At last she sings

Summery: AU. Normal Again (S6 E17). Unable to over come the psychosis induced by the demon, Buffy lets her family die but remains torn in the spaces between this world and her own. Soon she realizes that she still needs to disassociate herself completely from this world to be able to form in the real one. But there is still the matter of anchors like Cordelia, Weasley, Angel...and Faith.


This was fucked up.

There were photographs – lots of photographs – and I could almost remember the room that they had been shot in. She had taken me down there once, picked up this big dusty basket from a corner and shown me some snaps from her childhood. From her time in L.A., from her first school, her first sight of the grand canyon where she'd fallen madly in love with another sightseer who had seemed to know everything about its history. There were no pictures of him, she had said. Her parents had been too busy shouting politely and their's had been an illicit affair anyway; short for she had only seem him twice; painful, for he had asked her to run away with him, into the sunset, and she had refused.

There was a picture of this dog she sometimes fed – Dangy? Dingy? -, a mangy little brown pup whose owner was a sick girl who used to smile so widely at her when she came baring food for the pooch. They had lived a couple of lanes away, in an alley, underneath a green-blue canvas that sparkled and shone and in the sun, and made rainbows when it rained. Many years later, after the girl had been long gone and the sick pup had staggered upon the road, Buffy had wondered who'd eaten the larger share of the food she had brought. It prickled her, for some reason. Perhaps, she had told me, if she'd understood she might have brought more.

There are some things you just can't forget. Even now, so many years later, I could remember that night perfectly.

She sat leaning against me with her fingers creating deep indentations in the album; an album of her previous life, she said. It was dark, and a bit damp and wet from freak showers. It was still a couple of days before the fall, so it wasn't unusual for her to be pressed up against me; and tonight, with my heart beating, and her soft voice pouring out like a sad song, I just let her, without reservation.

As she turned the pages (and the plastic crinkled loudly in the silence) the album moved to and fro the years. She said how useless this all seemed now; how in a couple of years, or months, or maybe even tomorrow – who knows? But soon, probably, her mother won't even be able to look at this as it would stir up too many memories. And does it even matter? Her first step, her first bite of cake, her first nonsense word – does all that even come close to measuring up to the importance of her first kill, her first apocalypse. But there were no pictures of that. Nobody saw us when we killed, when we saved the world; nobody but vamps, and they were dust, and all those memories that would die with us.

And then she threw it, against the wall, a slayer's throw. The spine shattered as she cried, and the pages fluttered to the damp floor, and I could see their white sheen becoming dark in patches. And she was slipping into my arms, her face wet with tears.

I didn't know what was wrong. Was she afraid of dying? I'd heard her, but I couldn't understand. Was she afraid of dying or being forgotten? And of course those pictures meant nothing; that I'd tried to tell her a thousand times. Nothing else mattered but the now, when we were with each other, and the then, when we were killing vamps. But I couldn't tell her that, not now, when she was like this.

So I kissed her, like I'd done once before. This chaste little thing on the forehead that made her crinkle her eyes and stop the flow. And then, just because she looked so beautiful, and I couldn't help myself, I kissed her on the lips.

It was all dark and raining, a soft patter against the glass, and she was still in my arms, still and wide-eyed, with her lips salty with tears and tasting, faintly, of rose. And then she moved, slowly, her fingers coming up against my cheek, moving it gently, and her bare shoulders moving towards me, her smaller frame coming to fit against mine, like something that belonged.

I could still remember that perfect night, the night that changed everything between us before a death sent it all to hell. I could still remember the gentle press of her lips, the dim awareness I had of her smell, the feel of her arms as the cords and cords of muscle beneath the deceptively smooth and gentle looking skin pressed me tight against her breast. It lasted all of ten minutes before the bang of the door announced her mother's arrival. But it was still –

That was then.

Now there was yellow tape and blood. The television in the recreation room had been blaring it out all day, displaying all the grisly details. That night it had seemed so comforting, and with the long twisting shadows, so ery intimate. Now it was a crime scene. You could see the blood, pools of it, bordered with thick white chalk. The whole damn place was little with it.

They were photographed all lined up straight, the little scobbies reporting for duty. And the bastards around me laughed as they displayed the torn up bunch, with their ribs wide open and their insides missing.

