|
Title:
Beast
Author:
Miss Murchison
Rating: PG,
if not actually G
Disclaimer:
All characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy,
etc. Only the lame plots and dialogue herein are mine.
Notes:
dettiot didn't
get the fic she requested in the Spuffy ficathon, and her request gave
me an idea that wouldn't go away.
dettiot wanted
an encounter between Buffy and Spike, post-Chosen, in which Spike is
not human.
"Miss
Chandler?"
"Huh?" Buffy sat up in bed, holding the phone to her ear.
"Catherine Chandler?" repeated the voice.
"What?" mumbled Buffy. Then she added in a stronger voice, "I mean—yes?"
She was Catherine Chandler, she remembered now. At least for this
assignment. Luckily, she'd been too disoriented when she woke up to deny
it.
"You were asking about that blond guy—the one who isn't quite human?"
said the voice on the line. "Him and his friends?"
"Yes," said Buffy in a stronger voice, fully awake now. "Is this--?"
"Never mind who it is," said the voice, slightly panicked now.
"Something's happening by Alice in Central Park. Late today. At
sundown." The line went dead.
Buffy looked around the apartment bedroom and saw that the TV was still
on. She had fallen asleep watching some old movie, and another one was
running now. In flickering black-and-white, a young woman was floating
down the corridor of a mansion as arms holding flaming candelabra
reached out of the walls to light her way.
Buffy hung up the phone and picked up the remote control, switching to
the news and turning up the sound. She could barely take in the horrors
that paraded before her eyes on the screen. She was too busy wondering
who Alice was and how to find her in the vastness of Central Park. And
trying not to think of the dream she'd been having when the phone rang.
She'd been running very fast, with a monster she didn't recognize at her
side. Faster than she'd ever been able to run before. She'd seen—
What she'd
seen wasn't the strangest thing. The strangest thing was how happy she'd
been in that dream.
She tossed the covers aside and got out of bed, looking around the room
that never seemed to be hers, no matter how long she stayed here. That
was probably for the best, because this mission was taking too long.
She'd been in New York for several months now, and she still hadn't
tracked down the people Giles had sent her to find.
It wasn't the kind of assignment she usually took, but she'd been burned
out after months of training young Slayers and helping organize a new
Council and schools for all the protégées she'd acquired as a
side-effect of closing the Hellmouth. To her surprise, although she'd
been bored with her work, she hadn't felt dead inside, the way she had
for so long after Willow had called her back to this world. Instead,
she'd been on fire to do something, to go somewhere. She'd never felt
quite like that before.
And when Giles said he was looking for someone to investigate a demon
community in New York, she'd been immediately convinced she had to take
the job herself.
Giles hadn't argued. He knew she needed a break from the constant hum of
teenaged voices and the whirlwind of melodrama that the girls created
around themselves. So he'd produced a cover identity for her and briefed
her with what little information the much-depleted Watchers' information
network had been able to provide.
"There's some evil demon activity near mid-town Manhattan. That's hardly
new. What's odd is that there seems to be a group of fighters combating
them in a semi-organized way. Word is that their leader is an unusual
creature of great size and strength. We need someone to track him down,
make contact, and determine if he's a possible ally."
For some reason, Dawn had thought it would be cool if Buffy was a
lawyer, so Giles had arranged for her to pose as an attorney for a
charitable institution that helped runaways. "It will let you get close
to the kind of people who might know something about these hunters."
So far, Buffy had done lots of sight-seeing, heard many miserable
stories, and nearly blown her cover story a dozen times. But she'd found
no army led by a gigantic warrior. She had made some contacts who'd
described a man who lived in the sewers and came out to stalk demons at
night, sometimes with a gang of strange warriors at his back. But until
now, no one had given her any idea of where to find him.
And, of course, there was a good chance the anonymous tip was a trap.
She shrugged. That concern had never stopped her before, and it wouldn't
tonight.
As the sun was setting that evening, Buffy reached out to touch a
gigantic mushroom. "Hi, Alice. Care to introduce me to some
bleached-blond guy named Vinny or Vincent who fights nasty things in
this neighborhood?"
Alice stared down at her silently, arms outstretched to the creatures on
either side of her. Buffy looked at the March Hare, then turned to
regard the Mad Hatter. Neither of them had anything to report. The
Dormouse and Cheshire Cat weren't very forthcoming either.
