Fic: The Road to Byzantium

[rahirah]

Here’s my CYA story. It got a bit longer that anticipated. The second part will be posted shortly, and the third and final part will be posted on Sunday.

The Road to Byzantium
by Barb C.

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13 for violence and naughty, naughty words
Characters: Spike, Dawn, Anya
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I’d just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: The Knights of Byzantium have returned to Sunnydale. Spike, Dawn and Anya take to the road to avoid them, but when they run into a mysterious hitchhiker, their plans go awry. Can a neutered vampire, an ex-vengeance demon, and the Key to the Universe evade a very human foe?
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” Many thanks to my betas, slaymesoftly, bruttimabuoni, rainkatt, shipperx, and kehf. It was written for the 2008 cya_ficathon, and the request was as follows:

Characters/Pairings you want the story to focus in: Dawn&Spike
Characters/Pairings you want in the story too: Anya! Even if only because D&S are speaking about her.

Things you want: post-Gift but *before* Buffy comes back. Spike takes Dawn out of town for several days - to distract her, to protect her from a demon (a parallel ‘OMWF’?), on a whim… whichever reason works best.
I really want the story to focus on D&S, and the firmer their friendship is, the better. Banter is love, lol!
Things you don’t want: No LA, and as few B/S as possible, please.
Extras: hitchhiking back home (either they do it, or they pick someone up at some point in the journey). I would love for Spike to tell Dawn *his* version of Lover’s Lane (S3), and maybe Dawn can add her own ‘memories’ around those events?


Spike was on fire again.

The dusting of curly light-brown hair on his left wrist was starting to singe and fizzle in the filtered sunlight. Wisps of smoke curled upwards and whipped away out the window. The first time it had happened, sitting at a red light in Ventura, Dawn had panicked and thrown her Diet Sprite at him. By now, fifteen miles out of Ojai, it was starting to get old.

“Fucking hell,” the vampire muttered, slapping the flames out before his skin could catch. He examined the red spot with a scowl. Dawn fished an ice cube out of her cup and handed it over to him solemnly.

In the back seat, Anya looked up from her magazine and heaved an exasperated sigh. “You know, if we’d just waited until it was dark…”

Spike took a drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. It bounced off a Fire Danger: HIGH sign and tumbled to the shoulder in a shower of orange sparks. “Not a chance. We want to be well out of Sunnydale before those Byzantium wankers roll in.”

“Because running away from them worked so well the last time,” Dawn muttered, so low that no one could hear it.

No one except the vampire with super-sensitive ears, anyway. A muscle in Spike’s jaw twitched, and his knuckles went whiter-than-white on the wheel. “Not going to be like the last time,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t mean it like…” Dawn trailed off unhappily. Of course it wasn’t going to be like last time. Last time her sister had been with them. Not that it had made any difference, in the end. But Buffy was gone now. My sister is dead, Dawn thought, rolling the words around in her brain, testing the weight of them. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t even had time to get used to My mother is dead yet. Buffy’d died a hero, saving the world - saving her - one last time. But dead was still dead.

It didn’t help the way the others looked at her - pitying, sure, but she was positive that behind the pity was Why are you still here? Dawn couldn’t blame them. Sometimes she asked herself the same thing.

“It’s all right.” Anya reached out with the hand that wasn’t still encased in a neon-purple wrist brace, and patted Spike’s shoulder. “We realize that it must be emasculating for you to be sent away with the non-combatants, but - ”

Spike’s scowl was just a hair short of game face. “”m not a sodding non-combatant!” he snarled, leaning over to fiddle with the radio.

The car swerved. Anya hopped up and finger-flicked the back of his head. “Ten and two, Spike!”

Reflexively, Spike swung around and batted back, only to double over in agony as the chip fired. Dawn dropped her soda and grabbed the steering wheel, ice cubes cascading across the floor as the DeSoto slewed across both lanes and leaped the shoulder onto rough ground. The gnarled trunk of a live oak reared up before them, and then Spike’s long fingers covered hers, his lips skinned back in a terrified snarl as he wrestled his pain and the black steel monster of a car into submission. Tires thundered over gravel, a spray of prickly leaves clawed the hood, and with a bump and a jounce they were back on the highway. Spike brought the DeSoto to a halt and sat there, head bowed, shoulders shaking, hands welded to the steering wheel.

