And The Rest Is Silence: Part One
by Amywyn
Disclaimer: We know the drill by now. I don’t own them. Not a one. They belong to Joss, Mutant Enemy, the WB and the wonderful actors and actresses that give them life and make them so easy to invite into my living room every week. It’s their playground - I just made up the game and borrowed the players. And I promise to return them relatively unmolested (Joss did more to them than I ever could have come up with anyway). The song is Jonatha Brooke and The Story's _Plumb_ CD. As for suing, I've got CDs, books and cats - which do you want?
Timeline and spoilage: This is post-Becoming, pre-Anne fic. I know - it’s old. I had started it a *long* time ago, and then set it aside to deal with other things. But then, re-watching “Dead Man’s Party,” a certain line made me think of it again. And once I was thinking of it, it wouldn’t leave me alone ‘till I wrote it, so here it is. Contains the quote from “Dead Man’s Party”, and specific quote spoilers for “The Dark Age,” “Lie to Me,” “Innocence,” “Passion,” “I Only Have Eyes for You” and (for obvious reasons) “Becoming.” Some minor “Anne” situational references.
Notes: ~memory~ *lyrics*
Part One
Buffy: You have no idea how much I've missed you - everyone. I wanted to call everyday.
Willow: That doesn't matter Buffy, it doesn't make it okay that you didn't.
- BtVS, “Dead Man’s Party”
*I never knew what enough was,
Until I’d had more than my share.
I let the darkness in,
and it was then that I lost the dare.
It was then that I lost the day.*
This was what her life had been reduced to. A sparse, one-room apartment in yet another city where she knew no one and no one knew her. No heat, no lights, undrinkable water and only rats and cockroaches for company. The duffel bag with its meager supply of clothing at the side of the bed her only possessions, with just enough money left in her pocket after paying the rent to eat for the next couple of days. Somewhere in the distance a child screamed and a couple fought, the sounds of others lives passing as easily through the walls as the wind.
Buffy brought her knees up closer to her chest and pulled the thin, threadbare blanket tighter around her shoulders, huddling further into the bedsheets in an attempt to escape the drafts and get warm. She laid her head on her upraised knees and closed her eyes, waiting for the exhaustion to overcome her.
It was a futile effort on both counts. No amount of huddling would hold off the wind that whistled, unchecked, through the little apartment, and her eyes would never close tight enough to block the images that her mind continually brought forth.
~Close your eyes.~
Buffy’s eyes snapped open, all thoughts of sleep fleeing as the simple sentence echoed through her mind.
No. Not again. She would not do this again.
Her fingers released their grip on the blanket, allowing it to fall, unnoticed, from her shoulders as she reached up to cover her face with her hands. The heels of her palms pressed painfully into her eyes, until all she saw behind her eyelids was a shifting, pulsing blackness.
She moved her hands up along her temples, pulling her hair away from her face as she waited for her vision to return. As soon as the room around her was once again clearly visible she scooted to the edge of the bed and walked quickly over to the door, not bothering to lock it as she left the tiny room. It wasn’t as if she had anything to steal anyway.
She wrapped her arms about herself as she moved down the dark hallway, silently stepping over one of the other residents of the roach-ridden, rat-infested apartment building. Usually she would have tried to get him up out of his drunken stupor and into whichever room he thought he belonged in, knowing full well that if the super caught him he would be back living in a cardboard box. But right now all she could think of was getting out of the building.
The walls were closing in around her, pressing down, cutting off her air. The ever-present stench of poverty and hopelessness that permeated the decrepit building wasn’t helping either. The smells that she always associated with this place she couldn’t bring herself to call home were threatening to make her gag.
She sprinted across the room that passed for a lobby, noting with no surprise that the so-called night watchman was sleeping in his little bullet-proof glass and barred box. Again.
She hit the sidewalk at a near-run, unconsciously moving as if she knew where she was going, and wasn’t just running aimlessly from demons only she could see and hear. Walking with no purpose after dark in any city was an open invitation to more predators than just vampires, and Buffy simply didn’t want to deal with either at the moment.
She walked for several blocks, a small part of her mind taking note of precisely how far she had walked, what corners she had turned and stores she passed. She would not get lost, no matter how hard she tried. Years of patrolling had ingrained the habit in her, and the last few months had only sharpened it to near-perfection. She could always find her way back to anywhere, it was where she was going that she lacked.
Lightening flashed across the sky, followed quickly by a loud clap of thunder. Buffy stopped, looking up into the clouds, trying to gauge whether or not she had time to make it back to the apartment building. At the thought of the tiny, oppressive room her stomach began to churn again, and she ducked beneath a doorway awning, deciding that even if she did have time, she wasn’t going back there for a while.
She dropped into a crouch, leaning back against the stone wall that made up part of the doorway of the little shop. Her eyes scanned the mostly-deserted street from her vantage point, probing the shadows and alleyway entrances, peering warily into the few passing cars and taxicabs, looking for dangers of both the living and un-dead kind.
Her gaze was repeatedly drawn to a trio of telephone booths across the street. Their soft florescent light seemed to beckon her, giving false promises of warmth and security, solace and comfort. The devices they housed offering the possibility of a conversation that did not necessarily have to involve a choice of drink. Conversation that could, instead, be about love and home and forgiveness and hope.
The numbers were there, easily recalled, having been consistently, though not consciously, recited over the past few months, usually in situations like this. When the fact that all she had left behind was a mere ten buttons away, when the means to have a destination again was illuminated before her like a sign from God, and all she had to do was pick up the receiver and dial.
