End of Days: Part 14
by Felicity
Disclaimer: No, I'm not this evil...evil, but not this evil. Joss owns 'em.
Author's Notes: Okay, this is therapy fic for IWRY, also involving prophecies, apocalypses and whatever odd things pop into my head...but mostly B/A-ness. The parts are all gonna be first person from different people's points of views. Bad things will happen. This is gonna be very angsty, but I promise, it will all work out in the end!

Teaser: The End of Days is coming to Sunnydale...



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Part Fourteen

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The First Rule of Life is Balance. For every joy there is pain. For every light there is darkness. One cannot exist without the other. Every creature on this earth has measures of both. To reach Enlightenment, one must first realize this. The Path however, is not that simple. There are always exceptions to every rule. One will be born who exists only in the Light, for their path is to be the balance, the hold back the Dark.

The birth of this One shall presage the coming of the greatest Dark ever seen to man. And before the One can triumph, they too much learn the First Rule.

—The Seven Rules of Life by Míng-Hóa, 342 A.D.

Buffy

I was scared. I was frightened out of my mind.

I was kind of hoping I wasn’t in my right mind. Better crazy than standing in Hell facing a sixty foot monster with a sword, right?

Come to think of it, I’m a little confused as to where the sword came from. But Angel had one too, which was…a plus.

Hell was pretty much exactly what you’d think it’d be like. Fire and brimstone and all that. Except more of the fire than is possible to imagine when not actually standing in it. Which I was. Not a comforting place to be. The fire never touched us, really, but the heat…it was like being smothered to death, but instead of just not getting air when you took a breath, it was like breathing in fire. The heat would race through your throat, scorch out your insides…I felt like I was being baked from the inside. And outside.

Good thing Angel doesn’t feel hot and cold, or we’d both be staggering. This way, it was just me.

Oh, there’s a comforting thought.

"Buffy, don’t think about the heat," Angel told me. "It’s in your mind. Hell isn’t a place, it’s a thought."

"What?!" I demanded, not in the mood for philosophy.

"We are where we believe we are!" he yelled over the roar of the fire.

I believed I was being burned alive.

"Oh Hell," I muttered and closed my eyes and thought very hard about being somewhere else. Anywhere else. About being cold.

Snow materialized around us. I swore. "I didn’t mean that cold!"

"Well it’s not supposed to be a fun place to be," Angel reminded me. "It is Hell." I shivered.

"Thanks for the warning," I snapped. I looked up at the monster that was, by the way, still right there, and laughing. "Can we just fight now?"

"Not here," Angel said, twining his fingers with mine. "This has to be more even."

We were in a room. It wasn’t really a room, because there weren’t any walls. It was more of this long white plain. It wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold. The monster was still there.

"We just fight it?" I asked. "This is the Lord of Hell?"

The thing laughed. There is no sound as evil as that laugh. I can still hear it…It takes all the dead, the decaying, the pain, the horror in the world…And makes it into sound.

I fell to my knees beneath the onslaught, and when I looked back up the monster was gone. A man stood there instead, looking perfectly normal. Just any man you would see on the street. Except his eyes. His eyes burned.

"Voila," he said, his voice rasping of things better unknown. "Here I am."

"This is a physical embodiment of one of them," Angel told me, pulling me up to my feet. I stood, unable to look away from the terror of those eyes.

"Wrong," the thing laughed. "I’m all of them."

And he was.

He was all around us, copies of the same thing, the same man, maybe twenty of them. They spoke together. "I am Darkness. I am Pain. I am the End. And you are going to die."

I hate it when they tell me that. I lifted my sword in readiness.

"Wrong," I said softly. "I am the Beginning."

Angel

We weren’t fighting the physical men surrounding us. We were, but much more importantly, was the mental fight, the emotional fight. Which became immediately apparent when we were able to beat back twenty men with two swords.

That was the high point of the fight. From there, things started to go down.

Hell, I’d been taught by Darla, was the physical embodiment of your nightmares. But you controlled your nightmares, and if you could see the truth, you could change it.

Seeing it was the hard part.

I spent three hundred years in Hell, and I never saw the truth, even knowing it. I never believed. But with Buffy beside me, I did. Together we could see the truth.

Divided, we fell.

I was alone, with the Lord of Hell, or all of them, if he was telling the truth. I knew Buffy was beside me, I knew it with all my soul…but not enough apparently. I began to doubt.

"What? You’re just going to stand there?" he taunted. I raised my sword.

"Try me," I answered, darkness against his darkness. He lunged forward and our swords clashed. I staggered, though the physical blow wasn’t a hard one. As our swords met, so did we, and the vastness of that evil is enough to fell many a greater man.

—Don’t you dare give up now!— Cordelia’s voice sounded inside my mind. I steadied myself and my sword lashed out, snaking around his. He twisted away and I followed, the sword alive in my hand, a living tool of light, to drive away the darkness. Every thrust, every lunge every cut was countered by one of his own. Every good memory I had was countered by one of pain, one of darkness. The one man became many and I slahes at them all, my sword here to block a cut, there to thrust into a stomach that vanished along with it’s owner the second my sword touched it. I disarmed two and kicked out behind me, sending one flying backwards just before ducking beneath another slash. I rolled and thrust upwards as I stood, catching an apparition on the steel. It vanished and another appeared behind me.

"You can never win," they laughed. "You cannot kill us. We are Darkness. We are Despair. We are Death."

"I’m immortal," I replied, and skewered one of them through.

—Atta boy,— Spike prompted. —Give ‘em Hell.—

—They are Hell,— Doyle replied.