“Violence is never the answer,” Anya observed placidly. She sat back and gave the pages of her Modern Bride a crisp snap. “Extremely satisfying, but never the answer.”

Spike growled low in his chest, and one hand left the wheel and crept towards the inside pocket of his duster, where Dawn knew he kept a flask of whiskey. Sweat beaded his brow above the rims of his day-driving goggles - nothing to do with the heat; it was a stress thing for vampires. Halfway there his fingers clenched, and his fist dropped to one knee. Timidly, Dawn laid a hand on his arm, feeling muscle and tendon tense as steel cable to her touch. “Are you OK?” she asked.

“Fine, Bit.” The harshness in his voice was the kind that kept it from shaking. He cast a longing look in the direction of his duster pocket, and then his mouth firmed. “Promised Buffy I’d take care of you, ‘n I will. Whatever it takes.”

Dawn picked a melting ice cube off her shirt as they pulled out onto the highway again. Spike didn’t look OK. He looked exhausted and hung over and scared. And thin. Spike had never been a big guy, but he’d always had a solid sort of leanness to him. Now every ounce of extra weight (and there hadn’t been all that many ounces to begin with) was burnt away, and then some. You could lose yourself in the hollows of his eyes, draw blood on the cathedral arches of his cheekbones.

She’d have to get some pig’s blood to keep around for when he came over, Dawn decided, and make sure he was feeding right. She could tell Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg it was a science project. Still, this was about a million times better than the condition she’d found him in when she’d first braved his crypt a couple of weeks after Buffy’s death.

For the next fifteen minutes they drove in silence. State Route 33 spooled away ahead of them, snaking up into the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The July sun beat down on the dusty green armies of scrub oak and manzanita marching uphill and down alongside the road. Dawn propped her knees up and laid her head against the grease-smudged windowpane, watching the chaparral roll by. That was one of the cool things about driving with Spike: he didn’t care about stuff like sneakers on the dashboard. It was probably the only cool thing about this trip, though. The DeSoto’s air conditioning, if it had ever had any, had given out years ago, and Spike, of course, didn’t need it. If he’d been by himself, he’d have had all the windows rolled up tight, the blacked-out panes protecting him from the sun. But his passengers needed air, especially if he planned on chain-smoking all the way down the Cuyama River.

“I’m bored,” she announced. “We should play a game or something.”

“You can help me pick out bridesmaid’s dresses,” Anya offered. “I’m thinking green.”

A wicked light sparkled in Spike’s eyes, and the barest hint of a grin quirked his lips. “Think Harris would appreciate the traditional burlap and blood larva, myself.”

Dawn shuddered. “Speaking as a potential larva wearer? I vote green.” Obviously a subject change was in order. “I know. Spike could tell us a story.”

Spike raked a hand through his platinum-blond curls - in the last couple of weeks, he’d started touching up his roots again, which was an encouraging sign. “Dunno as I’ve got anything entertaining to hand,” he said.

Dawn was conversant enough in Spike-speak to know that meant, Come on, flatter me into it. “Aw, but you’re so good at it,” she wheedled, batting her eyelashes.

“Laying it on a bit thick, Snack-size,” Spike growled, but it was his good-humored growl this time. “Lessee. I ever tell you about the time Angel and I were trapped in a submarine?”

Dawn slouched down in the cracked black leather seat and slurped at her Sprite till the ice cubes rattled, letting Spike’s voice and the summer heat lull her into a half-doze.

A vampire, an ex-vengeance demon, and the Key to the Universe were driving down the highway… And that was the really annoying thing about all this, Dawn decided. She’d never, ever felt like the Key to the Universe. In the last year she’d discovered that her whole life was a magically-manufactured lie, that she was really some vast cosmic force squished into human form. And that everyone who was anyone, mystically speaking, was out to either destroy or control her. And none of it mattered. She still felt exactly like Dawn Summers, desperately ordinary fourteen-year-old girl.

