Chapter Text
“… thank God it’s Friday. I can’t believe I just said that. See you later…”
Buffy glues her eyes back on her computer screen as soon as Principal Wood leaves, dropping the nonchalant act with a sigh of relief. She’s no psychic (well, excepting the occasional Slayer dream) but something tells her if her boss discovers she’s internet stalking a student she suspects is, she’ll be written up faster than she can say job insecurity.
The seventh macabre poem in a row curdles Buffy’s insides because a high schooler shouldn’t be so good at pinning down death. It’s everything Buffy never understood until she endured dying by drowning and then diving and becoming girl-in-a-grave, depicted before her with startling accuracy. Number eight is one of the less grisly ones but it’s even more haunting for how certain Cassie seems that it’ll be her turn to go in the ground soon, no matter how scary and unfair that is. Just like a different little girl, told a harrowing truth by the grown ups she trusts more than anyone in the whole wide world she had seen so little of: a prophecy doesn’t care if she’s only sixteen.
My veins are filled with sand
I stopped writing fairy tales when I found out
That in a shade of time
I will be dead
Not resting in peace
I said dead
My soul isn’t anything special
Only an hourglass
“Not on my watch, Cass,” Buffy says, shaky voice betraying how scared she feels for this girl that’s got so much left to experience and goddamnit will write her fairy tales again come hell or high water. And Buffy will be right there to read them because it only took a day of knowing her to see how bright and witty and talented she is when she’s just a kid who doesn’t have to be any of those things.
How she has the strength to go to school and sit in class and walk the halls carrying the immensely heavy conviction death will precede diploma eludes Buffy. She’s got no Slayer powers to keep her arm bones from snapping under the weight.
Deciding that she’s had enough of wallowing in someone else’s too-familiar misery, she resolves to close out of the browser. But she stops with her cursor hovering atop the button that’ll take her away, because… just to be safe… maybe she should do a quick scan through the drawings and paintings on this site. See if she can glean anything useful, like a hint about what “old coins” supposedly will be involved in Cassie’s early expiry. It feels inappropriate bordering on voyeuristic at this point, but Buffy’s been going crazy since her student bluntly stated she’d be dying next week, so she might as well be diligent about this lurking thing. A peeping Buffy is an informed Buffy.
The webpage takes a while to load, these school computers always take forever to render stuff, she knows that from experience. Her foot taps with impatience anyway. How is it that the more deplorable members of society have figured out how to construct and customize a lifelike robot modeled after anyone they desire but this is the latest in computer tech she can ask for? Or maybe they’re hiding the good ones or administration skimped or—
“Oh.”
Oh.
Oh no.
Buffy decides right then and there that Cassie Newton doesn’t have precognitive abilities and the foretold shirt stain was a coincidence, a mean cosmic joke, no more inevitable than the side facing up on dice that’s still rolling and rolling and rolling all the way under the couch and hitting the wall with a clink and Buffy come lift the couch, I’ve got it, birthday girl’s off duty today, guess not all of Evil Dead’s chivalry died with him huh, I’ll die for good before I do another damn favor for you
and as Xander sheepishly voiced a thanks to Spike that was surely prompted by Anya’s pointy elbow getting him in the ribs rather than authentic gratitude, something Buffy wished was nothing welled up in her chest and started to crawl up up up her throat to try and poke its way out of her closed mouth, a Wicked Secret risen from the menagerie of hidden fears/wants/hopes/resentments she could never let herself express so she swallowed it back down with a gulp so loud he looked at her with a brow raised over a black eye that she had inflicted
how insane how duplicitous how scum-of-the-earth she must be to beat him bloody for not understanding that everyone’s life matters for the fact that they’re living and she needs to protect them no matter the personal cost for the fact that she’s the Slayer
when he could make a remark like that, about dying for good, and she would think so hard it nearly breached containment:
If Spike dusts I don’t think I can go on.
She wasn’t sure in what sense she meant it, living or Slaying or performing the obligations of adult life. She was sure that she never wanted to find out.
And damn it all and him because she still feels the same way after they barely managed to weather the storm they had brought down upon themselves by being so dysfunctional and wretched to each other. Moving on is a pipe dream and that pipe is way too narrow for Buffy’s behemoth feelings to push through.
It’s just that she didn’t expect to realize that while scrolling through dozens of artfully terrifying illustrations of him dying.
Burning, all alone. Turning to particles of dust. Buffy feels like her throat is clogged with it when she sees Cassie’s rendition of Spike midway through dusting. She had never before thought about the human-shaped outline the remains of a vampire make the split-second before gravity kicks in, the silhouette capturing the contours and curves of what once was and would never be again, never wondered if it was instantaneous lights-out or if the undead feel the pain of coming apart into a gazillion pieces, like thousands of metal wires spawned and sliced-diced-chopped them up into confetti.
She recalls a saying she had heard from Giles, context forgotten but the words themselves imprinted in her memory: death by a thousand cuts. It seems to perfectly capture the horrors on the screen before her and the maelstrom she feels inside.
Her plan to deny and forget comes to a halt. There’s a problem, a bump in the road, that makes her brain glitch out on her and sends jolts of fear powerful like electrocution down her spine. Her stomach is sick with the cold hard truth of it.
Cassie shouldn’t have any idea what Spike looks like. Shouldn’t know how platinum his hair is, or the scar in his brow, or the broad expanse of his shoulders and how rigid they get when he’s being particularly stubborn about something.
It’s impossible. It’s right in front of her face. It’s too horrific to comprehend.
And now it’s a big blurry mess because of the tears obscuring her vision. She needs to go to the basement to—to make sure—
That he’s still there.