Prologue:
The whole story is really quite involved. But if you've found this particular little run of the mill Fanfiction story, then chances are pretty good that you already know most of it. For now, just call me, the Narrator. Not that I will be participating in the story, other than an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent voice above those in the story. For just this story though. Unless you'd like a sequel.
But suffice it to this particular story, beginning with another one's ending. The main characters? Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. Dawn Summers, Buffy's little sister and the mystical force of energy called the Key. Willow Rosenberg, extremely powerful bi-sexual witch. Xander Harris, normal guy, construction worker, and everybody's best friend. Except for the bad guys. Angel, vampire with a soul seeking redemption. Cordelia Chase, Angel's link to the forces guiding his redemption and Xander's former girlfriend. Spike, or William the Bloody. A former bad guy that got "neutered" and has fallen in love with Buffy. The real bad guy, sort of, Glorificus. Hell god/dess banished to Earth within the prison of a human body named Ben. Glory wanted the Key to return home. Well, by the beginning of our story…she's got it.
The ritual stated quite clearly, "The Key will flow to the portal, the portal will open, and shall remain open until it stops flowing." In everyone's mind, that meant that Dawn had to die. Well, Buffy managed to stop Glory all right. Her trainer, or Watcher is the term, was the one to kill her though. Unfortunately, the portal still opened.
The energy flux that was the portal was both beautiful and terrible in its existence. It seemed to be made of nothing but energy. Raw, pure, lightning that made it's own cloud in the air. Occasionally a lightning bolt would leak out and strike something of the world below it. The lightning then changed the very substance that made where it struck real. It changed the reality of whatever it hit. Striking a street where a car was just driving along, the entire street just caved in right in front of the car, barely giving the driver enough time to stop. When he gets out and looks into the chasm the lightning bolt created, he will see the very depths of a very literal and very real Hell.
Another change is City hall, changed into some kind of factory for an electric eel type of demon that nobody dare recognize. A final change is made to the very air as a mythical creature everyone knew to be fiction and false, a dragon, flew out of the lightning that came from the cloud and circled, looking for prey. During all these changes to reality, our main characters have been dealing with their personal turmoils, there believed to be final thoughts, and their regrets and wishes. And their final hopes.
To cut out a lot of…huh? Put it in? Are you serious?! Sigh Fine, whatever. Ok folks, the editor wants the emotional garbage, that personally I…FINE! I have to stop writing like this is a diary or whatever and actually put out the story now, or I'm fired. I love my job. Really, I do. But here ya go.
The energy vortex swirled and flashed in the early morning night. It was the most amazing, yet devastating sight that the Slayer and her friends had ever seen, and they had seen a lot.
Buffy and her little sister Dawn stood atop the platform that Glory had built for this event, for her trip home. Now, Buffy had beaten Glory and was somehow sure that she would not be coming back, despite knowing that the insane hell god would obviously want revenge for her ruined chance. Despite all this, Buffy was only thinking of one thing at the moment, and that was her sister.
"What are you doing?!" Buffy yelled as she grabbed her sister, just as the fifteen year old was about to run past her and jump into the swirling vortex of destructive hell energies barely twenty feet below them.
"I have to jump…the energy." Dawn whimpered as Buffy held onto her, keeping her from stopping what she started.
"It'll kill you!" Buffy exclaimed, terrified at what Dawn was about to do.
"I know," Dawn whispered as she looked at her sister, her only family left in the world. "Buffy, I know about the ritual. I have to stop it!"
"No!" Buffy's voice shook as she held onto her only reason left for living, her sister. Her promise to her mother.
"I have to! Look at what's happening!" Dawn shouted as at that exact moment, a surge of lightning from the churning vortex below shot into the sky beside them, and a flying dragon like demon appeared and flew around the tower, only to disappear out of sight mere moments later.
"Buffy, you have to let me go! The blood starts it, and until the blood stops flowing, it'll never stop!" Dawn pleaded with her sister. Buffy could only shake her head.
"You know you have to let me. It has to have the blood." Dawn explained, looking past her sister at the swirling vortex that her blood, that she had caused. She has caused so much pain and suffering for so many people…she, she can't let it go on like this.
Buffy reflected on those words, and all the hidden meanings that it had meant to her over the past few days. The time she spoke to Dawn in the hospital, the conversation with Spike, the whole conversation with the group back at the magic shop, and finally on the message that her spirit guide had given her; "Death is your gift." "Death…" "Is your gift."
And Buffy was visibly shaken by the realization that dawned on her. A light of understanding came to her face as she turned slowly, her internal Slayer clock instinctively telling her what time it was. And as she turned, a strong orange hue took to the sky, and slowly, slowly but surely, an orb of orange red fire was forming on the horizon and slowly growing larger as it inched higher upon the sky. It was Dawn.
Buffy turned back to her sister, a strange serenity within her features all of a sudden. As soon as Dawn looked in her sister's eyes, she knew exactly what Buffy was planning on doing
"Buffy, no…" she pleaded.
"Dawnie, I have to." Buffy stated.
"NO!" Dawn begged.
"Listen to me, there isn't a lot of time. Listen." Buffy began.
"Dawn listen to me, listen." Buffy urged her sister to hear her last words. "I love you, I will always love you. This is the work that I have to do."
"Tell Giles that…tell Giles that I figured it out, that…I'm OK. Give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. Dawn the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me."
