Prologue:
The light washes over her, shades of pale fear turned golden with the sun. But still old and bitter. Her eyes react, and she flinches.
It took the better part of ten minutes to get it together enough to go outside, and less than three seconds to slam the door shut hard enough to rattle the hinges. Buffy's eyes still burned.
No light. She draws the blinds shut, and turns away from the door, heading towards the living room. Through the kitchen, past the painstakingly whitened tiles of the counter. She sits on the couch and things are still again.
Lost in thought she traces the picture of the careless little girl that could've been her, that was her. Happy, smiling faces, frozen grotesquely in a single pose for eternity. Smiles pasted on her mother's face, on her father's. Not real, of course. Never real. They said they'd been happy once. If they had, Buffy can't remember it. Happiness is a fading impression that she sometimes dreams about. She sometimes dreams that the sun doesn't burn her eyes.
Desperately she clings to the strands of her thoughts. Holding together by a thread. She can't fall apart anymore, but every day, a little bit more of her gets away. More of her thoughts slip through her fingers like sand or water. Xander isn't there to pick them up for her.
Xander is dead. It had almost been an hour since she's thought those words. Willow is dead. Giles is dead. Her mother is dead. Anya is dead. Tara is dead. More pain...blinding flashes of light press into her mind unwanted. They are like the picture. Xander is frozen in her mind, his mouth slack in the moment before he died. She wants to reach out to him, to yell at him to run, to get away, but every time, she hears the flesh rip, hears the blood flow, and sees his noble heart taken from him.
She hasn't cried in days. Breathe, Buffy, breathe... The blood had been thick. Heart's blood. She remembers the way he'd gone pale and cold. The way the gaping hole in his chest had desecrated his beauty and drawn her eyes. She hadn't been able to look away.
Anya wasn't there to weep for her beloved. She had died the week before, trying to protect him from falling debris. Buffy remembers the crunching noise as her spine had cracked and her heart stopped beating. She gave all. And it hadn't been enough.
Willow. There had been so much blood....leaking out on the floor. Vampire, maybe, but not likely. Torn open throat. She'd tried to fight. Her green eyes had still sparked with a false fire. The magick burned within her fiercely, even though it hadn't saved her. Occupying an empty, broken corpse.
Die....
Listless, Spike called her. You need to eat something, he said. Eat? To live?
Memories shade in, reanimated in detail. Stop, she'd said. They can't hear her now. But there was malice in Willow's dead eyes.
Darkness disguises the light and hides the shadows. The memories are gone now. Can't come back. Can't...
Shallow cuts...Shallow cuts.
Buffy...save me...I don't want to die...
Never, Dawnie...I'll protect you to the end...
There was another. Dawn. She closes her eyes and tries to keep her head above the water. Thick, viscous fluid that tastes of despair and fire that eats her from the inside.
"Buffy. Buffy. Buffy!"
I have to, Buffy...
Dawn....no...no...no
I'm the Key...I wasn't supposed to be here...Dead...Key...alone...
Jump...
A vicious slap. Dawn...No. Spike. Her eyes open and turn upward in some hope of salvation. Please...make it stop...no more pain...please...
Grimace of pain. She claws at her shirt, at her breast, at her heart. Wrapped in its misery and choking on the guilt.
Cold dead hands on hers. Xander...be Xander, Spike. Be Xander for me. Be Giles. Be Willow. "Save me, Spike. Please..."
"Oh, Buffy." Real. Spike is real. Tara isn't. Mom isn't. Won't ever be. Hands on her flesh. Not her flesh. Not her nerves. Don't feel it. Flesh wrapped around teeth and bones and organs. Beating heart. Pumping blood. Can't feel...
"I don't know how." Simple admission. No hope. Drowning. Deeper now, can't see the light. Can't breathe...
I'm crying now. That's why I can't breathe.
Spike holds her hands helplessly. He can't save her, and she can't save herself."Buffy, you need to get out of this house. The memories are...they're killing you, pet. I see it day by day. They're eating at you. You need to be free. You need to live. Please, Buffy." Whitened hair. High cheekbones, hollow cheeks, pale skin. Plastic quality. Spike will never change.
"You're right. But...I have nowhere to go..." She bit her lip. Blood....that's right, you deserve the blood.
Her memories are all of carnage. All of pain and suffering and death. Nothing can live in this house, where she found her mother's body, life funneled out of it. Not her mother anymore. A plastic shell. Rubbery skin, cold eyes. So cold....
She shivers. "Let's go for a walk, pet." Spike's cold arm around her shoulders, so cold and dead. Wants to throw it away from her. I can't...no more death...
Can't. "Spike..."
Out into the night. Cold air. There's no warmth left anywhere in the world. No place she can find a safe haven, no place where she can be warm.
The streets are lifeless. Fires burn among the rubble. What happened...Demons... She knows. After Glory, before Dawn. Demons had destroyed. Demons had killed. And she had cried. And cried...
Dawn had come, and then her Dawnie had died. Her special blood had saved them and killed them. And it was all done.
Cackling drew her attention. You're the Slayer, Buffy. I know that you can do this. It'll be hard, but you're not alone. You're never alone. I love you like my own, Buffy. Goodbye...
Deformed monstrosities roam Sunnydale's streets now. The vampires were killed or chased out. This town isn't on the mouth of hell anymore. It is hell.
Walk among the ruins. Spike growls at those who come near. None do. Smoke everywhere, devastation. Not her home anymore...
She's lost. Lost inside her own head, and Spike can't bring her back anymore. Can't, because she doesn't love him. She doesn't love anything. She feels nothing but pain. Mind-numbing pain, and stabbing pain. Ripples like water, easily disturbed and viciously brutal. Has a life of its own.
"It's alright, pet. The demons won't bother us." He's leading her somewhere. Somewhere...else. There's no place she can really think of to be. Desperate for change, fearing difference. She clings to him, but he's a piece of steel and he'll take her down with him. Or she'll drag him down. One way or another, she will drown in the grief and her body will be devoured by the waves until there was nothing left for the acid to burn at.
There's a body. A half-eaten body of a woman, her arms spread wide and her eyes staring to the side. Right at Buffy. Her torso trails away into nothing. Her internal organs are still steaming.
Buffy stops. Cold. The woman is still staring at her. Eyes black and filmy with death. Dead eyeballs in her dead head. On her dead body. Brown hair that had fallen to one side of her head when she died.
A muscle twitches in her arm. Spike covers Buffy's eyes with his hand and tries to drag her away from the obscene and grotesque picture. She allows it to happen. She allows it to happen, and she closes her eyes because she doesn't want to see, doesn't want to know.