Chapter Text
“I still don't see why I have to come.”
Buffy sighed, not for the first time that night and almost certainly not the last. “I told you, Anya and Giles need all the help they can get for Black Friday and Anya specifically told me to bring you.”
“But why me? I can guarantee I'm not gonna be as helpful as she's expecting. Let's just skip, I bet the Bronze is still open.”
Tara spoke up, looking slightly amused: “Spike, I d-don’t think the Bronze opens on Black Friday. Besides, we're already h-here.”
This was a good point. As Spike was doing his best to formulate a counterpoint, Anya caught his eye through the window and gestured for him to come inside.
“Fuck.”
Tara snorted. “Baby.”
The three of them went inside with varying degrees of reluctance. Anya grabbed Buffy’s shoulders. “Thank goodness you're here! Tara, go work the cash register for a minute, ok? Buffy and Spike, you can start by going down to the basement to get the bulk lemongrass. It's on the bottom shelf on the right, you can't miss it, go go go!”
The basement was a disaster. One of the shelves had apparently been knocked over by someone rushing to get something, and its contents were spilled all over the floor. Ingredients were mixed together in unsortable piles, and it was impossible to tell what anything was.
Spike took one look at the mess and turned right around to call up to Anya, “The basement’s buggered, we won’t be able to find shit!”
Anya called right back: “Then clean it up! What do you think we’re not paying you for?”
Spike groaned. Tara had followed them down, clearly glad for the excuse not to do customer service. She had already begun picking at the piles, taking out things that were sealed and placing them in neat rows on the floor.
Buffy kicked the wall. “This sucks. I could be doing so many other things right now, but apparently I’m clean-up girl?”
“A-at least you don’t have to g-go back upstairs f-for a minute?”
Spike ruffled halfheartedly through the rubble, coming up with an old-looking wooden puzzle box. He looked at it with some interest. “Hey, what d’you think this is?”
Buffy glanced over. “Probably just a toy or something. Put it on the shelf.” Spike ignored her and started fiddling with it, twisting it back and forth like a Rubik’s cube. “C’mon, Spike, if we’re gonna get this done within the century we have to focus!”
Spike held up a finger. “Just a second, almost got it…” He moved the last segment into place with a satisfied huff. “There. Now where’s this supposed to -- uh. Fuck.”
The box had begun emanating a cool orange light. Spike tried to drop it, but it hovered in place, spinning slowly on an axis, then gaining speed.
“Fuck, fuck, Glinda, little help here?”
Tara ran over to help, but tripped on a random piece of magical paraphernalia and fell to the ground, scraping her legs. The box spun faster and faster. Spike tried to grab it, to un-solve it, but it was moving too fast and he only managed to cut up his hands.
“Fuck! Slayer, quick, can you -- aahh!” The cube was spinning so fast it was barely recognizable as a cube anymore, now just a midair blur. Its momentum pulled everything around it into an orbit, and Spike found himself flying in circles around the cube, closer and closer until he was practically touching it and then it was cutting his shirt into ribbons and then it was in him, or he was in it, and he got this horrible feeling like it was learning him and then --
pop!
Spike landed on stone.
Clean, slightly damp.
Definitely not the basement of the Magic Box.
He picked himself up, wincing at his bloody palms and chest.
He was in a cold, empty room, all the walls and floor made of stone. There were three hallways leading in different directions, seeming to lead only to more stone rooms.
There was a surreal whirring sound and then a couple more tiny pops, and then Buffy and Tara were in the room too. Tara was hyperventilating a little bit, but Buffy just seemed annoyed, and yeah, okay, he had to respect that.
“Seriously! I think I’m cursed. Tara, is there a curse that makes someone physically unable to have a single normal day, because every time it seems like something normal is going to happen, something fucking weird happens instead? Is that a thing?”
“Guess not, luv. Keeps things interesting, though, right?”
Buffy sighed. “I don't want interesting, though. I want… oh, whatever. Let's just figure out how to get out of here, and then tell Anya we found a teleporter thingy in the basement and we’re going home. Tara, any idea what’s going on here?”
Tara flushed. “I d-don’t know. It s-seems like the s-same d-dimension but I don’t think w-we’re near the s-shop or anything. My g-guess would be a p-pocket dimension. But I'm not s-sure, I'm s-sorry.”
“So we're gonna have to battle loose tissues and pocket lint?”
Spike smiled, despite himself -- it warmed something in his empty chest, seeing Buffy do her best to keep tensions low. Such a caretaker, that one. If only she turned some of that energy to herself every once in a while…
It worked, anyway, Tara cracked a tiny smile. “No, a p-pocket dimension like a tiny little mini d-dimension inside of ours. The spell is pretty s-simple, so it’s hard to say who or w-what might have done it, but the good news is that all we have to do is f-find whatever the power source is and b-break it. It could l-look like anything though.”
“So we just have to go around breaking things until something works? Step aside, I was born for this job.”
This time Tara laughed, and Buffy smiled back, and Spike wanted to watch them be happy forever and he wanted to do something horrible and sudden to make his chest stop itching.
Instead, he pushed off the ground and cleared his throat. “Right! Start looking around for suspicious shit?”
Buffy nodded. “I'll take the forward path, okay? Tara, you go right, and Spike, you can --”
“A-actually, I think we should stick together. It might be s-small dimension-wise, but who knows how b-big this place actually is, right? I don’t want anyone to g-get lost.”
An image drifted into Spike’s mind, of wandering alone in cold stone halls for the rest of his unlife, calling for Buffy and Tara and unable to escape or even properly die, and he shuddered. “I gotta agree, Glinda. So, right first, then?”
Buffy shoved past him and stomped towards the left path. After a few seconds, she turned around. “Coming?”
Spike smirked at Tara. “Always the contrarian, that one.”
They took the left path.
A little ways down the path, a small archway was cut into the wall, revealing a tiny room, barely bigger than an elevator. Spike ducked his head in and grinned. “Jackpot, ladies and gents.” The room was nearly empty, save for a stone tree stump in the middle that seemed to be growing out of the ground. On the tree stump was a fist-sized vase, of the expensive and very breakable-looking sort.
Spike put his back to the wall and gestured grandly for the others to enter the room. “Either of you wanna do the honors?”
Tara frowned. “I’m not sure that’s the p-power source. It doesn’t f-feel right.”
“Hey, worst case scenario, we get to break something, and that’s a net positive where I’m concerned.” Spike grabbed the vase and handed it to Buffy.
Buffy shrugged, hefted it over her head, and flung it dramatically to the ground.
Nothing happened.
They waited. There were shards of porcelain on the floor. One of them had somehow flown into Spike’s arm, and he pulled it out, fidgeting absentmindedly with it as nothing continued to happen.
Eventually Spike got bored first -- he’d never been very good at waiting. He turned to go, and Buffy and Tara followed, but just as Spike put his foot across the threshold, there was an angry hissing sound.
Buffy groaned. “If I turn around and there’s an eldritch behemoth rising up out of the vase shards, speaking with the sounds of a thousand desperate screams and furious at us for disturbing its rest, I’m gonna punch you in your stupid face.”
They turned around.
“Ow,” said Spike.
“A tHouSAnD CurSES UPoN yOu And yoUr kIN,” said the eldritch behemoth rising up out of the vase shards.