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Spike knocks Angel off of her with a growl that echoes around their tiny room.
Still yellow-eyed and lumpy-faced, Angel backs up as far as he can, which is about two Angel steps or maybe three-and-a-half Buffy steps, until he collides with the rough rock wall. By either measurement, it’s not very far, but it does the trick and Buffy’s throat wound bleeds freely into her jacket collar instead of into Angel’s mouth.
She thinks Spike says something chock full (What is a chock? Maybe it’s chalk full) of language that would disappoint her mother with just a little dash of possessiveness that they so need to talk about but everything goes all Charlie Brown trumpets for a minute and she can’t quite make it out.
Buffy spends a little while floating. Her body and her bleeding neck and her gored right arm kinda dissolves into static and the stone floor below her turns into a nice little cloud for her to sink into.
A cloud with substance.
Maybe it’s just a jacuzzi, actually.
Whatever it is, it’s a nice break from the unending labyrinth they’ve been stuck Spinal Tap-ing their way through for the past week.
When she comes back to her body, Spike and Angel are still arguing, so she could have been gone anywhere from a heartbeat to three days. Heartbeat’s probably closer, though, because Spike is only just now crouching over her and pressing a hankie to the missing chunk of her throat.
She starts to laugh and almost comments on how those Victorian gentleman habits die hard before she realizes he keeps it in his pocket to spit his gross smoker loogies into.
Euuugh.
“How clean is that?” she asks.
“Clean as anything else you’ll find down here, I imagine.”
Which? Fair. She already needs a full marathon of showers just to get rid of the all the labyrinth must and the cobwebs and weird goo that sometimes drips from the ceiling. Her future is getting out of this maze, eating an actual meal, and then a spa day that actually lasts twenty-four.
And maybe a chocolate milkshake while she gets her hair fixed.
“Don’t know why you’re worrying about germs when you just had The Big Brood trying to drain you.”
“I wasn’t trying—” Angel protests. He hasn’t left the corner Spike shoved him into and he sheepishly wipes some of her blood from her chin.
“Oh, no, of course not! Everything’s always all your fault when it lets you sulk in a corner all mopey to get the ladies wetting their knickers but soon as you start lunching on your friends, ‘oh, I wasn’t trying too!’”
“I don’t sound like that!”
“I told you,” says Buffy, her voice sounds woozy and also a little old-movie star husky. “One of us has to be at full strength. And right now it’s not gonna be me.” She gestures at her gored arm.
As soon as Spike turns to look back at her, Angel licks the rest of the blood off the back of his hand.
All in all, the minotaur fight didn’t exactly rank particularly high. Compared to gods and dragons and giant publicly-elected snakes, it fell pretty quickly. But even with Angel’s sword embedded in its ribs, its final bid to take one of them down with it had ended with one horn slicing through Buffy’s upper arm, chipping bone.
She’s been stabbed and shot and drowned a few times so, as awful as it had looked and felt, once Spike’s overshirt had been sacrificed to the cause it shouldn’t have been anything that some first aid and Slayer healing couldn’t fix up.
But the portal back out of the pocket dimension had already moved by the time they’d retracted their steps, like they’d been warned about all ominously when they were going in, and even though the bleeding stopped pretty quickly, now her arm’s turned dark purple and dark olive green and all kinds of colors that arms should not be.
Maybe good colors for some upholstery.
She’s still gotta replace some of the furniture Dawn took when she moved out.
“Where you going, pet?”
“Hm?” She blinks and Spike comes back into focus.
Spike’s sallow on a good day, which is a look that works better for him than it should, but right now he looks like a throwback Thanksgiving Day Spike circa 1999. Way too pasty, way too gaunt, with chapped lips and bruised under eye circles in desperate need of some teabags.
Her two Luna bars that she’d brought with her for the extreme far-fetched scenario that eight-hour work day to find the portal back out had lasted her three days after she’d rationed the second one. Her water bottle had made it to the fourth day.
But Spike and Angel haven’t had anything to drink since the night before they agreed to help that old man with the monster from the portal in the basement of his antique shop.
Spike presses the hankie a bit harder and Buffy hisses as she’s forced back into her body and the reality of their current situation.
She lets him help her sit back up against the rock wall and pulls the scythe into her lap. “Did it work?” she asks. “How are you feeling, Angel?”
“Ooh, I’ll tell you how he’s feeling, all right,” says Spike, instantly reverting to that weird schoolyard persona that Angel brings out of him. His tone is dangerously close to toppling into a titter.
Angel clears his throat uneasily and, with a grand sum of absolutely zero ounces subtlety, removes his jacket and holds it over his crotch. “Is it hot in here?”
Buffy flushes and looks away herself.
How is it that they’re three adults who’ve all had sex with each other and yet they still all go total schoolgirl over an erection?
“Well, c’mon then, big boy, use all that hot Slayer blood in your big hero muscles to get us out of here.”
“Spike.”
“Show us why you’re the great savior when you can’t keep you fangs to yourself.”
To get the conversation moving in the right direction, Buffy does to Spike what she’d done to Angel a few minutes ago, which is punch him straight in the face.
Unfortunately she’s weak from the whole dehydration thing and the gored arm thing and the blood loss thing and also she’s kind of leaning against his shoulder so he mostly takes a sloppy left-handed bonk to the nose that would make Giles clean his glasses in shame before she ends up slumping further into him.
“Ow.”
“Shut up, Spike.”
She can see the pouty look he gives her from the corner of her blurry vision.
There’s a reason she picked Angel.
“Can you try breaking through the wall?” she asks.
Instead of listening to her actual words, Angel looks at the pile of rubble that had collapsed and trapped them into this dead end the size of a handicapped bathroom stall. “I don’t think I can move it without bringing everything down.”
“No, the wall,” says Buffy. Her eyes drift shut on their own and she has to fight them back into submission.
“You want me to punch through the wall?”
“You’re back at full strength, right?” Her voice is sounding all far away-y even to her own ears that are right there.
“Better be better than,” says Spike, “with as much as you’ve just drained.”
“Yeah but it’s not even guaranteed that there’s anything beyond that. It could just be solid stone forever.” Angel looks down at his knuckles. “And it’s… really gonna hurt.”
“Oh, God, stake me now. Your poor manicure might get scuffed up.”
Her punch is even weaker this time.
Spike catches her hand on the way down and looks at her actual poor manicure that is entirely scuffed up. He gives her a little squeeze and she does her best to reciprocate.
Her best is pretty sub-average at the moment. Unsatisfactory, even, as far as hand squeezes go.
“Angel,” says Spike.
“Right.”
The first strike makes her grimace in sympathy. It makes her knuckles crawl, the ones that she can still feel anyway, with memories of suffocating stale air and wet dirt.
Spike eases her back against the wall and rises, flipping his sword around to strike with the hilt. “Just rest, pet. Get your strength back.”
“Sure,” says Buffy, and the word kind of oozes out of her like those weird drippy things they found yesterday that they never figured out what they were. “I’ll join in in a minute.” She shuts her eyes and it all just turns to Jell-O around her.