AUTHOR:  Orin.

RATING:  NC-17 (For later.)

DISCLAIMER:  Mutant Enemy owns all things Buffy; all hail Joss Whedon in the greatness that is the creator... ^__^

SPOILERS:  Everything through the end of S6 is game... I suppose... But this is definitely AU - in the sense that it'll never happen on TV, which is fine with me, cause this is bloody depressing... OCCness abound BTW...

FEEDBACK:  Yes, but please be gentle.

PAIRINGS: Spike/Buffy of course, just give me a chance... Others undecided...

SUMMARY: The End of Days had been and gone, and in the aftermath, Spike and Co. search for Buffy, seeking to fight back for and rebuild their world...
 

Pat... Phat... Pat.... Phat... Phat!Squelch!

Binky slipped, made a strange snorting noise, shook his head, and then plodded obediently on, at Dawns urging.

Pat... phat...

Ignoring the assortment of sounds emanating from her mount – because Binky always made finny noises – Dawn watched Gunn carefully, noticing how his form slumped in the saddle for the umpteenth time that night and then she frowned. Riding himself into the ground in order to get to Fred and Buffy was not her idea of progress. She would have preferred to leave him behind – but he was their guide, and as such, he set their pace. Even if he was half way to being dead on his mount.

She looked back to Willow and tilted her head in Gunn's general direction. The witch's gaze mirrored her own. It was creased with worried tension. Slowing slightly, Dawn fell back next to the red-hared woman.

"He'll kill himself at this rate," came Willow's immediate whisper.

"Glad you noticed."

Dawn's eyes flickered back to the black man and she pressed her lips together, tempted again to call a halt, even under Gunn's protest. But if she tried that, it would come up as two against two. Spike would side with Gunn, she knew. The pair were not exactly bosom buddies, but their objective was the same. And Spike would reason that if Gunn wished to ride himself into the ground in getting to where they wanted to be, then who were they to stop him?

She fought a sigh; damn men were all the same, undead or no.

Dawn had already tried to reason with Gunn and had fallen far short of getting through to him. He had a one-track mind when it came to protecting those he loved. Not that she could really argue with his priorities, but still...

"Want me to try?"

She threw Willow a grateful, if brief glance, and nodded immediately. Willow had always been closer to Gunn than she.

"Please," she said. "I don't want to have to clump him over the head with a rock, but, y'know." She shrugged haphazardly.

A small smile crossed Willows features and she chuckled. Though the witch knew Dawn well enough to know that she was only half-joking. If push came to shove, the Slayer would nearly resort to that method if nothing else worked. She nodded, then urged Meridian into a slow trot, catching up with Gunn.

The pair acknowledged each other and then Dawn watched Willow work her magic. The witch could be damn persuasive when she wanted to be. It took only a few sentences for a tiny smile to curve Gunn's lips. His posture straightened, and somehow despite his fatigue, he looked more alive than he had all night. At his brief reply, Willow's soft laughter floated back to Dawn on the night breeze. The pair began to talk in earnest, heads inclining close to each other. Dawn could not hear them, and wished she could.

Mulling this over silently, the Slayer pulled back even further, slowing Binky until Dawn was level with Spike. The blond vampire was higher than her, but only because Calliope was a hand taller than Binky, making up for her rider's lack.

"No," Spike said immediately.

"What?"

Dawn drew out the question into a low whine, knowing Spike hated when she did that. It earned her a succinct glower as expected.

"I don't need t' hear you say it to know what you're thinking, Slayer. So, no."

"You can hear them," she pointed out.

"Yeah. A perk of being undead n' all that. But still; no."

Moving about via horseback always made for one cranky Spike.

He was being difficult. Spike was always difficult when riding. It was never the best time to address him for anything. And he was especially tense lately. He had remained silent for an entire day after their immediate departure, which was a bizarre occurrence in itself, and Dawn guessed it was something to do with Angel and what they had said to each other before they left. She did not understand Gaelic – except a few choice curse words Spike had uttered now and then.

