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Unbidden the Day
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Part IV
I’ve watched and re-watched Groundhog Day until there’s no need to watch it again; every moment is set into my memory, every shift of expression, every word and breath and intonation, every note and resonation of music, every detail of costume, each and every play of light and lighting. I started watching in hope of some kind of inspiration, to see if it would give me any idea at all as to what had happened and what I might do about it. I kept watching because there was no explanation, none, Phil Connors found himself outside the trap without ever knowing what had caused it, and something about that gave me hope even though I’m not really sure why.
One thing that did bother me, though: why did Phil kill himself so many times, and never kill anyone else?
Because it’s tempting sometimes, let me tell you. Go on a bloody rampage, see how many I could take out in just seventeen hours … why not? It’s not like it would matter, not like it would mean anything. Finish the day, and they’re all right back, never knowing: no harm, no foul, right?
Of course, with my luck, the universe would decide that was the release switch, would finally let the world start turning normally again but with lots of nice gory dead bodies and me to deal with the consequences. Still, that wasn’t what stopped me. Ultimately, I backed away because I’m scared of what it would do to me. Something tells me, Don’t get used to killing people unless that’s what you want to keep doing. It isn’t what I want to keep doing, no thanks, so probably a good idea not to start.
Because blowing off tension by engaging in questionably-consensual sex with multiple partners is SO much healthier.
Except, yeah, it really is.
Okay, back on track. One place the movie definitely veered away from my situation: physical skills. Think about it, you increase strength by tearing down muscle and letting it get built back even stronger (not gonna happen with me), you hone coordination by establishing new neural pathways with repetition (also not happening, not when I get set back to zero every seventeen hours). Regular memory is one thing, even without the chemical-neural basis of long-term memory storage, I can hold onto increasing amounts of knowledge — which is another way I know that my situation is bound up at least as much in magic as in physics — but ‘muscle’memory, just not possible. Same basic principle for magic, once you get past a certain point you can’t accumulate any further magical ‘mass’ without layering it onto what’s there already, and starting over fresh kept putting me back to nothing being there already.
So, I dealt with both problems by learning how to wrap up what I needed, and store it. The original idea, believe it or not, came from a fortune-teller who called herself Madame Tiphaine and claimed … and, even more unexpectedly, turned out to actually have … half-demon ancestry. It took me forever to work out how to do it, but it was worth the effort (and the time didn’t matter, obviously I’ve got time out the wazoo). Store it where? Well, there was only one place, really: the ‘wall’ itself, the Wall I hit every day at just over seventeen hours. I can’t really feel it, but eventually I got to where I could feel myself getting closer to it, and after endless experimentation I finally found ways of attaching what I wanted to keep (deeper memory, acquired physical skills, accumulated mystical potential and spell-forms) to the barrier that always throws me back. It was then, and not until then, that I really started to pick up momentum.
The original paragon spell would have simply made me the best at everything, essentially because it said I was. In the current approach, if I want to excel at something, I just keep working at my chosen subject until, with eternal repetition and magical augmentation, I actually am the best. Attaching all this knowledge, all these skills, all that accrued power to the Wall means it can’t be lost, it’s always there for me to access and, if necessary, increase. (That might also mean I’ll lose it all if I ever manage to break the barrier … but, honestly, I wouldn’t care, just as long as I’m out.)
I’m a better fighter now than Buffy. I have more occult knowledge than Giles. I can use magic more skillfully than Willow, Tara, or Amy, and can call on more power than all of them combined. I can surpass them, command them, seduce them, dominate and lead them.
I just can’t beat Glory. Can’t stop the coming apocalypse before its back-wave somehow hits my first attempt at the paragon spell, and kicks me back into this endless repeating loop. With all I can do, I can’t do that.
Yet.
* * *
Willow felt small, and cold, and afraid. Helpless, powerless, defenseless … lots of less-es, actually. What she didn’t feel was hopeless. Hope soared within her, because it was impossible to see, and hear, and not believe.
Most magic users called on their own power, and tried to strengthen or increase it. Others borrowed or channeled power from elsewhere, accessing it without ever actually incorporating it. A very few found ways to collect power, to acquire it from various sources and seal it into a central and growing repository within themselves. Willow had, at various times, followed all three routes, working to find the optimum balance among them.
It had never occurred to her that it was possible to become power. But she was seeing it now.
Veronique Solange Desjardins was everything Willow Rosenberg would never be: tall, beautiful, self-assured, commanding, and effortless mistress of every form of magic a human could possibly control plus a few that should have required demon heritage. The coming of the Beast was long foreseen, she had explained to them. My mother, and her mother and their mothers’ mothers, knew this day would come, and worked without ceasing in order to prepare for it. I am what they prepared.