Ever since she’d found out that her older sister was the Slayer, the Chosen One, the one girl in all the world who’d inherited the mystic strength and skill to fight the demons and vampires of the world, she’d gone to bed every night wishing desperately for something just as special to happen to her. And now, surprise, she was even more special than the Slayer. And Buffy was dead and Mom was dead and Dad wasn’t answering Mr. Giles’s calls, and every single one of those jealous memories was fake, fake, fake, and she knew exactly why Buffy had always complained that being special sucked major ass.

At least Buffy had helped people. All she was good for was to be the key to a door no one wanted to open. And that wasn’t anything she wanted to think about, here in a getaway car driven by a vampire with a behavior-modification chip in his head that meant he couldn’t fight humans without giving himself a migraine, chaperoned by an ex-vengeance demon who still hadn’t completely recovered from the injuries she’d gotten the last time someone had tried to capture the Key.

“…so I decided I’d win Dru’s black heart back, and your Will was just the witch to help me do it…”

Dawn shook herself. Spike had segued out of one tale and into another.

“…made the colossal cock-up of thinking the best way to keep the Slayer off my back was kidnapping her bratty little sis…”

“Hey!” Dawn said, indignant. “I wasn’t bratty! I was… spunky!”

“Worst mistake I ever made,” Spike went on, with a mock-doleful shake of his head. “‘course, I was plastered at the time. Dunno why the experience didn’t put me off the drink for good.” Dawn stuck her tongue out, and he continued with a grin, “What I hadn’t taken into account was, the Slayer might not have been home, but your mum was, and let me tell you, I’d rather the Slayer come at me with a stake than Joyce Summers take the sharp edge of her tongue to me. Gave me a proper hiding, your mum did.” He chuckled reminiscently. “If your sis hadn’t barged in, all huffy and righteous, I give it even odds Joyce could have talked me into heading back to South America then and there.”

“Do you ever think that maybe it didn’t really happen that way?” Anya asked, intrigued. “Maybe all of that was inserted into your memory when the monks created Dawn. I mean, it’s not very plausible, is it? Two years ago, Willow was barely able to make a pencil float, and it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of competent witches in South America. So why would you have decided she was the one to cast the love spell for you? And how likely is it that as notoriously vicious a vampire as William the Bloody would end up drinking hot chocolate and blubbering about his ex-girlfriend to his victims?”

“Didn’t blub,” Spike replied with great dignity. “I was expressing my grief in a restrained n’ manly fashion.” He shrugged and lit another cigarette, with a little smile at Dawn. “Whatever happened before Half-pint here come to us doesn’t signify, does it? ‘Sides, it was bloody good hot chocolate.”

“Mom was always - ” Dawn stopped, hoping Spike would attribute the catch in her voice to a sudden case of Sprite poisoning. “Wait. What’s that?”

Anya leaned over and pressed her nose to the cloudy glass. “What’s what?”

Dawn pointed. “Up there on the shoulder, at the top of that next hill - it’s moving!”

All three of them squinted out into the bright afternoon. The shadows were still crawling out from beneath the rocks and bushes where they’d hidden from the noon sun, but on the next rise limped a shadow torn free of its moorings. The scarecrow figure took a swaying step out onto the asphalt, waving its ragged arms in some arcane semaphore. Spike immediately applied foot to accelerator.

“Wait!” Dawn shrieked, as the DeSoto roared past the hitchhiker. “Stop! That’s a person!”

“Right,” said Spike. “An’ coincidentally enough, people are exactly what we’re trying to avoid at the moment.”

“But he’s hurt!”

“He looks hurt,” Anya pointed out. “But is he? It could be a trap. If any of the Knights who were here last spring bothered to phone home to headquarters before Glory slaughtered them, the rest of the order probably has dossiers on all of us. The Lower Beings know Spike’s car’s not exactly inconspicuous, not to mention Spike.”

It made sense - and yet… Dawn’s shoulders hunched mutinously. Was she going to let this Key business turn her into a hermit? Someone afraid to risk talking to any random stranger because they might be a member of some wackazoid Key-stealing cult? She was gripped with the sudden conviction that unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life holed up behind tinfoil windows, ordering all her food and clothes over the internet, they absolutely had to stop the car. “And what if it’s not a trap?” she demanded. “This is practically the middle of the desert. He could die if we leave him here.”