He was tense, and though she could not that she could blame him, they all were. Just as they all worried about what was to come, if Buffy could be redeemed, brought back. What happened when she did? Or if Fred could regain her sanity, and if both could have their humanity returned.

"Don't be difficult."

"M' not being difficult," he snapped. She could swear he was pouting, but it could just have been a trick of the moonlight.

"Just what Gunn's saying, you don't have to relay the whole conversation."

"You'll ask Red later on anyway. Why bother?"

"Spike..."

"No."

He sat straighter in the saddle, defiance written throughout his entire frame. It was a familiar sight, and one she recognized from back before Buffy had died that second time. It made her want to clout him over the head with something very solid.

He was being an idiot. A stubborn childish idiot.

Her gaze hardened and on impulse she reached out, grabbing Spike's reins from his hands, pulling a snorting Calliope closer so that she could lean in and hiss; "He's killing himself."

The vampire remained indifferent as he grabbed the reins back and pulled away. He gazed steadily ahead, his jaw like granite.

"That's his prerogative," he bit out, "Far be it for us to stop 'im if that's what he wants."

"It'll be hard to get where we're going without our guide."

The sneer still came easily to him, and it still looked natural as he shot back a rapid-fire retort.

"Already had 'im tell me where to go, Slayer."

Dawn drew back; she looked at Spike's expression, dark and grim, and was appalled at it for a long moment. And she hated that she could understand his reasoning all too well. It was harsh, and cruel even, but it was necessary, and she could see why he had gotten the information from Gunn even as she felt disgusted that he had. Their guide was pushing himself too much each night, and the closer they got to their destination, to weaker Gunn became.

If they could not slow him, if – if they lost him. Then at least Spike would still have an idea where to go.

For a second Dawn hated the vampire riding next to her.

"Did you have him draw you a diagram too?!" she spat.

Spike did not even flinch.

"A map," he countered coldly, "And only after I said please."

Her mouth worked for a few moments, then she clamped it shut. Dawn really had nothing to say to that. She slumped, feeling suddenly very world-weary and tired. She raked her hand through her hair, brushing the loose locks back out of her face, and then tightened her grip on her sword, just for the reassurance that her weapon was still there. Old habit.

Refusing to look at Spike again she murmured, "Even with a soul, can't you care?"

She could see him draw an unnecessary breath from the corner of her eye. He did that too, when he was getting ready to defend himself. But the blond vampire did not speak; instead he glowered silently, glaring from the path ahead to the forms of Willow and Gunn, still in conversation.

There was a silence that stretched for long minutes. The vampire's expression altered subtly next to her, liquid emotion melted and flowed across his face, changing aloofness to desolation, scorn to helplessness, for a brief instant. Then it was gone and she could almost believe she had never even seen it there.

His shrug was light.

"Cannot and choosing not to are two different things, luv."

"How very Machiavellian of you." She said it quickly, and her voice was still cold.

Spike gave a frustrated sound, low in his throat. It sounded very like a growl to Dawn for a second. She still did not look at him though. She knew he was gritting his teeth in irritation, and that there was probably another snarl lurking in him somewhere.

"He... He needs this, Dawn," he sounded exasperated, but he also sounded like he was trying to explain as best he could.

"It's driving him to the ground, but he needs it. Don't take a genius to see that. And you do see it, luv. You just choose to ignore it."

"Killing himself to get there? Yeah, that's really necessary."

"Getting there is necessary. Getting there as fast as he bloody well can – is his choice."

Silence and because there was truth to his words, as always, and because Dawn could not think of anything better to say...

"Jerk."

A quiet chuckle from the vampire.

"Freak," was his immediate rejoinder.

Dawn's worry did not dissipate, though her lips had to fight a small smile. And inside she was fighting another battle. To be sure it was nothing to do with blood or the fate of the world, but concerning her companions, Gunn, and a certain undead blond in particular. This battle was familiar. A deep complacency that usually accompanied Spike's companionship, habit, and a deep affection for her friend – affection and... other things.

He would never grow old. And if she had her way, he would never die.

