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Road
Author: Jo
Disclaimer: Not mine, alas.
Wordcount: 853
Setting: Angel’s in Acathla’s Hell
Notes: Written for ba_rosebuds.
Prompt ‘Road’, and a scenario game with Ares.
**
Road
Buffy follows the road up to the Mansion, as she has followed it in hope
before, but this time is different. This is the last time. It has to be the
last time. He’s never coming back, and she has to move on.
Inside, she crosses unerringly to the place where she killed him, tears
already starting. She tries to feel him, as she used to feel him, that
clenching in the pit of her stomach whenever he was close, but there’s
nothing. There’s been nothing since that terrible day, and how could she
expect even a ghost of her lover to haunt this house, when he was sucked
down, body, soul and demon, into Hell?
She pulls his ring from her finger. He told her his people gave it for
friendship, but she knows better now. Well, death has them parted, and that
must be an end to it. She crouches under the weight of her widowhood and
lays the ring down, giving it back to him in love, the heart pointed to her
last memory of him. Does that mean she’s still claiming him in death, she
thinks wildly, but her mind is too filled with pain to answer.
“Goodbye”, she whispers, and then she walks away, because there’s nothing
else she can do.
++++
The road is rough and cracked and pitted beneath his bare feet, but the
clamour is too close behind him to try and find a different route. Besides,
these are small hurts. Not that he recognises any of those thoughts. He’s
no better than a beast, an animal, pared down to nothing but a bundle of
instincts. Those instincts are for survival. For escape from the pain. And
so he runs.
The demons who labour in his wake are grinning fiercely. They like it when
he makes a break for freedom. He hasn’t learned that there is no place here
that he can run to and be safe. There is no escape. They will always catch
him, and when their blood is up from the hunt, they will enjoy his pain
more. He hasn’t learned that, either.
But he’s fast, despite all the damage and starvation that he’s suffered.
Only a few of those on foot can keep up. It’s the mounted ones who will
have the pleasure of chasing him down today. One old demon shakes his head.
There are stories about what lies at the end of this road. No one comes
this way anymore. He hopes they catch their prey before he gets much
further.
The surface is more broken now, the way steeper, more taxing, and the
vampire has to slow, his steps laboured as he climbs up into the high
places. He doesn’t know why he’s come this way, but it seems good. The
mounted demons will have to abandon their steeds soon, and...
He doesn’t know what he means by the thought, but, yes, this road seems
good. It seems right. There’s a pull, in the pit of his stomach, leading
him this way. And suddenly, there is no more road. There is just the end of
the world, and a sheer drop into oblivion.
Swiftly, he turns to face his pursuers, fangs bared. One lashes out with a
burning whip, trying to wrap it around the vampire, to drag him away from
the edge, but he steps backwards, out of its reach. The demon presses
closer.
“Come away from there,” it calls to him. “Come away now, or we will make
you suffer.”
He doesn’t understand a word. Words are things without meaning, a drone in his
ears, sound and fury, telling him nothing except ‘Run’.
The whip lashes out again, and he takes another step backwards, snarling.
Now he can feel the edge crumbling beneath his heels. The primitive part of
his brain tells him that there will be no more steps. He can surrender to
them here, or...
Or what? What else is there to do? The pull in the pit of his stomach
becomes inexorable, a clenching in his gut that he must follow.
Death can have no meaning here, or he would be dead already. But that pull...
That’s different.
The demon draws back the whip again. If it lashes out, it will find its
target. It can’t miss from that distance. He stands, perfectly still, and
he closes his eyes. Then, Angel opens his arms, and allows himself to fall
backwards into the yawning emptiness beneath, as other angels have Fallen
before him. Backwards, through land and sky and nothingness, through life
and hope and death and the point of a sword, through sin and sorrow, until
he crashes to earth on the other side.
He doesn’t know who he is, or where he is, or why he is. He’s still just
that anguished and shivering bundle of instincts, with no rational thought.
But the pull in his gut is satisfied, and the fresh scent of Her reassures
the beast that he has become. He struggles to get up, although he has no
strength, but already he can feel another road beneath his feet.
The End
August 2010
Jo
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