Her voice had carried the ring of authority, as did everything else about her. Nearly six feet tall, regally slender, dressed in shimmering silks; her hair was mahogany shot through with silver, and her eyes had seemed to change hue with every tilt of her head and shift of light, until Willow had at last decided that they were responding to the movement of magical currents within the woman herself. Her voice was clear, mellow, perfect, the kind of voice you would expect to hear from Galadriel or Athena. She was, in every way, in every sense of the word, overwhelming.
Your valiant service has preserved the earth to this day, she had told them. It can do no more. All your power, all your courage, all your will cannot defeat this foe. Then, her smile stern and thrilling: Not alone. If you but add it to mine, however, the Beast will fall.
It was asking a lot to trust this much to a stranger, after all they had been through together. Yet, in the end, trust her they had. With their consent, Veronique had siphoned all the mystical force from Willow, Tara, Giles. She had restored Amy to human form, then taken her energy as well. She had drawn the Slayer essence from Buffy, and the last tiny resonant remnant of demonhood from Anya, and … something, from Xander. Stopping finally at Dawn, she had shaken her head and smiled sadly. You I cannot touch, World Shatterer. You are the most potent vessel of all, but not for my hands. Rest and be safe.
For the purpose, they had all gathered in a meadow at the edge of Breaker’s Woods, secluded from anyone who might be harmed in the coming conflict. Now Veronique stepped away from them and, as they watched, sketched patterns of fire on the grass of the meadow with deft, sure gestures and focused will. Her chant was pure and clear and completely unintelligible, not as of a tongue unknown but as if human ears simply could not recognize the sounds being made. The patterns flared and etched themselves into the earth, there was a crescendo of wind and a single crack of thunder … and abruptly Glory was there before them, blinking surprise with her mouth open as the fires banked and died.
An indescribable shift in the tempo and timbre of the chant, and bands of light appeared around Glory. As the demon female gasped, “What the f–…?”, Veronique splayed her fingers in front of herself and then drew her hands apart, and Glory yelped as the light-bands tightened around her and began to separate as well.
At first Willow thought Glory was being torn apart … but then, blinking to make out details through the light, she saw that something else was happening. Glory was being … sifted, somehow, strained away from something else, another form whose screams of pain drowned out Glory’s howls of fury. The form was too vague, too insubstantial, too blurred by the light; but, as the separation increased, detail sharpened, and the second shape was revealed as a tall, rather handsome young man who seemed somehow familiar, and Buffy and Dawn blurted, “Ben?!!” simultaneously, and Willow thought dizzily, It’s like with Toth, Veronique did just like the ferula gemina was supposed to do to Buffy, separated Glory from some human alter-ego … a male alter-ego, and how does that work exactly —?
Veronique clenched one hand with an inchoate shout, and the young man’s — Ben’s? — screams were cut short; he clutched at his throat, unable to speak, his face darkened, and he dropped where he stood, and with one final shriek Glory collapsed as well.
And suddenly, it was very, very quiet.
Buffy took a hesitant step forward, Giles an instant behind her; yet he went to Glory, while she knelt beside the young man she had called Ben. “He’s dead,” she said faintly after a moment. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“Glory —” Giles cleared his throat. “Glory seems to be … deceased also. At least, so much as one can be certain in a case like this.” His eyes went to Ben. “I suppose they must have been, been connected somehow.”
“I did it,” Veronique said, and they all stared at her, for her voice was suddenly different: not just the absence of the lilting trace of French accent, but the voice itself. “I don’t believe this — I did it!” She grinned at her gaping audience. “You don’t know why, you couldn’t know why, but trust me, folks: it’s party time!”
And then, still grinning maniacally, Veronique Solange Desjardins clapped her hands together and vanished.
* * *
And, six and a half hours later, while I was dancing at the Bronze with a mug of Heinekin in either hand, I hit the Wall again, and bounced again, and the whole thing started all over again.
Oh, God.
* * *
I kill her four times more, just to be sure, and then I take off for awhile. Rio, New Orleans, Aruba, Cozumel, up and down the Riviera. Spend all day getting drunk or getting laid or both, then do it all over again the next day (the same day), and on and on and on. Keep at it for … I don’t know, a month, maybe. Or maybe a year. What the hell, I’m not destroying any brain cells — I wish! — or wasting any time I won’t get back ad infinitum.
I always start out back in Sunnydale, though, and always dead sober, and after the thirtieth or eightieth or four hundredth time of asking myself Where do I go today?, I stop being able to deny that there’s just no point to it. If killing Glory doesn’t work, neither does running away. So … now what?
That’s the question I put to Jonathan, except this time I look him up in late morning instead of catching him at the Bronze in the evening. After the inevitable period spent bringing him up to speed, he gives the matter some thought. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “Except … well, are you sure it’s even about you?”