Willow or Xander, Giles... her mother; the possibilities ran through her mind once again, each one picked up and lovingly examined before being tossed away out of fear and shame. How could she face them again? Ask them for shelter and comfort?
An image of Willow, her hair standing out as the brightest thing in the suffocatingly white hospital room, rose in Buffy’s mind. And another, of Willow looking anxiously around the schoolyard, as Oz pushed her wheelchair into the building. No, she could not call Willow. Could not face the questions she was bound to ask, could not tell her over the safety of a phone line what the spell had done, how high the cost of those last moments with Angel had been.
Xander? Buffy dismissed that idea more quickly, the memory of something in his eyes the last time they spoke holding her away from the possibility. Not Xander.
~You walk out of this house, don’t even *think* about coming back!~ Her mother’s words echoed back to her, still holding the power to hurt immeasurably, even nearly three months later. In her head, she knew her mother had not meant them, but her heart was another matter. She would not call her mother.
That left Giles. And she had as many reasons not to call Giles as she had not to call anyone else, maybe more. He had lost Jenny because of her, not once but twice. He had been tortured because of her. And she had abandoned him without so much as a note to explain why. She had failed him more thoroughly, more often than anyone else. So why did her mind refuse to let this possibility go as it had the others? Why was she suddenly standing outside one of the little silver booths with its little door grasped firmly in her hand as the rain finally began to fall?
Buffy stepped inside, pulling the glass and silver door closed behind her, blocking out the light rainfall. Her eyes glued to the phone before her, she slumped against the side of the booth, unable to force her legs to hold her up any longer. She slid down the panels, bits of metal scraping painfully against her back through the thin material of her jacket and top. She never even noticed, just continued to stare up at the phone with a mixture of hope and revulsion.
Giles paced back and forth across his living room floor, his white-knuckled grip on the phone receiver in his hand threatening to break the small plastic device in two.
“You’re absolutely certain? There’s no poss...” He pulled his glasses off his face and tightly pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture Buffy would have recognized instantly, forcing himself to get his voice under control, trying not to take out his frustration and disappointment on the woman at the other end of the line.
“Yes, yes, of course. I understand.” He tossed the glasses in the direction of the coffee table, not actually noticing whether they made it or not. “Thank you for your help.”
The phone rattled loudly through the quiet apartment as he put the receiver back in its place more forcefully than he’d intended.
“Again.”
Placing the phone back down on the desk with a bit more care, he walked over to sit down on the couch, drained both physically and emotionally from yet another dead end. One more place where she was not. One more person who could not help. One more failure in a never-ending parade of them.
He dropped his head into his hands, his thumbs pressing gently into his temples, fighting a headache born of lack of sleep and months of worry.
The image of her as he had last seen her, a glimpse caught out of the corner of his eye as Xander helped him limp from the mansion, flashed across his mind. Rather than push it away in the usual manner, he lingered over it, clinging to it, taking what comfort he could from it. Fighting one of Angel’s minions, her body moving in the same lithe, deadly grace he well knew, she was the only thing in the memory that appeared real. The minion, Xander, the statue... the entire room seemed muted and colorless around her.
Followed closely behind that memory was another, and another, as if it had been a dam holding back all thoughts of her that did not involve looking for her. Flashes of her smile, something he had missed even before she had left, snippets of conversations and arguments... he closed his eyes and let them come, savoring what images he could call up, allowing the memory of her voice to wash over him.
Buffy standing beside him, looking down at the ashes of what had once been a friend. ~Lie to me.~
Sitting before him, her legs pulled close to her chest in an unconsciously protective gesture. ~I think its a little late for both.~
The feel of her arms wrapped tightly around him, as they wept for lost loves in a dirty, wet alleyway outside of a burning warehouse. ~You can’t leave me. I can’t do this alone.~
He pushed the memories aside, along with the lonely, lost feeling that accompanied them, reaching out for the gin on the table in front of him. The remaining ice cubes clinked gently against the sides of the glass as he raised it to his lips and finished the drink in one swallow. He set the empty glass back down on the newspaper on the table in front of him, watching with a strange satisfaction as the condensation darkened the article that had lead him to call the woman at the L.A. Youth Crisis Center.
Getting up from the couch, he turned his back on the remaining stack of newspapers on the table and wandered over to the window. He stared out at the shadows that danced across his lawn in the half-moonlight, trying hard not to look at his own haggard appearance reflected in the glass.
Buffy, where are you? What happened? he silently pleaded with his missing Slayer - his friend. He was lost and he knew it. A Watcher without his Slayer, with nothing to do but wait and worry.
What had happened to make her run? What had been so awful that she couldn’t tell them? The fight with her mother, getting kicked out of school, the murder charges... all could have been dealt with if only she had come to him; let him help. She had to have known that, so what else could it have been?
As much as he needed the answer, he also dreaded it. The mansion had been eerily still when he and Xander had returned there hours later, and the sight of the dormant stature, its eyes staring blankly into him, had filled him with an overwhelming sense of foreboding. His fear of the place and the urge to leave the silent building had been nearly as strong as when Angel had first brought him there.
He hadn’t had the energy to analyze it then, and had since used what energy he did have searching for and worrying over Buffy, deliberately pushing away the thought of what the sword lying abandoned next to the statue might have meant every time it presented itself. He had an inkling of a theory, and it was a possibility he didn’t want to think about.
He leaned his forehead against the cool glass, suddenly too tired to even hold his head upright.
~Don’t be sorry. Be Giles.~
~I still don’t see how she could have forgiven him.~
~You can’t leave me. I can’t do this alone.~
Why, Buffy? And, god, where are you?
To Be Continued....
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