He was a lot of what remained of her old world. He was probably one of the few who loved her sister as much as she, selfishly and utterly. And as such, she knew how to get around him better than anyone alive – or undead.

On impulse she reached into her pocket, hoping they were still there, and smiling when her hand made contact with the two cylindrical objects. Still smiling lightly, she withdrew them, and catching Spike's attention, she held them up to the moonlight with a flourish.

Spike stared at her hand.

Cigarettes. Blessed cigarettes. Two of them.

Dawn watched his expression, and then she grinned mischievously. His mouth worked soundlessly and as he blinked, his hand lifted to point.
 
 

 "Where'd those come from?"

She shrugged lightly, fighting the smirk at Spike's intense look.  After a bit of this, he gave his head a dreamy shake.

"Flash the ash this way then." He held out a hand. Dawn just continued to look at him coolly, until his hand dropped back down to his side. She let her gaze travel meaningfully ahead to Willow and Gunn. Realization flashed across his features, hardening them cruelly as he returned his eyes to her at a glare.

 "Oh I get it. Put one over on the vamp who's been gaggin' for a smoke for the last year-and-a-half."

"Last two. I'll swap..." she offered. Her voice was deceptively light, but that did not stop the steel beneath it from showing through. Some tactics she had learned from her companion. Bribery was one of them.

"Witch," he growled.

"Nope, that's Willow. Yes or no."

"Fine, give 'em here."

His grabbed them roughly from her proffered palm, glaring at her all the while. A moment of hurried fumbling found him lighting up with a sigh and he looked almost blissful as his shoulders slumped and he rolled his head back. A long slow exhale. For a few seconds during which he looked torn between falling asleep and laughing. He looked more relaxed than Dawn had seen him since their departure. She envied that.

Which was why she missed his offer for a moment. When she did see the cigarette lying easily in his palm, stretched out for her, she had to do a double take, from Spike to cigarette back to Spike again.

He just shrugged.

"You look like you need one as much as I do."

His eyes were dark.

She nodded and took the cigarette gratefully. Spike offering her his last smoke, now that bordered on almost on sweet, in a nicotine-filled kind of way. She rolled it in her hand, she would save it. He would probably need it in the future, and it was her last one.

"How long?" she asked then, her eyes looking ahead.

Spike searched the sky and the stars. He nodded. Gunn could stop running himself into the ground soon enough.

"Not long."

*****

She dreamed sometimes. When she slept. She dreamed of days and night so distant she did not know if they were memory or myth. She dreamed of battles and blood, defeats and victories both. Dreamed of pain and love and lust and sex and laughter. She dreamed of the one who had loved her, and whom she'd loved in return, beyond expression.

Then the change. And the pain, and her loved one was gone. Left. To give her life. There had been those who had followed but they were just shadows.

Until.

He had been the sun, shining in the deep dark night. And he had shone as well, but never with light. Something else. He had always been something else. And he had been crippled, and she had died, been shown the door and the light. And there had been peace, for a time.

Then the fury and the pain, as she had wandered disconsolate in a world she hated as much as she hated herself. She had longed for an end, praying for her life to trickle again to the conclusion of blessed, blessed death.

Why had she been brought back?

Why?

Her name was Buffy.

That was who she was. Or had been once. Sometimes the facts flowed as clear as the bright moon in the sky, sometimes they were murky shadows of marionettes that laughed and danced out of her reach.

Buffy was alone.

This was something she understood innately because it seemed she had always been so. She was a young woman still because the curse, the one that stole her sanity, her soul, it would not let her age. So slowly she wore away on the inside instead, eroded by the string of fruitless journeys she had taken in her existence. By the sorrow that only loss could bring. Surviving that loss, over and over until the sorrow seemed to fill her mind and heart with a bottomless wellspring of grief.

Sometimes she knew this. Mostly she knew nothing at all.

She liked those times best.

The bones had lain there for over five years, the body decayed and gone, picked clean by the passing winds of time. They had been a neat pile when he lay down for that final moment, defeated and weary in soul; now they were scattered about, littering a half-dozen places, some resting in the glare of the sun, others piled under the gloom of a thorn bush.

