Are You Busy Tonight? (The Nothing To Do Remix)
I felt the magic drain away like so much dirty bathwater, and I just knew that Ripper and his children had done something regrettable.
Then the alarms started sounding.
The tin soldiers didn't get it, of course. They ran around looking in all the cells, simply unable to comprehend how so many of their lab rats had "escaped" at once. But when they went out on patrol after patrol and didn't find a single vampire... then they started listening to me.
I wasn't the only experiment left. I was the only one sane, but I wasn't the only one alive. But they listened. For a while.
It took months for them to realise that I was no longer any use to them - longer still for them to work out that they were holding a foreign national from a friendly country without anything resembling cause or, perhaps, internationally agreed decent treatment for any human being.
Without magic, I suppose I'm just like all the rest of them. Older: the first time I looked in a mirror I thought there was a glamour on it. Poorer: my investments suffered without my personal attention, and we mustn't forget the way half my money was tied up in genuine underworld dealings. Not necessarily wiser.
I went to Sunnydale, first. Of course, it was too much to hope that Ripper would still be there, that I would be able to trace him and catch up with him and... I don't know what I had planned to do. But he was all that I had. All that was left. Even his children, the youngsters for whom he was in loco parentis... all of them dead or demented. I saw the boy, the one that wanted... well, he had been close enough to normal that he survived, but he couldn't tell me what had happened.
It was easy enough to work it out, of course. I knew the little witch would have power one day, but to do what she did, she must have been more powerful than the wizards of legend. She pulled it out from deep within my body. She ripped all the power out of the world. All the potential of the Slayers, all the vampires, the demons, the magic. I don't know why, but I would assume it was a fight they couldn't win any other way.
They should have lost. There's the battle, and then there's the war.
She ruined me.
It wasn't too hard to find out what happened to the Slayer herself, of course. Her grave sat proud and firm, though I didn't see anything for her sister - but then, the child was impossible, wasn't she? Still, blondie left baffling hospital records, hours spent dying from a multitude of wounds that appeared even as she lay in her hospital bed... I almost felt sorry for Rupert.
Then the book hit the shelves and the sales went through the roof.
I read the book, of course. He always could sell a tall tale. Much more believably than I could, at any rate, and we made use of that more than once. In print, he is the man his father wanted him to be. The Slayer is a paragon of virtue, her friends comedic and heroic by turn, her enemies deadly and fearsome but ultimately defeated.
It was never like that. It was real. They were real.
He was real.
That was all I wanted to do. Remind him that it all really did happen. What did he think he was doing all those years, after all? Working in a library somewhere, dusting the shelves?
Pretending not to know me was a dirty trick. I saw the look in his eyes when he realised, and he knew. He remembered how we used to be. There was a spark of Ripper in the leather jacket hanging over his chair, in the gleam in his eye as he spied a pretty girl, in the way he didn't even have to try to impose his presence on the room. And he denied it. He denied all of it.
But I suppose he's lost everything that mattered to him anyway. His Slayer is dead. His learning is useless. His life might as well be over.
So he just let it go. And me with it.
I can't believe he denied me! Deny me thrice, will you, old friend? Though I'm the old one, now. I'm practically decrepit. But at least I remember. At least I know that the magic was real.
At least I have that much.