Authors Note: This story owes a debt of gratitude to to the one where Sean Bean gets stuck in Westeros, also published on this very website. I'm not sure how mature the themes will eventually get, but as a non-native English speaker not from the US I do not feel bound by the puritan attitude towards "coarse language", so be warned that there will be - in my opinion situation appropriate - swearing from the get-go. Also, I am a fan of the Series and the Buffyerse but there may be commentary by characters that you might consider unkind to certain characters or plot points or aspects of the fandom. If you can't handle that (and if you cannot distinguish the opinion of an author from the opinion of their characters), maybe fiction isn't the kind of entertainment for you... Also, I apologize in advance for run-on sentences, weird word choice and any errors of grammar punctuation and spelling. English is not my native language.
Chapter I
Stuck in a Coffin
"Fuck you Joss!" Those were all the words Sarah Michelle Gellar could get out. Well actually, that should be Sarah Michelle Prince, but her stage-name and the one the Actors' Union knew her under was still her maiden name. For some mysterious reason, she was trapped in a coffin again. Joss Whedon knew she hated that – and he made her do it anyway. Twice. Well this was the third time. Only this time it was for real. How did she get here? She had no idea. She'd had one drink after her role as the Seventh Sister on Star Wars Rebels had wrapped. It had been nice to work with her beloved Freddie again and she got along reasonably well with the rest of the cast even though she did not quite care for Kiddie TV any longer – she'd had had enough of that in her career. But a forty-something woman, even a very smart and attractive forty-something woman cannot be overly picky when it comes to acting jobs. Damn sexist Hollywood. At any rate, she was here in this damn coffin in a ridiculous black dress, that she'd worn exactly once before – on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Oh crap it slowly dawned on her. Either this was a particularly twisted nightmare – and she rarely had those – or she somehow got stuck in the worst year of Buffy's life. She still half remembered most of her scenes. And she knew in that scene she had to dig herself out of her grave. Fuck that shit. Why did Joss Whedon torture his protagonists like that? Unfortunately Buffy was a super-powered teenager, while Sarah Michelle Gellar was not. Still, she started digging, hoping that she'd get some sort of passage aboveground before her oxygen would run out. Oh this would be all sorts of no fun at all.
While she dug, Sarah tried to remember how that episode went on. A lot of BtVS had been shot out of sequence and she had forgotten many key plot-points, it was almost twenty years ago after all. There was still the occasional reunion or comic-con to please the nerds and she would sometimes get awfully specific questions on minor details of the lore, but she usually had Anthony, James or Joss answer them. Sarah had also never gotten around to reading the comics. Apparently she had a lesbian hookup in one of them. Interesting, but then again, she was a bit glad that she did not have to play that on camera. She'd have done that of course if necessary for the plot, just like she did all the cemetery shit Joss wanted her to do (at least by Season Two she'd gotten him to agree to have most shot at fake cemeteries. With all the crappy CGI it actually fit the overall aesthetics of the show better than the real deal), but she thought a lesbian hookup of an otherwise clearly straight character pretty gratuitous. With Willow and Tara it at least was a genuinely romantic relationship that got proper time to be built up.
At any rate, superpowers or not, she could almost sense her hand touching air by now. A bit more digging and she'd be through. What was it that happened after she got out of her grave? She knew she'd played an almost catatonic depressive state throughout Season Six which got Tara written out of the series, Allyson Hannigan got saddled with one of the worst makeup jobs she could remember (thankfully her scenes with Allyson while she was in that ridiculous getup had been rather short) and Michelle had to play klepto-Dawn with major abandonment issues. Well if she'd be stuck in that crap-hell, she might as well make it a marginally better place. Oh and if she could at all get to Warren, she'd tear him to shreds herself. She was out of the grave now and recognized one major thing: Her grave had been on an abandoned piece of forest quite outside any cemetery and away from settled areas and she had no idea whatsoever which direction Sunnydale was. After all, there weren't really maps of the place, and if there were she'd surely not memorize them. But being recently not-dead excused a bit of disorientation, so she thought "what the hell" and simply headed in a direction that seemed plausible.
Eventually she got to see some signs of civilization, meaning she'd either headed in the right direction or far enough in the wrong one. Now if only she could remember Buffy's address. It was something with R... Rapallo Drive? Nah, that was a German-Soviet Treaty from the 1920s. Rubella Drive? Nah, that was an illness. Ridcully Drive? Nah, that was a character in Terry Pratchett novels… And she was not even sure the Magic Box – the set they all hung out at after they got rid of the extremely awkward to shoot at library set – even had a canonical address. And as the sun was down already, anybody she might've asked about directions might as soon have told her where to go and started attacking her. Thing was, she was not a super-powered teenager but a forty-something actress stuck in the body of a twenty-something with incredibly impractical attire. Speaking of which, it made her tear up a bit inside, but she'd ditched the shoes first chance she got to be able to walk faster further and without pain – her life might depend on it eventually. When she finally got to the outskirts of town – for a "one Starbucks place" Sunnydale was actually pretty sizable – she saw a fair bit of riot, with stuff burning and people apparently fleeing something. Shit. She'd forgotten all about the "biker demons" that had attacked at the beginning of Season Six. How would she extricate herself from that?
Authors Note: I have not yet plotted it all out, but I am pretty sure a certain redhead witch is in for a major dressing-down. If you want to leave plot suggestions or guesses along with your review, be my guest.