Footsteps disturbed the peace of the makeshift gravesite. The small and willowy woman once known as Buffy Anne Summers, dressed in rags that clung to her frame, with hair paled from the sun, long and unruly as it hung loosely down her back. She had eyes that were neither green, nor blue, nor brown, but a mixture of all, the color of a stormy sea at night, and a red mouth with blood and grime trailing from one corner and down her chin.

As she neared the largest pile of bones the woman crouched and then snarled viscously, her small hands curled into tight claws.

 "And then you died!" she hissed. "Alone and forgotten, you died! You coward! You servant! You blindman! Did you think I'd forget? Did you think you'd escape so easily!?"

She snarled again, and grabbed a portion of the ribcage, flinging it away from her furiously. Then she reached out, snatched another bone, cracked and chipped at places, and threw it away as well, so the it fell with the discarded ribs.

"You toy soldier.  A toy made of clay. A shell. All bones now, twenty one, and mommy's little boy and you served them well. Sheep with a gun."

She scurried a little further away, reached under the thorn bush and hauled out its desiccated treasury of bones, throwing them to the pile with the rest.

"The circus came to town and you stood up, played the lead fool, loving the cut because it fit so well. You let them pull the strings. Twisting and turning when you danced. "

And she continued to snap and snarl as she scuttled about, muttering under her breath, as though she possessed the rabid fever of a wild dog, scurrying from spot to spot, picking up a knuckle here, a vertebrae there, a cracked femur bone from somewhere else.

The pile of bones grew.

"You never led," she whispered, "You can only crawl when the strings are cut, little boy."

She finally stood, surveying her work in the form of the skeletal pile before her.

"We're born dying. Dying all the time. Dying time is here," she whispered again, very suddenly, and much softer than before. She went completely still, her face like stone until a muscle jumped in one cheek. Her voice sounded out, so low it could very well have been the wind's hushed whisper.

"I was born for dying."

Shuddering lightly, she pulled on a tendril of hair that had fallen to her eyes and regarded the pile of bones for a long, long time. When she moved again, it was only to tilt her head and to blink twice, considering the ivory frame with a solemn expression.

"Something is missing," she mumbled, louder once more, distracted. She swept her hands back through her tangled hair, catching slender fingers in the knots, and the pulling them free, furious again. Her tongue had long since licked clean the tasty morsel draining down her chin. Her lips thinned, as her eyes began to dart furtively around the broken landscape surrounding her.

"Missing," she continued to mumble, wandering in circles about the desolate site. "Missing... Looking for smoke-holes in the sky and all we find are echoes. Where... Where... Where... Where... Whe- Ah!"

She snatched at the short dark strand of hair that clung to the outer reaches of the thorn bush and hurried back to the pile of bones with it. Then carefully, almost reverently, she laid it across the top. Task complete, she stood back, standing immobile, her eyes staring at the bones.

"Bones. Just bones... Bones are useless to me."

A loud, hoarse cry. And then she was glaring furiously at the inert pile, pointing a bony finger in accusation. Her lips curled back as she snarled, the garbled sound tearing up from her throat to let loose into the night air with a mangled ferocity.

"Did you think I'd crawl back to you, when my strings were never cut? Crawl through the blood and filth? Did you? While you flew away again? To find your useless strings to try knit something useful from them?"

Ignoring the silence, she began to pace.

"W- Why should I love bones?! They're useless," she growled. "Can't go for picnics in the park, or- or drive by the vineyards in the evening time. I never saw the vineyards! I need flesh!"

She blinked suddenly and her fury dissolved into mild irritation. Idly, she kicked the precious pile apart. It scattered under her as she pouted and casually crushed the skull under her bare foot. It cracked, and then shattered, as she twisted and ground her foot until she had mashed most of it into dust.

"You thought I'd crawl back to you," she said matter-of-factly. A grin flashed, there then gone. "When the sky has fallen and it's raining blood and the trees are screaming. A waste. Now and then. Waste, waste, waste, waste."