Buffy had asked an acquaintance if there was a famous Alice who hung
around in Central Park, and the response had been a laugh. "Yeah, she's
been hanging around there since before I was born. She's a bit heavy to
wander around much."
She really was, and so were her friends. The larger-than-life images
were worn smooth with time, and, most likely, the attentions of children
who had climbed over the statues. Sitting on her bronze mushroom and
surrounded by lots of bushes and trees, Alice was looking too serene to
be aware of any demonic activity. She looked just like the
black-and-white illustration in the book Buffy remembered reading to a
very young Dawn—until Dawn had been so frightened by the boy who turned
into a pig they'd had to stop.
Buffy doubted if Alice or any of her friends were going to be of much
help to her tonight.
She turned away from the statue, her boots crunching against dry brown
autumn leaves, peering into the dismal shadows for any sign of movement.
But she heard the fight before she saw it, and she ran toward the noise,
fumbling in her pockets to make sure she had a knife and a stake
available, not sure which she'd need.
As she rounded a corner of the path, she glimpsed fangs and a ridged
forehead in a shaft of pale lamplight. The wooden stake it was.
Four vampires were running from two hunters, all six of them racing
along the path from the conservatory Buffy had passed a few minutes ago.
They were headed toward the Alice in Wonderland statue. And Buffy.
The first of the pursuers was an enormous creature with a great mane of
tawny hair. He was wearing leather boots, a hodgepodge of loose
clothing, and a long cloak. Behind him ran a much shorter and slenderer
man whose shock of whitish-blond hair made his movements easy to follow
in the battle that ensued.
Buffy took out one of the vamps in less then a minute, and in that time
the huge demon accounted for two more by the simple but effective means
of yanking off their heads. Buffy looked up from her kill see that the
blond man hadn't been so lucky dealing with the fourth vampire. He was
lying on his back, struggling to rise on his elbows, fumbling for a
dropped stake. Behind him, the big demon was turning away from a misty
cloud of ashes to look for his companion.
Buffy was momentarily frozen by a flash of bright blue eyes that she'd
thought never to see again. "Spike!"
The vampire snarled.
Simultaneously, she and the demon leapt to defend the blond man. Buffy
got there first, and the vampire was vanishing into a cloud of smoke by
the time the demon stood before her. Her stake still upraised, she
blinked at the huge creature.
He whirled away from her, reached down and seized the blond man by the
back of his leather coat, hauling him off towards the street.
"Wait!" Buffy raced after the two of them, towards Fifth Avenue, needing
all her speed to keep up as the demon thudded along, holding the slender
man easily in his grasp. His dark cloak billowed behind him as he ran
out of the park and turned out of her field of vision.
She was only seconds behind, and when she reached the sidewalk she was
in time to see a manhole cover slip closed and hear a muffled complaint
from below street level. Without hesitation, she yanked up the cover and
dropped into the sewers below.
She had to follow them through the endless passageways, tracking by
sound rather than sight, but that was made easy by the constant protests
of the man the demon was carrying. He was demanding, loudly and
profanely, to be put down. She didn't waste time fussing over the
dripping walls or the slime underfoot. Distasteful as her surroundings
were, the main difference between this immense tunnel network and the
one she'd known in Sunnydale was size.
Finally, she emerged in a dry, broad passageway that was lined with lit
kerosene lamps and bordered on each side by makeshift doors. There were
some benches, boxes of junk food, and an ice chest squatting next to a
couple of six-packs of beer. An underground home. Not exactly Alice's
Wonderland or even a comfy hobbit-hole, but not Shelob's lair either.
The demon didn't pause until he reached the end of the corridor, still
dragging his protesting captive behind him. The last room had a metal
gate instead of a door, and the demon yanked that open, tossed the blond
man in, and slammed it shut again, reaching for a huge key ring that
hung on the wall beside the cage.
"Wait!" yelled Buffy again, coming up behind them.
Before she could say more, the blond man howled menacingly, the timbre
of his voice changing as the shriek died in his throat. He snarled
again, and threw his body at the door of the cage.
The demon stepped back as a hairy claw emerged between the bars and
swiped at him.
"He's a werewolf," said Buffy.
"Yeah," replied the demon, his back still to her. "Stupid bugger got
himself bit over a year ago. You'd think that by now he'd remember to
check when there's a full moon and what time it rises. He loves a good
rumble, but he had no business being there for that fight." Moving
quickly enough to avoid the grasping claws, he turned the key in the
lock.