Dawn was crying as her sister gave her, her final message, her last words. She would know them by heart until the day she died. Taking Dawn's face in her hands one final time, Buffy kissed her sister lovingly on the cheek, and said goodbye one last time, with her eyes.
Then she turned and ran to the end of the platform, leaving a crying Dawn behind her, as she ran towards the birthing one. And then, she disappeared over the edge, heading straight for the heart of that evil energy that Dawn had unleashed unwillingly. It was far too late, but Dawn cried out anyway.
"BUFFY!!!" and then she wept as she fell to her knees, seeing and feeling the rip in reality disappearing, and everything was normal again. Except that Dawn was all alone now. She had no one. Not her sister, not her mother, but…but.
Dawn steadied herself as the light of the new dawn reached her face. She stood up slowly and began to walk down the stairs of the tower. When she reached the ground, she was about to pass out from her injuries, and steadying herself against the stone wall, she saw the others gathering, around a small pile of debris. And she saw. Just like she had seen her mother. She lay there, so still, so very, very still. Fresh tears flowed from Dawn's eyes, but she steadied herself and walked over to the others.
She would be brave. She would live. For Buffy.
She knew what she had to do. And later, if asked, she knew that she would say, and do, that she would do it again in a heartbeat. After giving Dawn her message to her friends and Giles, she kissed her little sister on the cheek, letting the little Summers woman know how much she truly loved her.
Buffy turned after that, and despite knowing full well what she was doing, what it would mean, and that she was more than likely about to die, she felt so very, very calm. Yet as the energy storm raged beneath them, she also felt an anxiousness, a feeling that if she didn't do this, and do this soon, that it would be too late, even for her sacrifice. So filled with sudden adrenaline, working with Slayer muscles, she ran as fast as she could, and as she reached the edge, she jumped, spreading her arms out, her legs straight. She almost felt like she was trying to fly, but she knew on every level of her subconscious that she was falling, and about to die.
This is when something else happened. Just the few seconds that it took Buffy to fall from the platform into the energy vortex, it suddenly decided to send out a few more pulses of energy. Specifically two more bolts of lightning. One arched immediately to the hidden corner where two witches lay in fear and at the same time each other's comfort. Willow and her lover, Tara. Willow saw the bolt coming, and did the only thing that both her heart and mind said to do. She flung Tara aside and protected her love from sure harm.
The other bolt headed for Xander Harris, whose own lover and fiancée Anya tried to do the same thing Willow had done. Yet, midair, the lightning bolt itself did something strange. It split into two, and one continued toward Xander away from Anya's blocked path, while the other branch immediately struck the cursing British, bleach blond vampire, who had just rolled out of the way of a crack caused by the lightning, only to roll right into it.
Yet as instantaneous as all of these actions were, Buffy's fall into and through the vortex was still much quicker. Mid-strike on all of these targets, the entire apparition dissolved in the air. Everyone of them had thought they were all about to die. But that was not what the vortex did. Well, it did in the case of Buffy, but that was only because she leapt from a five story tower to begin with. She was dead the moment she jumped.
The Vortex was exactly what it was meant to be. A portal. A portal to all of reality and beyond. A portal that worked throughout all realities at the same time. The same time that it opened at the top of that tower in the one-Starbucks town called Sunnydale, it had opened across all realms, all universes, all realities at the exact same moment, for the same amount of time. The lightning was how it transferred its "passengers". The lightning, in one reality would strike something and then randomly, for the most part, drop it in another completely alien reality. Yet the moment the portal was dissolved, reality automatically healed and resifted itself.
There was a problem though. An extremely rare and nearly impossible event took place. Apparently, enough "Key" energy still remained within the vortex that it was not immediately dissolved. Also, Buffy, Willow, Xander and Spike were all being shifted, or to be more accurate, in the process of being shifted to another reality. When the vortex dissolved mid-strike, the lightning bolts had just managed to start pulling on them, but never really got a total hold on them though. So they weren't totally pulled out of their reality, and they weren't traded with some other really bizarre thing. Instead, they were copied into the remaining Key energy.
It was the energy of Buffy's soul moving onto Heaven that got the residual energy to start bouncing around the realm that is between Realms. It was here that it interacted with another energy vortex, which just so happened to be another portal, this one coming back from a demon dimension, in the shape of a black Chevy convertible.
The little bit of Key portal energy somehow immediately drew energy from this new source, not really directed by anything, just a reaction. Somehow, during this, it copied two of the people that were riding inside of the car, and the new portal was flung out in an entirely different direction than what it had been going to. It was even flung far away from Earth.
After a time, it settled into one spot, where it waited, without realizing or aware that it was waiting, for just one more type of energy to attract itself to, and then it would open, like it was supposed to. It had both a long and not a long wait ahead of it.
One of the intrauniversal beings, calling itself Q to the human race, found the little sparkle of Key energy, and saw what it was holding within it's very energy cells. He was intrigued, to say the most. Not very often that this type of energy lasted as long as this one apparently had. He left it alone, for the moment, and informed his brethren, the other Q, about it. Thinking it totally insignificant, they told him he could do with it as he pleased.
He decided to open it. But what fun would it be if he was the only one to see or encounter whatever would come out of it? So he waited. He did have a long wait ahead of him. Not that it really mattered to him. He was a Q after all.