The complete disinterest in Spike’s face was… well, inhuman. “So?”

Vampires just didn’t get this stuff, she reminded herself. She wished she could see Spike’s eyes behind the insectile lenses of his goggles. “Look, if you do good things for people, they’ll do good things for you.” Honesty compelled her to add, “Sometimes.”

“That so?” Spike cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Question is, then, what could that bloke possibly do for me that’s worth riskin’ your life if it is a trap? Not a lot.”

“Maybe he’s a brilliant brain surgeon who could take your chip out so - never mind, he totally isn’t.” Dawn played her trump card. “It’s what Buffy would do.”

For a second she thought it wasn’t going to work. Then, “Bugger,” the vampire muttered, hit the brakes, and punched the car into reverse.

They rolled to a stop about fifty feet from the hitchhiker, who’d collapsed into a desolate heap of rags on the side of the road when they’d driven past. The man, whoever he was, scrambled to his feet again and broke into a lop-sided run, gesturing wildly. The dusty rags of his clothing fluttered wildly in the breeze. He was brown-haired and nondescript, younger than Dawn had thought at first - it was his clothes, and the ragged growth of beard he was sporting, that made him look older.

Spike watched his approach in the rear-view mirror. “Right, we’re stopped,” he said. “Now you want to tell me who’s going to hop out and talk to the violent lunatic - the fourteen-year-old girl, the bird with the broken wrist, or the bloke who bursts into flame?”

Dawn bit her lip and frowned, unease overtaking her burst of altruism. Something about the hitchhiker’s face was awfully familiar. The man was banging a fist on Spike’s window now, and Dawn could see his lank hair swinging over a very familiar forehead tattoo - the sigil of the Knights of Byzantium. “Turnabout, turnabout!” he croaked. “Carry the lass who’s born to be king!”

Dawn’s belly went cold. Behind the scruffy beard… “I know him,” she whispered. “He’s one of those crazy guys from the hospital. The one I tried to talk to first, last winter, back when I was trying to find out what it meant, being the Key.” It had never occurred to her to wonder what had happened to all the people Glory had brainsucked - they’d just seemed to disappear after Glory died. “What do you want?” she said, voice quavering.

“Green girl, shining girl, so beautiful - mine eyes have seen the Glory,” the man whispered earnestly, drawing aside his rags to reveal an ugly red scar across his belly. “And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men! Et tu, Brute?” He eyed Spike, and bared yellowing teeth in a sudden mad grin. “He hath a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.”

“Too right,” Spike growled. “So you’d best be on your way, and we’ll be on ours.”

The man slammed his fist down on the hood of the car with a frustrated howl. “My way your way wrong way wrong wrong wrong! Full fathom five my father lies, into the cradle endlessly rocking!”

“Bugger this for a game of soldiers.” Spike revved the engine, and the man leaped back with a little yelp. “He’s barmier than Dru.”

“Can’t you figure out what he means?” asked Dawn. “It seems awfully important.”

Spike shook his head. “He’s just rabbiting on about the ocean.”

The man’s face lit up. “It is an Ancient Mariner - ”

“‘He stoppeth one in three,’ yeh, yeh, I know,” Spike interrupted. “Look, mate, if - ” he stopped abruptly, eyes going wide as the crazy quilt of literary references clicked together into something that apparently made sense to him. “Oh, bloody hell.”

“What? What?” Dawn shrieked. The ragged man was pounding on the door again, fear distorting his drawn face. “Spike, we have to let him in! He’s been hurt, maybe someone’s still after him - ”

Spike was already slamming on the gas, cursing a blue streak. “Not him, you bog-ignorant chit! You! He’s trying to warn us - ” One look at her adamant face and he braked again. “Anya, open the fucking door! Get in, you cheese-brained berk!”

Anya scooted over, forgoing the color commentary for a grimace of distaste, and the ragged man broke into an elated grin. “Backwards, turn backwards, and a star to steer her by!” he cried.