Bending low, she scooped up the powdered skull in her hands, fragments sifting through her fingers as she surged high and flung it into the air, casting it to the wind as she laughed at her endeavor. Still grinning at the pleasantries of her solitude, she spun on the balls of her feet, not feeling the flesh there part and rip and bleed, she spun wildly and laughed.

"Waste, waste, waste, waste, waste, waste," she sang tunelessly.

Then she stiffened and she stopped.

Then her smile faded.

Because there he was. Her sun of the night, sitting on his dark horse, wearing black, looking tortured because she always tortured him. There were others, but she ignored them. He shone like the sun, he blinded her. He was all she could see. And he was flesh and not bone. Time could sting and bite at him, but he would never change. Neither man nor monster, because he could love and hate just the same. And his love would outlive even him.

Because he loved like he lived.

Forever.

Buffy giggled in delight, then reached down for more powdered skull and began to dance again, picking up the internal beat as she moved, faster and faster. Until she was moving inhumanly fast.

"Spike, and William, and William and Spike," she sang, "Mine and mine and mine and mine and mine and mine and mine..."

Below her, sitting ramrod straight on Calliope, Spike stared on with tormented eyes.

*****

END OF PART 4

*****
 

NOTES AND TRANSLATIONS for 3-4

Galway Bay and Danny Boy are both traditional Irish Ballads.
 
 

*Praties – lol! Haven't heard that one in a bit. It's an old Irish word for potatoes used more in the likes of Galway though, rather than down South in Munster so we don't hear it all that much down here; I'm assuming it's derived from the Gaelic 'pártá' which is the native for potato.

*Aradia is the principal name by which the Goddess is known in Wicca today (As far as I'm aware of...) She's got so many of the same attributes as the Egyptian Goddess Isis that I decided to have Willow refer to her as both as being one. (She seemed to call on Osiris a lot anyway in the series) Aradia is seen as loving humanity and as savior figure of the oppressed who would protect them.

Isis herself was seen as the 'Queen of all Witcheries', as she was the great sorceress. She was also a great healer and many of her temples were partnered by Asclepius; the Greek God of healing.

*Calliope is one of the Nine Muses of Greece: Thalia (comedy), Clio (history), Calliope (epic poetry), Terpsichore (dance), Melpomene (tragedy,) Erato (Love poetry), Eutere (Music), Polyhymnia (Sacred hymns) and Urania (astronomy).
 
 

*Binky is a character from Terry Pratchett's marvelous  'Discworld' series. I highly recommend it, as do a lot of other people I'm sure. The series is full of dry humor, adventure and other great stuff. For example... 'Death rides a pale horse, right? Well, that pale horse's name is Binky.' I just had an idea that Dawn could be a fan of the series somehow... Dunno how it got there. You should give at least one of the books a read.
Latin - English

Domina, Curator – Lady, Protector

Aeterne rerum conditor. Noctem diemque qui regis – Eternal creator of the world, who rules day and night.

Audire mea ad se vocare – Hear my call

Ergo - Behold

Occidens et Orientis – West and East

Opacare ut matutinus. Hiems et Aestas – Dusk and Dawn

In radius solis, et umbra – In the light of the sun and the dark of the shadows

Suum cuique. Et meus mihi, suus cuique carus – For each to it's own. And mine to me, and so each is dear.
 

Gaelic - English

Tá mé bródúil leat – I'm proud of you.

Nach bhfuil a fhíos agat? – You know that?

Tá éagla ort – You're scared.

Táim scanradh – I'm terrified.

Agus ní táinse duit. – And you're no exception.

Thug tú faoi deará – You noticed. (Literally, 'You took notice')

Seá – Yes.

Stóp - Stop

Gheóbaimíd Buffy – We'll get Buffy.

Agus ansin geallaim dóm, tiocfaimid ar ais." – And then believe me, we'll be back.

Never though I'd get to use my Gaelic for something I actually liked. ^__^ (Used to hate it in school) Though I did well enough by it in the end. Because – yes – I'm Irish. ^__^

Take care,

Orin.