They said that she had eaten them perhaps, over the course of the three days that it took for them to be found from when they had died. Or perhaps she'd thrown their bits in the dispenser, creating the fountain of gore that they had seen in the kitchen. (Exhibit B). Or maybe she'd jumped upon them like a giddy child and mashed them to pulp. Who knows, they said. Does it matter?

They were all dead.

Dawn, Xander, Tara and that demon chick.

And maybe Red too. Since she was all missing, except an arm; and that, they said, never bode well.

They were all dead and a small part of me couldn't help but be ferociously happy that Buffy had killed them. The larger part waited for Angel to arrive, stunned.

0

It took him two weeks to get here. The look on his face was expected. The fact that half of his arm was missing was not. My first instinct was to laugh. And I did. A short barking little laugh. She'd gotten him, that was obvious. He'd tried without me, and that hurt.

After that I couldn't speak, just staring at the way the shirt hung limp after a certain point and trying to imagine how it had happened. Had Buffy made those little quips of hers as she took a bite? I knew she thought they made look far cuter than she was; a fucking cheerleader girl who could bend steel without a thought. But I'd always thought they made her seem a bit terrifying. Here she was, fighting demons who could so easily turn us, and she was laughing at them. So fucking sure of her superiority.

I always wondered why they never saw it, never questioned that hers' was not the way to fight when your life was on the line. Why you had to be angry and mad like I was, because those bastards killed, and they could kill you.

"Faith, are you listening?"

His voice brought me back. It was deep and gravely, as if he'd been screaming for a long, long time. And now that I noticed, I could see the marks across his neck, and on the sliver of wrist that was left exposed by the really long shirt before disappearing beneath black gloves. Fuck. What has she done to him?

"Yeah, big guy. I know."

He looked at me. Every part of him that could be covered, was.

"All you do is walk out with me. Fred'll take care of the rest."

Okay, great. Six months to parole hearing. Fuck you, Buffy.

"Five by Five."

0

They didn't know what was wrong.

She wasn't a vamp. She wasn't dead. Watchers and the covens had concluded that it wasn't any active enchantment, but it could be the remains of one that had since faded. Fred said it could be post traumatic stress disorder: she was, after all, a resident of heaven fetched against her will.

Or it could just be that slaying had driven her mad. Of course, nobody said that. It couldn't be their precious Buffy at fault, right?

We sat in the lobby watching the huge television blare out the breaking news. She was a celebrity already. A mass-murdering cheerleader with a number of violent tendencies in her past. They'd taken pictures a couple of years old and interposed them against those found on a crime screen, with the strap of the camera that had taken them tangled with the man's mangled neck.

Giles sat on a counter behind me, grey faced and discussing strategy with Angel. There were snipping rifles stacked at the corner with grenades, and at the bar with chilled glasses clasped between their fingers, the people who could use them. They were the second team that had been sent. Nobody knew how it had happened to the first.

I didn't really know why I was here. Pretty much nobody had said shit to me since I came. And they had fucking sniping rifles for god sake. I was good, but sitting a couple of hundred meters away with the scope tailed upon her ass was even better.

Perhaps they didn't want to kill her. But they had grenades for gods sake. And she was famous already: a mass murdering, possibly cannibalistic cheerleader. Homicide, an anchor quipped, had never looked this sexy. Even if they contained her, made her okay, she could never go back. She had nothing to go back to. But people wanting to kill her.

I needed to move. They way they were talking about her, about the traps they could set, the things they could do to incapacitate, disable, kill... I tried to tell myself that they didn't know her, that to them she was just a slayer, just a bitch gone bad, foaming white in the mouth, needing to be put down. But that didn't help the anger from crowding my thoughts, or my hands from twitching as I imagined—

I moved. The night outside was cool and calm and slightly windy, and it blew strands of hair against my face. She was out there. I remembered clearly what she'd told me the last time we'd met, about how I couldn't apologize, how she'd kill me if I dared. Perhaps I didn't need to. Perhaps this could be the apology that I so desperately needed to give. And perhaps, after I'd saved her, we could go back to night, and imagined what could have happened if her mother hadn't come.

It was an old fantasy and leaning the edge, I slipped smoothly into it, like a well-worn pair of leathers. But they end, these fantasies, and when this did, it left me as bewildered as I was that night, knowing only one simple fact: that I had to save her.

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TBC~