102 - A Message Made From Bones

5

Jay sits at their old family piano, comfortable in the dark save for the fire in the hearth and the moonlight that fractures through the windows, cutting slices of silver and flickers of gold across the warped walls and old floors. His strong, slender fingers float over the keys with a mind of their own, the song he began writing a few weeks ago nearly muscle memory by now.

Now he can't get the lyrics out of his head, singing softly to himself most times. Trying to remember the bits and pieces of those dreams that inspired them to further analyze it all. At the time, he couldn't tell the difference between premonitions and regular, nonsensical dreams. The two tend to alternate and melt. But now... he hates himself for being so naïve.

Sineya's bones, the beam, Kai falling from the spire—those all came to pass. For the most part. And he could've been better prepared for them if he just looked closer.

Those few moments watching Lily free-fall from the sky before Moira's magick caught her... His mind had never been so loud—louder than Faith screaming beside him. And the world... it had never felt so still. Hanging off his shoulder, Kai felt and sounded miles away. Moira seemed quiet beside Faith, both of them nothing but shadow and blur and distant voices carried to him on the wind; his eyes had been glued to Lily, who had been just metres from the pavement before her limp body hit an invisible net, already unconscious. Spared, thank gods, from feeling the brutal kiss of stone that awaited her.

Because of that tunnel vision, he didn't notice that Moira had dived into the new well of magick, desperate to hone enough to save her best friend, until Lily was lowered to the ground with unseen hands and Moira broke from her trance to check on her.

Then the world seemed to come back into focus.

That witch is damn good, he'll give her that.

But Jay can't help thinking of the other dreams: the circle in that cement room, that nightclub. The one where he wakes up, red-eyed and fangy and cold.

The last one unsettles him more than the rest. He's never sired in the same way or in the same environment, so he can't seem to discern when or where or how it might happen. And when Lily mentioned she'd also dreamed of him becoming a vampire, an undead chill skittered along his bones.

So this morning, he'd needed to bloody near belt the lyrics—every word, combing through every detail, channeling into the song all that unspent energy that burned within him, bright and hot as the fire raging in the hearth to his right. And he hoped that somehow—eventually, he would make sense of it all.

He hadn't—until Buffy arrived and announced that prophecy: The boy with slayer powers. A prophet.

Then something clicked:

a life, a child, a son

a flicker in the dark to carry on

that he needed to move on to something better—something more than the Doctor—and ideally, anything that doesn't involve his mother. And when he'd met Lily, it became a bit clearer what he wanted: to learn about the slayer side of him.

But when Buffy explained the prophecy, those lyrics lilted through his mind, cutting through his usually calm thoughts. With them came the flashes of that nightclub, the smoke and clamoring...

It only confused him more.

The frustration of it all still surges through his veins, his muscles, which is why he is again playing. His body wants to fight—to punch and kick and kill. It takes an incredible amount of control not to smash down on the keys as he messes the refrain up for the third time. It's one of the first parts he wrote—he should know it by now.