Disclaimer: As you probably already know these characters and concepts don't belong to me, I'm just borrowing them for a while (without permission) and I promise to put them back where I found them once I'm done playing with them... oh, yes, and I'm not making any money out of this.

Warning: A totally AU fic. set post Bargaining, Buffy's life after her resurrection. What if she had really been in Hell? Some readers may find this story objectionable/disturbing. We are talking Hell here.

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Hell
Author: Alec Star

She woke up, trying to keep the scream that was burning her throat from escaping. She had been trying to avoid sleep as much as possible but it wasn't really working. Her body --her living body-- demanded sleep and with sleep came the dreams. She could have handled them if they had been just that, but the problem was that they were more than mere dreams. They were memories from her time in Hell.

She had only been back for a couple of days and already she felt like she was losing her mind. The demands of life were more than she could handle. Her friends wanted her to be happy, they wanted it so damn bad that more often than not she ended up comforting them and feeling guilty because she wasn't getting any better. They had done so much to save her that she owed them that much, but the memory of the pain was still too fresh, too raw and it was drowning her.

At times she felt so lost, like the lines between both dimensions were shifting and she could no longer tell where she was. That was the worst part, but there was no way she could hope to express that with words, even if the others had been ready to hear her, which they weren't. They just wanted her to forget, so she pasted on a fake smile and prayed that when the dreams came she would be able to swallow her cries together with her pain and her fear so that her friends --her family-- could rest in peace.