He’s alone in the room when the intercom goes nuts and he can hear people running in the halls outside. For a moment he panics and jerks at his restraints, afraid that Caleb has come to finish the job, or take something else from him, but suddenly a sense of calm fills him, as if seeping in from the very air, or perhaps his IV…

He can feel the change in the air, that someone has opened the door. No one answers his calls, and he feels a pressure near his legs, and then a sense of release. A moment later and he feels something cold, like metal, near his wrist, and this time he can feel the straps parting. Someone has cut his bonds, and he reaches out, calling for Willow, or Buffy. Even Spike? But there is no answer, and he stumbles to his feet, stomping his legs, tingling with the heightened of circulation. It’s weird, he always thought being blind would be worse than this, but he can kind of tell where the nightstand is, more like he’s remembering where they are than he can actually *see* it. He gets the drawer open on the third try, after knocking over the glass of water left out for him, and finds his clothes, all folded up. Ripping out the damn IV, he stumbles into his clothes and feels his way to the door, which is exactly where he thought it should be in his far-too-many memories of being in these sorts of room over the last few years.

He has no idea who cut him loose, but whoever it is must have had to run before they were seen. Whatever is going on must be serious, the whole floor sounds deserted, and he stumbles his way down the hall to where he thinks the nurses station should be, but instead finds a wall, and some sort of metal thing with little bumps. The ‘bing’ sounds brings it all home. An elevator. He’s found the elevator, completely by accident!

When the door opens, he literally falls forward into the elevator, having been leaning on the door for support, and sits there and laughs, wondering where he’s going. Blind man walking, clear a path! Nothing to see here! Get it? Nothing to *see?*

The elevator is moving now, and he wonders how that happens, since he didn’t actually press a button, still being seated on the floor. Pulling himself to his feet, without the use of his eyes, on a moving elevator, turns out to be a lot harder than you’d think, and he ends up on his ass again before he manages the feat.

‘Bing.’ Welcome to… wherever. The door slides open and he feels his way out and stands still, trying to get his bearings, and waiting for the various staff to notice that the dude with the bandage over his face is wandering around the hospital.

But no one seems to notice, and he can’t even hear anyone here, wherever ‘here’ is.

After a moment of listening, he realizes that he feels warmth on the side of his face, and concludes that he must have gone down into the basement to some sort of Freddy Kruger-ish furnace room. He remembers something like that back when Buffy had to kill that Kinderstod thing. Moving very slowly towards the warmth, he encounters a wall of what feels like glass, and a fake plant of some sort, and after some confusion realizes that he must actually be in the *lobby.*

This now officially makes *no* sense. Why isn’t there anyone in the lobby? It’s almost like one of those movies where everybody is gone. Which would mean he was dead. But he can’t be dead, he’s freaking *blind!* Surely in heaven he’d get some sort of new eye deal! Even in the other place, you think they’d want him to be in one piece before they started taking him apart… More fun to scare someone when he can see you in all your veiny scaly pus-dripping demony goodness, after all.

At this point, he’s pretty sure this has to be a highly realistic dream, and at the thought of his last few dreams, his skin crawls and he decides that he much prefers this weirdness. Edging along the glass, he keeps bumping into chairs and magazine racks, and then a blast of warm air, as a sliding door in front of him slides open and he’s out the door and into the warm sunlight, which feels blessedly nice after all the time he’s spent indoors lately. It’s a sad little laugh, one that ends in a coughing fit, but he’s amused that the first time he’s stopped to enjoy the sunlight in god knows how long, he *can’t even see it.*

He’s on the sidewalk, moving along, just letting his feet take him, and trusting to his suddenly amazing visual memory to avoid obstacles. Sometimes the sidewalk is broken, and he stumbles, but he takes it slow, and listens for traffic before crossing any road that gets in his way, and it’s like he can *almost* see stuff. He can hear people now, someone passes him, walking a dog, and doesn’t even seem to notice that the guy passing her is wearing a shirt soaked in his own dried blood, has a big white bandage over half of his face, and, oh yeah, is wandering around *freaking blind* after checking himself out of the hospital, where he was *tied up.*

Sunnydale, go figure. He can almost *see* dog-walker lady, all wrapped up in the music of her walkman, completely unaware of anything just a bit odd about her fellow pedestrian, and he feels a flash of contempt uncoil inside of him. It must be fucking nice to be able to wander around and not *know* what’s going on in this town. Bitch has eyes, but she *chooses* to be blind. Whoah. Major mood-swing. No more IV-based non-prescription painkillers for this boy! Stick the over-the-counter stuff, like Rush. That’s the way to go.

It’s cooler out by the time he reaches Revello Drive, and he’s pretty sure the sun has gone down. He can recognize the street, somehow. He doesn’t remember being this good at navigating around the town, but he has been walking around the entire town in the dark for the last six years, never really getting lost, or specifically paying attention in his nightly patrolling, so perhaps he’s just good at this sort of thing. Or maybe he’s turning into Daredevil. Given his history with this town, the turning-into-Daredevil option is actually more likely than suddenly being good at anything…

He’s definitely picked up a headache in his travels. He’s passed a dozen people in his trek, and just about all of them pissed him off in some way. Kid’s mom was totally ignoring him, even though he was trying to get her approval about something he did. Way to go, teach your kid he isn’t worth paying attention to, lady, see what sort of exciting things he does as a teenager to get your attention. He wants to slap her, too busy on her cell-phone nagging her husband about the cable bill to see one of the most important things in her life, an opportunity to encourage her son, slipping away.

Will she blame it on rock music when he blows his brains out?

Man, this weirdness won’t stop. It’s like he’s got a major hate-on against the world, and he’s got to pull it together before the girls see him. He can’t let Dawn see him like this. She’s already had every other man in her life flake out on her. Much more of this, and she’s gonna be the one blowing her brains out. Or ending up like Willow, giving up on men entirely after a single attempt.

Jesus, it just keeps happening. Now he’s having mean thoughts about *Willow!* Fucking dreams. He’s gotta keep it together. The girls are already a mess, they’ve been through so much. They need him to keep it together. Buffy acts like she can handle anything, but she really can’t. Every time she goes all Lone Ranger, things blow up in *everyone’s* faces and he’s gotta be there to help her, somehow...

He completely misses the front of the house and kind of slams into the side of it while trampling into one of Joyce’s bushes, the one with the little yellow flowers. For Cynthia, she called it, whoever Cynthia is. Okay, what the hell was that? Make it out of the hospital, all the way across town, and now the radar-sense screws up in the front yard of the house that he’s practically *built?* That makes even less sense than the rest of today…

He can hear something in the back yard, so he keeps one arm on the side of the house and moves until he can better hear what’s going in. It’s a strange noise. Scrunch. Swish. Scrunch. Swish. Finally he places it. Someone is shoveling in the back yard, digging a hole or something. The wind shifts and now he can smell it. Someone’s dead. Not like five-day old roadkill dead, fresher crapped-themselves dead. He doesn’t like that he can tell the difference…

He’s frozen in the moment, and he can hear Buffy swear softly, and then the shovel clatters to the ground. There is a something that sounds like a choked sob from Buffy, and then a muffled thud. He knows, even without eyes, that Buffy has just rolled the body of whoever is dead into the hole, and he can hear her back at the shovel, with a numbing mechanical rhythm. Scrunch. Swish. Scrunch. Swish.

The sound is hypnotic in its awfulness. But then he realizes that it has stopped, and he can hear something, so soft that he doesn’t know what it is. All he knows is that Buffy is hurting, and his legs carry him forward, arm blindly seeking forward, trying to find her, to comfort her.