"No," agreed Buffy.
"Followed me out there, which means I had to take out the vamps and get
him back here before moonrise." The demon added with the air of someone
who, when handed lemons, is determined to make lemonade, "At least there
are three nights out of the month when I don't have to listen to him
rabbiting on. He never shuts up the rest of the time."
Buffy didn't answer. She was staring with fascination at the hulking
demon.
The hands that had slammed the cage door closed were surprisingly
hairless and well-formed, but their fingers were oddly jointed and they
tapered to tips that were not-quite claws and not-quite human nails. But
even in the simple act of dropping a key on a hook, he moved with
amazing grace, controlled strength flowing through his every gesture.
She stepped closer, wanting a better look at the strong profile that was
framed by a mass of tawny growth that seemed too thick and glossy to be
human hair. It reached past his shoulders, the tangled ends flowing over
the collar of his long cloak.
She stepped forward again, but the werewolf distracted her by growling
and throwing himself against the bars of the cage, reaching out one
shaggy arm to try to grasp her. "You take care of him," she said to the
demon. "On nights like this."
He turned around at last and faced her. "Yeah, well, setting the safety
of the Manhattan citizenry aside, I can't help chasing after the whelp
and trying to keep him out of trouble. He reminds me a bit of myself, if
you must know." His eyes blazed bright blue, astonishing in the face of
what appeared at first glance to be some kind of wild animal.
A very beautiful wild animal.
"Spike," she said wonderingly.
He responded hoarsely, in a thundering baritone that held an echo of a
voice she'd once heard emanate from a smaller chest. "Wasn't sure you'd
know it was me."
"I knew when I saw your eyes during the fight." The recognition had been
immediate, stronger and surer even than when she'd looked into the eyes
of a Fyarl demon and realized Giles had been transformed. "But—how?"
"I haven't the least bloody idea." His expression was only mildly
puzzled, as if he'd long since given up on solving the mystery. "I found
myself here, in the Rotten Apple itself, three thousand miles from where
I'd been fried to a crisp. And I looked like this." He reached out an
arm, gesturing around him. "Was even dressed like this, which is a
sodding shame, because it's not like I can stroll into Saks and pick up
something more fashionable, is it? Made my way down here, since the
sight of me draws a bit of a crowd even in the Village. Ironic, you
know? Now the daylight doesn't bother me, but I have to look out for the
crowds with pitchforks whether it's midnight or noon."
He looked over his shoulder at the growling werewolf. "I ran into Vinny
there and a gaggle of other losers who seemed like they could use a bit
of a hand. Been here ever since."
"You didn't tell me," she said, shaking her head as she thought of the
lost months since that last day in Sunnydale. "You didn't let me know."
She missed the old scarred eyebrow that used to quirk upwards when he
was surprised. The smooth, dark brows that now arched upwards at a
soaring angle rose together evenly. But she read the meaning behind this
new expression, awestruck as she watched smooth golden skin ripple over
his high cheekbones and long lashes come together over narrowing eyes.
"Didn't seem like the right thing to do."
She was almost angry with him then, even through the soaring joy that
was overwhelming her. "You really didn't believe me, then! What I told
you, just before you closed the Hellmouth? You should have believed me,
Spike. I've spent months telling myself that you must have really
believed me because I couldn't bear the thought of you dying thinking
you weren't loved!"
He shrugged, and this time she recognized a shadow of the old, familiar
gesture under the greater musculature of his new form. "Beside the point
now. Look at me."
"I am," she said, shivering a little. "You're amazing." She hoped her
sincerity showed in her face. "You're beautiful."
He blinked in astonishment, and she took advantage of his surprise to
step forward and put her hands on his shoulders. "In fact, I'd have to
say you've never seemed more good-looking and athletic."
He tensed for a moment, and then leaned down into her embrace.
As she stood on tiptoe and he bent his head towards hers, Buffy
remembered her dreams and knew that this would be no ordinary kiss.
Well, kissing Spike had never been ordinary.
And as her mouth opened against his, everything changed . . .
The End
As you see, I honored the request for a post-Chosen encounter between
Buffy and a non-human Spike to the letter, if not the spirit.
When I read the request, the first thing that crossed my mind was,
"what if he wasn't a vampire either?" Then
tzikeh
reminded me of La belle et la bête by Jean Cocteau and the TV
series Beauty and the Beast. This is the result.
And there
really is a statue of Alice in Central Park.
|
