprotect against a psychic attack and would help restore her energies from the surrounding environment.
'My Aura?' asked Buffy as she eyed the amulet. It was circular, made of some type of metal with a rather intricate design carved upon its face. The amulet was about two inches in diameter, considerablylarger than anything Buffy usually wore. As she held the amulet, it seemed to warm and grow lighter.
'Yes. It's very strong and really stands out. Actually, it almost looks as if there is more than one person there. But I'm guessing that is just something connected to you being the Slayer. Maybe it's your Slayerness shining through.'
Willow awoke with a start when Buffy put on the amulet. Tara was pleased to see Buffy's aura immediately began to brighten. After an hour, Buffy was feeling much more energized and alert. By the time night fell, Buffy was ready to kick some demon ass.
Willow was feeling pretty powered up as well. She would have been bouncing off of the walls is she wasn't passing through them. While they had waited for night to fall, Willow had concentrated onbuilding a shield around her and Buffy. She wasn't certain whether the creature could have attached itself to Buffy if she hadn't given it a path through herself, but she was not going to take any chances.
Ten minutes after she was finished, Willow began flippingthrough outfits to go into battle with. At first, she thought about her Joan of Arc costume she had worn at Halloween. However, since shealready had the full body shield, she decided to try something that had a 'less bulky, more stealthy' feeling to it. She pictured herself in what her vampire double had worn and began to modify it. Toward the end, she was experimenting with an outfit that was like something she had seenon 'Aeon Flux'. It was wholly impractical and if anyone could have seen her, she would have died of embarrassment. But there wasn't anyone except the monster and she didn't care what it thought. She did care about what she thought, though, and she felt silly. Deciding that with the shield it didn't matter what she wore, she decided to be comfortable and settled on a pair of blue-jeans and a T-shirt. Pink. Although with minimal f rillage.
Through out it all, she had kept the sword from the Joan of Arc outfit. It sort of gave her a comfortable feeling to be holding something that seemed heavy and sharp. She wasn't certain that 'thought' guns would work but since the scissors had, Willow hoped that asword would as well. She was guessing the sword was an extension of her spirit in the same way that the clothing she believed herself to be wearing was. A vision of herself as the shape shifting T-1000 from 'Terminator 2' gave her a start when her right hand suddenly shifted to a silvercolor and merged with the sword she was holding in it. 'Woah,' she thought, as she began to play with having the sword dissolve down into her hand and then suddenly shoot out like a lance.
Finally, after playing with her newest ability for awhileand learning to control it, Willow decided to settle down and wait for nightfall. As she waited, she did something that she hadn't done since she had died.
She sent a prayer of thanks to the God and Goddess for gifting her with the ability to fight off the earlier threat to Buffy, and asked for the strength to defeat the creature.
*****
Eve looked up when Maggie Walsh slammed the door shut as she stormed into the lab. 'Damn him!' she shouted silently. Jude Law had pulled rank on her again and countermanded her authorization for the teams to suit up and patrol with weapons tonight. When she had pointed out that people had been killed last night and probably would be again tonight, he had simply shrugged and told her that it was unimportant to the mission. Maggie could see her inner frustration and anger reflected in the eyes of 'HER' soldiers, and she was about ready to tell him to 'get the hell out of here'. Her soldiers would have backed her up, she was sure of it. But then Jude had passed her a note telling her that if any weapons were issued to the teams he would e-mail Washington and orderan immediate cancellation of the whole project. She knew he wasn't bluffing, so she had been forced to fold in front of the troops who had beenwaiting for her o rder.
'What is wrong?' wrote Eve on the computer.
Sighing Maggie took her seat next to Eve's and wrote a quick summary of the confrontation that had taken place. Eve read the account and looked blankly at Maggie. 'So?'
'So more people are going to die tonight.'
Eve shrugged and wrote, 'People die all the time in Sunnydale. It's Buffy's problem not yours.'
Although Maggie understood Eve's first statement, the second one had her stumped. She wrote back, 'What do you mean? Buffy Summers? Why is it her problem?'
'Because she is The Slayer.'
~~~~~~~
TBC...