[center][img]https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/dd909445d748.png[/img][/center] [sup][h1][b][center][color=black] B U F F Y S U M M E R S[/color] [color=#e6419f]B U F F Y S U M M E R S[/color][/center] [/b][/h1][/sup] [hr] [indent] [color=silver] Mists clung low over the graveyard; the borderland of life and death. A strange place at the best of times and tonight no different. A damp no-man's land where fog crawled crooked headstones and sank into the earth until the air was thick with scents and every step stirred them. Swollen rainclouds loomed from above; holding back a storm that was threatening to break with teeth. The air just held the feeling of something violent. Through the gloom, a shape moved. Tall and broad shouldered, silent as if carved from the very fog itself. Spike moved silently in the way only predators ever could, a crossbow slung over his shoulder. His face was cut by the life he lived; pale blue eyes that caught what others missed, a brow scored by old wounds, the quiet movements of a hunter. He paused as the fog curled about his boots. That same silence was a pressing weight, broken only by the groan of old oaks. Hollow trees, chalk-white and brittle, lining the path ahead, the path that lived away from the road and led to the woods. Those deep roots kept them upright even as the wind whistled through them with a hollow chorus that gave the old vampire pause. His nostrils flared, pulling in the damp air like a hound. There it was. Sharp and acrid, almost buried beneath the mud and rain. Burning wood. Smoldered stone. Beneath it, something else unmistakable, “...fruit?” he whispered under his breath, frowning faintly. He followed the scent through the growing mists until the shape of a crypt emerged, broken and decrepit but still clawing skyward. A body lay slumped at the threshold. His lip curled and he crouched low in the ruins to observe. “Class,” he muttered to himself. “Used to have a bit of it.” Inside, light flickered, and the sound of chatter grew. Carefully he pushed the door ajar and was met by the smell all at once. Sweet and artificial and wrong. The crypt was occupied alright. A loose group of vampires sprawled around; half lounging and half-living in the space. One exhaled a thick cloud of the fruit smell, tossing the vape to the next in line. Another of them shook around at a clear cup and ice clinked around softly in dark, diluted blood. Spike stared at it. “...They’re [i]icing[/i] it now?” “--I’m just saying,” one of them was mid way through a thought. “If this Slayer is that big of a deal, someone should actually try, right?” “Literally,” another said, sipping from a bedazzled flask through a straw. “Worst case is that you get dusted but that’s like, kind of already the lifestyle.” “Yeah but imagine if you win,” a third chimed in. “You’d be like, everywhere.” “Okay but like, where even is she?” the first said again. The vape back in his hands as he drew from it, his words cut through the mango-berry fog cloud. “I’ve been trying to find her and it’s actually impossible I fear.” “She’s probably hiding or something,” another scoffed - rattling the ice around in her cup obnoxiously; clots sitting like boba pearls amidst the ice. “It totally builds her brand.” That was enough of that, Spike decided. He pushed the door fully open and felt the eyes of all five vampires snap to him. “She’s not hiding,” he said. Now that he had the full view of the room, his brow quirked. Various apparatus here and there - an espresso machine. Syrup pumps, vape cartridges all lined up. [i]Disgusting[/i]. He took from his jacket pocket a cigarette and lit it - the trail of smoke fighting against the wafts of artificial cloud. “You know that’s like, so gross right?” one of the vampires said with a look of disgust upon her own face. “Yeah. Right,” Spike responded nonchalantly. “As I was saying,” he continued, “she’s not interested in you. Bigger fish and all that.” “WAIT!” One of the vampires exclaimed, standing to her feet, arms outstretched. “Are you William the Bloody?” she asked, grinning. “If so, that is actually WILD.” “I used to be,” he shrugged. “That totally tracks, so vintage.” “--No but wait,” another one said, holding out a finger, sucking up the blood pearls from the iced drink before continuing. “He goes by “Spike” now, and he’s like, totally de-fanged.” The five of them all looked around at each other, then to Spike, then to each other again. One of them snorted out a laugh. “That can’t be your name! Shut up! No way, [i]Spike[/i]? Like what are you even? A puppy dog?” “Isn’t it like, because he’s a punk and wears spikes? Or did he kill people with spikes or something – like, either way it’s so cringe and so aggressive.” “Low-key problematic,” another added, nodding seriously. “I’m not bloody cringe,” Spike protested. “Been dead longer than you’d been alive and then some-” “Okay boomer,” one of them laughed, setting them all off all at once. “Just tell us where the Slayer is. Rumour has it you’d know and we’re trying to find her. People say she’s intense and we want to experience it at least once, you know?” “Yeah,” another said, raising her cup to the air. “We want to make it a group thing.” “And I’m telling you,” Spike interrupted at last. “She’s not for you.” “Gatekeep much?” “You wouldn’t last.” “Rude.” “Yeah, so rude.” “She’s literally just a Slayer, it’s our job to like, take her–” “Yeah,” Spike spoke again. His eyes having darkened already as something cold formed and settled behind them. “That’s what all you freshers think.” [i]Just a Slayer.