FIC: To Cross the River Styx (4d/?)

["Parise, Charles" <charles.parise@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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 girl wake 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 what she 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 zipped off and
disappeared through a wall. Willow hoped that the damn thing was 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 had overloading 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 what she had seen and
felt. The creature had tapped into Buffy's negative experiences 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. Could she 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 she felt 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 dark basement with a voice telling her how she
should give up and that everyone had 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 few pieces appeared not to be
affected. Willow could still sense Buffy's sadness and feelings of
abandonment and the fear demon Gavrock telling her how everyone was going to
leave her. Dominating this thought was the weeks of fear she had bottled up
inside of her for Willow's safety and the slowly 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 what I was told would happen. But hey, it looks like
I'm going to be with you 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
to that clock tower and you're gonna kick evil's butt in the real world
while I 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 to fade, 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 began to 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. Tell you 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 gleam of 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, her gown 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 about waking 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 paper and 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 she was 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 in her life. She knew
that she could do magic. Powerful magic. To a 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't kick 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 help protect 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, considerably larger 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 on building 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 flipping through outfits to
go into battle with. At first, she thought about her Joan of Arc costume
she had worn at Halloween. However, since she already 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 seen on '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 frillage. 

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 a sword 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 silver color 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 awhile and 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 order an 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 been waiting for her order.

'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...