"Shut up," I said, and spun around, slashing one in the face and ducking beneath a thrust.

They began to laugh. Terror followed the sound as night follows day, the natural consequence. "It’s no use fighting," that terrible voice purred, and they all dissapeared. I spun, my sword up, and saw nothing.

"Fight me!" I growled.

"I don’t have to," it laughed from the air around me. "Your little lover’s already lost the battle."

The world collapsed in on me and I screamed. "BUFFY!"

Faith

B did pretty good at first. I mean, she’s definitely got the sword moves down. It was weird being in her like that. I could see out of her eyes, and feel what she was doing, but I couldn’t control it.

I hate that.

I could even feel some of what she was feeling. I rooted for her when she beckoned them to the fight. I thought maybe she’d chicken out, y’ know? But not B. She asked for it.

And then she got it. Which wasn’t very good.

When Angel dissapeared, she freaked for a second. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone. She rolled to her feet after ducking a swing and—he wasn’t there. Just a whole heck of a lot of guys with swords. Guys that all looked the same.

Wicked freaky.

She got back into it though, didn’t let it wig her out too much. One of them knocked her sword away, but she punched the guy and kept fighting. She ducked under another sword, then grabbed the next one to thrust at her and turned it on the guy holding it. She kicked another one twice and sent him flying, then dived for her sword.

It was gone when she got there. So were all the guys except for one. "Looking for this?" he asked in a drawl.

"You want to give it back?" B asked, standing up and turning to look at him.

"You want to take it?" he asked. She cocked her head for a minute.

"Yeah," she said. "Okay." She jump-kicked him, then spun when she landed and kicked his legs out from under him. He hit her in the knees and she went down. He kicked her and stood up. She grabbed his arms and twisted, flipping him down and grabbed the sword, then stood on his chest, glaring down at him. He smiled up at her, as if he wasn’t about to be headless.

God, that smile…Well, I’ve seen some bad things in my time but that…

And then they came, like killer waves, except made of terror instead of water. Memories, feelings, assaulting us. Mostly B. I could feel them, but kind of removed. Still, it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

It was worse than you think, whatever you imagine it to be like. It was way worse. It was all those things you think could never happen to you, all rolled into one. It was the memories of young mother watching their children butchered, of women being brutally raped, of a baby starving to death. It was a man in a war, watching his friends die. It was a man in a war killing, losing his soul with each child he blew to bits. It was despair and fear and hopelessness and evil, terror and death and pain.

It was Angelus, smiling at B. It was thrusting a sword into your lover’s heart. It was dying at sixteen.

It was worse than you think.

Buffy staggered back as if she was physically punched, though the guy didn’t touch her. She dropped the sword, and then dropped to her knees, unable to cry or move or think beneath the horror assaulting her without pause.

Slowly, leisurely, he stood up and walked over. A sword materialized in his hands and he smiled, standing over her with that evil grin as she convulsed in terror before him.

"I told you," he whispered. "This is what I am." He lifted the sword.

I’ve never been a religious person. But I decided it was time to pray.

Buffy

I was screaming, but you couldn’t hear it. It was inside. It was…impossible to describe. I wanted to die, or surrender or anything to make it stop. To make it go away.

But it doesn’t go away. That’s what I’ve learned. The Darkness is always there.

Luckily, that’s not all I’ve learned.

I heard him scream my name. That was the first thing I heard since it started, since the pain came. I heard Angel scream my name. And then Xander, and Willow and Giles and Faith. They were calling me.

The horror continued unabated.

—You have to fight!— Xander’s voice said beside me, in my mind.

—You can’t fight this,— I thought, and knew he heard.

—Yes,— Faith said, —you can.—

I saw myself, through Xander’s eyes. Strong and beautiful, smiling brightly and laughing at him. I saw summer days eating ice cream with Willow and I, childhood games with Jesse. I saw Cordelia in her prom dress, and Anya in her bunny suit. Laughter and bad jokes and love filled me.

I saw Xander with a barbie and all of us in the library. Oz playing guitar, the Bronze pulsing with music and romance. Myself again, fighting, Ms. Calendar smiling, people I’d never met who still made me feel warm inside. A woman with dark hair braiding a little girl’s hair, a park, and me, out on patrol. Playing Anywhere But Here, goofing off in the halls, patrolling at night. Sleepovers and movie nights and pumpkin carving. And from my own mind, I found winning an award, saving a life, lying in Angel’s arms.

But still, the Dark came. And it wasn’t enough. There were good memories, yes, but for every good there were ten bad. The pain never ended. It was overwhelming. I knew I had lost.

And then I heard Angel again.

—Think of the good things, Buffy. Think of happiness,— he urged me. I almost laughed. This coming from him?

I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel. I could only despair.

—Buffy, remember when you came to see me? There was more. There was a day together, lost. I was human and I loved you. You have to remember.—

I couldn’t think. But I could heard his voice. I clung to it, a life line through the sea of pain I was drowning in.

—Buffy, I love you,— he whispered into my soul.

I remembered. I remembered Angel walking into the sun, his lips on mine. I remembered going to sleep with him, making love to him, eating chocolate and peanut butter in his bed. I remember planning futures in my mind, dreaming of sleeping in his arms and waking to find I really was.

Maybe I would never have that again. But I wasn’t going to let someone destroy a world where happiness like that was possible, even if it was only for other people.

"And I told you before," I said softly, looking up to meet his eyes. "This is what I am."

Before he could move my hand tightened on the sword and I surged upward, driving it through his heart. Those dark, terrible eyes widened, and he looked…surprised for a minute. And then he was gone. And everything went white.


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