But he was only halfway into the back seat when Dawn saw the riders crest the hill in front of them. Men on horseback, their foreheads tattooed with the same mark that their hitchhiker bore, and wearing the black surcoats of the Order of Byzantium. The ragged man saw them too, and gave a wordless wail of defeat and anguish. The mounted troop galloped through the brush on either side of the highway, flinging handfuls of glittering metal at the road as they swept past the car. The rear door slammed behind their new passenger, and the DeSoto swung around with a roar, only to lurch to an explosive halt as both front tires blew out on the scattered caltrops.

Half a dozen knights leaped from their horses and rushed the car, wrenching the passenger-side door open. Gloved hands grabbed Dawn’s shoulders, dragging her out of the car. No, oh no, it’s all happening again! “Let me go!” she hollered, kicking and squirming. In the back seat, Anya was thwapping anyone who came near with her bridal magazine, and the ragged man was striking out with blind, hopeless fury. Dawn sank her teeth into the nearest thumb and was rewarded with a yell of pain.

Spike shrugged his duster over his head and lunged across the front seat with a roar of his own, grabbing her ankles. He flinched as full sunlight slapped him across the face, then bared his teeth and held on. For a moment the whole bizarre tug-of-war teetered in precarious balance, one vampire against six men, and then fire licked along the backs of Spike’s exposed hands. Blue flame leaped up on each separate knuckle and tendon, charring the already-scorched flesh and spreading upwards along thin, steely wrists towards the straining curve of his shoulders.

“No!” Dawn screamed. “Don’t you die! Don’t - ”

He wasn’t letting go. He wasn’t letting go! Sheer panic drove Dawn’s heel into Spike’s face. The unexpected boot to the head broke his grip where the pain of fire hadn’t, and Spike, still aflame, tumbled backwards into the dark interior of the car. She caught one last glimpse of his pale, stricken face as they hauled her away. She’d seen that look in his eyes just before he’d toppled from Glory’s tower, on the night when he’d almost saved her, almost saved Buffy. It was a million times worse now.

The ragged man was already sprawled face-down and moaning in the scrub, while more knights pulled a very uncooperative Anya from the back seat. Dawn twisted wildly in the knights’ grasp, trying to see if Spike had gotten back into the car safely, but all she could see was the faces of her captors, and above them, the gnarled branches of live oaks, reaching up into a blue, blue sky. The knights threw her down, pinning her spread-eagled to the ground. Rocks dug into her shoulder blades, and every thorn and twig on the West Coast was trying to work its way into her clothes.

“We have Orlando, General!” someone shouted.

“You traitorous bastard!” a second voice snarled. There was the meaty thud of boot connecting with ribcage, hard. “You almost lost us the Key!”

An older man with a grey-streaked goatee and more elaborate forehead tattoos strode up, leading his lathered horse behind him. “Hold, Dagobert! Our brother cannot be held responsible for his actions. You know this. And he has been an invaluable aid in bringing us this far.” He shot Dawn a look of weary disgust, like she was some icky but necessary household task he had to complete - taking out the garbage, or cleaning the toilets. “Did you think we would simply give up?” he said. “We are Byzantium. Kill one, and we send a hundred. Kill a hundred, and we send a thousand.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Dawn spat.

“No?” Goatee’s eyes were flinty. “But how many have died for your sake?” He waved at the nearest of his men. “Dagobert, Neville, search the vehicle and dispose of the demon. Brother Maynard, take charge of Orlando, if you will. And Alauno… bring the knife.”

A knight with a shaggy blond mustache clapped a fist to his chest and trotted off, while two more headed back towards the DeSoto. A cleric in black robes took the arm of the man in rags - Orlando, then - and drew him to his feet. “No!” Orlando cried, as Maynard led him away, out of Dawn’s line of sight. “The great work has yet to be completed! The shining ones are coming, the harriers of Heaven!” he shouted back at her. “The Key is the link, the link must be restored!”

“General Aethelred,” the taller of the two knights who’d gone to inspect the car said, “The demon is gone. This is all that was left.” He held out one gloved palm to display a small heap of grey ash. If Dawn’s heart had faltered before, it stopped now. Curiously, she didn’t scream or cry or even feel sad. It was almost like she’d stepped outside herself, leaving the fear and sorrow behind, because right now, she just couldn’t deal with it. Mom, Buffy, Spike… she’d hit overload.