[/i] Those words turned over in his mind with a bitterness and he felt it then. That he was old. They spoke of it like it was a simple title and a challenge. Something to be sized up and take a run at. They had no idea. They’d never know, they’d never understand what that meant, what it meant to exist in this cycle and dance between demons and darkness and the wider world. To live and die by it, to orbit something that burned as bright and brutal as she did and to stand at even the edge of her as she threw herself again and again into the dark like it was the only place she ever belonged. Hell, he’d killed two Slayers himself once. Not her though, not Buffy; and somewhere along the lines he started fighting beside her, for her, because of her. A slow breath left him. These children, these idiots, stood here talking about her like she was a story and something to try on between sips of their cold foam iced espresso blood matchas. This was a game to them. “You totally just spaced out–” one of them cut in. “She hasn’t got time for you,” Spike responded, returning to the present scene in front of him. His voice low. “She’s with him.” “...Who?” Spike didn’t answer. He just moved and the first of them barely had time to react before Spike had stepped to him, a stake immediately thrust his chest and his dust scattered, drifting through the haze of vape and Spike swore he could smell the putrid Mango-Berry even in the plume of ash and dust as if it had seasoned the vampire all the way through. The others were sloppier; moving without reason or instinct to guide them. Just a weak bravado but Spike pushed through them without hesitation, and without much effort. A turn here, strike there – ending each of them without flourish. When it all finally settled, he glanced down at one of the abandoned cups. Ice half melted and blood thinned to something almost pink. “She’s bigger than the Slayer now.” He sat and settled himself upon a coffin, relighting his cigarette as his eyes traced the outlines of the place. Somewhere beyond and below him, Buffy walked a path he couldn’t follow. [hr] She dreamed. Not as mortals did in soft, fleeting colours that slipped with morning. No, she dreamed of something far away, yet drawing nearer to her present. A convergence where realities would collide. A cold ground, endless under her weight and a red sky above. A red night stretched without an end; fire bleeding across a muddled crimson cloud-wrack, stretching, stretching. Veins of red, and always the sound of drums, the slow heart beat of war. A rattle in her own lungs was the sound closest to her; sharp, dying breaths. A dream that Buffy Summers had walked many times, over years of her life since she was awakened as the Slayer - the prophecy settled and written in her dreamscape. It met her always, the path of it worn as familiar as an old scar but this was no nightmare. This was a soft unravel, a glimpse to her own future. The constant. The direction that she was always heading toward. The waiting embrace at the end of a journey. It had always been a dream that had been hers. A thing that lay misunderstood; but there. Always there. It was the Crown of Sineya that gave it all clarity. That thing bestowed upon her by the Amazons, made from the first of them. The first Slayer. Her essence and strength, her memories to become a doorway. The clarity of the Slayer line made real. A way to reveal the pathway of the liminal state between worlds; the riverway to the boundary of life and death. A way down. The edges of her dream shifted as she moved and the ground beneath her was no longer fixed, but flowing. Visions of a battlefield unraveled into something deeper and older as the red sky dimmed and darkened and the whispers began. There was no water that made this river to fill the banks, only memory and voices. The songs of the Slayers who had come before and they all brushed against her as she stepped forward, the fragments of their lives and battles won and lost. Moments that had never been hers and yet lived within her all the same. Echoes that whispered wordlessly to pull her onward along a current she did not resist. The air grew still and that red sky had long since collapsed into shadow, and there he waited as the river stilled at its edge. Buffy had done this before. Died. Crossed. Returned. This boundary could never hold her the way it held others. Stone rose up around her, vast and shapeless, forming something akin to a hallway. A throne room that had not been built, but imagined and brought there by concept. Imposing and expecting of her; not entirely seen and not entirely understood and at the centre a figure shifted at the edged of perception. Shadow abound, and even the mind of the Slayer with all her infernal energy could not settle on something absolute to create and perceive him. [center]Hades.[/center] For a while there was silence, but she had come this far. Whatever this was, whatever [i]he[/i] was… She would face it. At last he spoke. “Here beginneth the lesson.” [/color][/indent]