“It has to be about me,” I point out to him. “Even if it didn’t start with me, I’m the only one even aware of what’s happening, so it’s up to me to make whatever difference there is to be made.”
“I thought like that once,” Jonathan observes carefully. “Turned out I was wrong. I mean, sure, my situation was tailor-made — the problem I was facing was one I’d created myself, so it really was all about me — but even so, Buffy was the one who worked it out, and it was her who made the difference in the end.”
What he’s suggesting is something I can’t do, though I’m not willing to tell him why. I don’t know how to deal with those people as an equal. By the time I’d learned enough to realize how much they amounted to, I’d got so used to doing everything for myself — with others as tools rather than as genuine allies — that I wound up treating them the same. Part of me, even knowing better, thinks of them as puppets rather than as people; another part is so conscious of how I’ve used them (as cannon fodder, as spear carriers, as sex toys) that I’m genuinely reluctant to face them as individuals. “Honestly, Jonathan, by now I’m so far beyond them, I can’t see what they might possibly have to offer me.”
He looks troubled at that. “But you talk to me,” he says.
“Jonathan, I … I like you. You knew me When, back in the days we were both SHS Nobodies. And talking to you helps me think.”
I can see that what I said has meaning for him, both the words and the tone. He draws a breath, sets his shoulders, and locks his gaze with mine. “If you’re asking my advice, that’s it. Anything happening in Sunnydale, Buffy is who I’d talk to.”
He’s right, especially when I’ve already tried every other single thing I can think of. It’s hard, though. The way I’ve treated them all —
No. Not all.
It’s ridiculously easy to catch her between classes; I know every moment of their schedules for today, all of them, and I mastered teleportation long ago. The glamour that allows me to show them whatever guise I choose is a thousand times simpler, and by now almost as automatic as breathing; the only tricky part is the selection. I want her to listen, but I don’t want to awe or overwhelm her; I need her engaged, I need her interested, I need her to give me the benefit of her intuition and imagination. So, not one of the foreign personae, nothing so exotic as to distract her, or so forceful as to inhibit her natural responses. Someone who can prompt sympathy, interest, I don’t need her trust so much as I need her to take me seriously. So which —?
Huh.
Well, it’s worth a shot.
“Tara?” I say. She stops, looking my way, and I step forward. “My name is Nancy. Nancy Doyle. I was … I was hoping we could talk.”
* * *
I don’t tell her all of it. After God only knows how many iterations, I wouldn’t have time to tell it all. But I sketch out the basics, and I answer some questions, and I do a few power demonstrations to show that there’s actual substance behind what I’m saying. She takes her time thinking about it once I’m done, her eyes never leaving mine. She’s always been so quiet, so willing to stay in the background, it’s been easy to underestimate her, but now I’m feeling the weight of that deep, silent assessment. “We need to take this to the others,” she says at last. “To G-Giles, and Willow.”
“I can’t,” I tell her. “I’ve … I’ve gotten them killed, so many times, I can’t face them now.” Which carries some of the underlying flavor of the truth, without including any of the truth part of the truth. “I just — for whatever reason, you’re the one I can talk to, so here I am.”
She nods, and is quiet again for another good while before speaking again. “I think that … maybe you need a different perspective,” she tells me.
“I’ve gone at this every way I can think of,” I point out. “That’s why I’m here, because I ran dry and it still wasn’t enough. You’re supposed to be a different perspective.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she cautions. “It’s … You’re caught up in the middle of this, and you’ve tried so hard, I can just see how someone in your position could get … tunnel vision. If — … okay, this is just an example: if someone told you there was a mystical symbol drawn out somewhere that held the answer, you might look all over the world without ever thinking to check if it was drawn on the back of your head. Or to ask yourself if the symbol might … might be the DNA structure, or the Fibonacci sequence, something you already knew about but weren’t looking for. Do you see what I mean?”
I do, but I can’t see how it’s supposed to help. Open out the possibilities to include anything and everything, and that’s just another way of saying I have no earthly idea. I want to spit out something savage, biting, but following my impulses hasn’t really accomplished much. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t tell me where to look.”
She sighs. “I know. Okay: you’ve searched for the answer, and haven’t found it. Maybe you should just … just sit for awhile, and see if the answer comes looking for you.”
“I’ve tried crazier stuff.” I stand up, because I can tell Tara has said all she could think to say. Who knows, it might lead to something; at worst, it’ll leave me no more stumped than I already am. I’m about to turn and leave when something stops me, at least for a moment. “You’re special,” I tell her. “You know that, right?”
She looks surprised, and not necessarily encouraged. “Special? How?”
I chuckle. “I can’t tell you, because it’s embarrassing.” Because you’re the only one I couldn’t suborn into sleeping with me. “But take it from somebody who knows, okay?”
She nods, still uncertain, and I leave her.
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