The knight turned his hand over, and ashes drifted down, sprinkling the front of her shirt with grey-white flecks that…

That smelled an awful lot like the contents of the DeSoto’s ash tray.

She was pretty certain her heart hadn’t really stopped beating, but it sure felt like it had just started again. She was the Slayer’s sister, and she’d seen a lot of vampire ash in the last few years. It was gritty and grey-brown, not flaky and grey-white, and it sure as heck didn’t smell like the butt-end of an unfiltered Marlboro. Something had happened in that car, something other than Spike burning to death. But even if he was still in one piece, the sun was still high, and Spike still had a chip in his head. He wasn’t going to leap to the rescue, at least not right this minute.

Somewhat to her surprise, she found herself talking. “You know Glory’s dead,” she said. “My sister killed her. So she can’t use me to open all the other worlds into this one any longer. It’s all over. You don’t need to be doing any of this.”

General Aethelred stared down at her for a long moment. “Before we lost contact with General Gregor in the spring, he informed us that those accursed monks had made the Key flesh. You engendered in him grave doubts - he did not join the Order to slaughter children. He spoke of it as a test of his devotion.” He sighed. “I regret this, girl, more than I can say. But while the Beast is indeed dead, there can be no assurance that another will not rise in her place some day, when once more the stars wheel round to the proper configuration. Another who will complete the task at which she failed. I regret that you must die. But die you must.”

Alauno returned, sweating, and handed over a dagger with a short, triangular blade - similar to the athame Dawn had seen Willow and Tara use for some spells, but slimmer and more deadly-looking. Aethelred took it, clasping the leather-wrapped hilt in both hands. He looked briefly upwards as if in prayer, and -

“WAIT!”

The knights turned. “You’re planning on cutting her throat, aren’t you?” Anya continued, as if she were discussing whether she wanted brie or Camembert to accompany dinner. “You’re forgetting something very important.”

Aethelred glared for a moment. “Bring the woman here,” he said at last, and a pair of knights frog-marched the rumpled but unfazed Anya through the brush to face him. “And what, pray tell, escapes us?”

“Just this,” she said. “Glory’s dead, yes. But before she died, she shed Dawn’s blood, at the proper place and the proper time. The doors of the universe were opened. I’m sure your adepts sensed something rotten in the State of California about then.”

Aethelred glanced at Brother Maynard, who nodded. “And?”

“And those same doors were closed again, by her sister’s blood. Neat trick, exploiting the laws of similarity like that. But the universe, in my experience, doesn’t like having neat tricks played on it.” Anya tossed her hair and smiled, and it wasn’t a very nice smile. “If you shed the blood of the true Key here and now, so soon after and close to the Hellmouth… well, I don’t know about you, but personally? I’d rather be very far away when you try it.”

“And who are you? What qualifies you to speak of such things?” Dagobert demanded.

Anya straightened, and all of a sudden her eyes were as ancient and unyielding as the stone of distant mountains. “Who am I? I’m Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkens soon-to-be-Harris, who was Anyanka of Arashmahaar, born Aud of Sjornjost. I was cursing men with suppurating boils when your Order was a gleam in some out-of-work Templar’s eye, and I’ve prudently run away from more apocalypses than you have hairs in your chinny-chin-chin, so if I were you? I’d listen to me. And set us both free with abject apologies, and possibly chocolate.”

Go Anya. Dawn held her breath. Athelred’s frown screwed his forehead tattoo into grotesque inky patterns. “Is this true?” he asked Brother Maynard.

The cleric spread his hands and made a small distressed tch. “It’s not an impossible scenario. We would have to make greater study of the local aether to determine if it’s truly the case.” He looked unhappy. “I should prefer that someone with a more thorough grounding in aetheric disturbances - Brother Edric, perhaps, or Brother Selwin - conduct any such investigation. It is not my field of expertise.”

Aethelred’s face was red from more than the heat, but after a moment he gave a short nod. “Very well. Maynard, send a summons to the chapterhouse and bid Edric attend us with all speed. Until then,” he shot a sour look at Anya, “you are our guests.” He waved. “Bring the horses. We shall return to camp.”

To Be Continued…

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.