It was shaking -- the whole world was shaking, luggage falling out of overheads, people shouting, air hostesses rushing about, trying to reassure. Oxygen masks dropped from their compartments and people scrabbled for them, breathing deep.

She reached for hers with hands shaking from something other than the turbulence, and spared a split second to be surprised at herself before jamming the mask over Dawn's face and pulling another onto her own. She was afraid. How could that be? Maybe it was the...normalcy of all this. She was used to apocalypses and epic demon battles, not something as mundane as a plane crash.

Although Buffy wasn't unfamiliar with everyday tragedy, not after her mother. It seemed like those were the things that hit hardest.

Digging her fingernails into her seat cushion, she glanced around; people were being thrown against the roof of the cabin now -- she thought, with an unbidden lurch of her stomach, that she might have seen Andrew among them. Xander and Giles were safe in the seats in front of her, Willow and Kennedy were opposite her, and of course Dawnie was right beside her, squealing in that impossibly high-pitched voice she could conjure from nowhere. She couldn't see Faith, but if ever there was someone who could take care of themselves, it was her.

Buffy squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe.

And opened them.

And closed them, and opened them again.

She was in a tree. Upside-down, in her seat, in a huge tree, cradled unsteadily by its branches.

"Aw, crap."

~LOST~

Okay. This was no problem at all. It was only her seat that was up in the tree, so she didn't have to worry about how to get Dawn out of this situation too, at least – although she kind of did have to worry about where Dawn was if she wasn't here, but that could come later, after Buffy had successfully vacated the tree.

It wasn't the height that made it precarious, since Buffy had tackled higher heights than this before. Granted, the last time she'd leapt off something really tall, she'd landed in a glowing ball of evil energy and died, but that was no big. She'd gotten over it. No, it was the position that Buffy didn't like; upside down was generally not a fun way to be, particularly if you ran the risk of falling onto your head and dying.

Wouldn't that just make a great addition to the Watcher's Diaries, too? Buffy Summers, Slayer, broke her head falling out of a tree.

Still, it was manageable. There was a pretty sturdy-looking branch conveniently within arm's reach; Buffy grasped it tightly with one hand, using the other to try and unclip her seatbelt. She wasn't good at airplane seatbelts, though, so she had to jiggle it –

The seat lurched. Her stomach flew into her throat. There was a creaking noise which didn't sound at all good, and Buffy scrabbled at her seatbelt now as the seat slid forward ever so slowly, threatening to fall and kill her deader than she'd ever been...

There, got it! Her belt unclipped, she dropped forward out of the seat, hanging by one arm from the branch, just as some of the boughs supporting the seat snapped and it tumbled and crashed to the ground. Clapping her other hand onto the branch, Buffy swung on it and launched herself off in a Slayer-typical feat of gymnastic prowess, landing catlike on her feet on the lush jungle floor.

There were the odd pieces of metal and debris scattered around the clearing she'd found herself in. One larger chunk bore the symbol of the airline, and Buffy shot it a distasteful glance as she strode past it into the underbrush.

"Oceanic, you are so sued."

-

"Kennedy? Kennedy?!"

Willow's urgent yells sounded out across the beach, mingling with the screams and cries and blazing of fires until her voice was swamped by the wall of sound, almost inaudible. She had a large gash across her forehead, from which blood dripped down her face and clung to her hair, but the skin was even now slowly knitting itself back together. This was an unconscious effort; she was far too panicky at present to concentrate on something even as simple as healing magic.

"Kennedy! Dawn! Oh god, Dawnie!" She kept shouting, to no avail, and felt ashamed of herself when tears started to trail down her cheeks, leaving tracks in the sand that covered it.

Scrabbling to her feet, Willow dashed further up the beach, into the center of the chaos, still yelling, all the time keeping her eyes and consciousness open for any sign of her friends. There was a spell she could use, she knew it...

A locator spell? But how did it even go? Her head was such a haze of pain and panic that she couldn't remember, couldn't think, and everyone else's voices and minds were so loud in her ears...she just needed some quiet...

"SHUT UP!" she screamed with every part of herself – and it really was every part; Willow's voice was amplified magically, so that she boomed out across the fiery, wreckage crash site like she was using the world's biggest megaphone, and her mind relayed the order telepathically, without quite meaning to. She winced at that, thinking for a painful instant what Tara would have said, but it seemed to work anyway. The entire beach fell silent.

"Oh." Blinking, she cast around for a familiar face, and found one. "Xander!" The delighted yell was, unfortunately for the ears of all concerned, still at a higher decibel level than was humanely called for. Willow blanched, waving a hand to call off the spell as she ran to her best friend and flung her arms around him.

"Will! Neat trick with the thing." He hugged her back just as tight, then pulled away to look at her, noting the wound on her face with concern. Xander himself had a nasty cut below his good eye, which had mercifully just missed turning him from eyepatch-clad to just plain blind. "Have you seen anyone else?"

Her face fell. That question had to mean that he hadn't. "No. I dunno. Just you."

"Oh. Ohh..."

"Yeah."

Idly, Xander reached back and brushed some sand out of his hair. "I guess we'd better get to lookin', then." He was trying to be calm. In fact, so was Willow, but they both knew each other well enough to know that neither of them were. "Panicked" was not even an apt description. "Terrified out of their freaking minds" wasn't quite there, but it would do.

Hand in hand for the little comfort it provided, they scurried across the hot sand, passing people screaming, people crying, people rummaging through the wreckage...there was also a blonde, stubbly guy rooting through a suitcase, amassing an impressive collection of Playboys. Willow would have liked to think that Xander didn't glance, but oh yeah. He glanced.

Suddenly, there was an urgent cry for help; an older black lady was lying on the sand, unmoving. Two guys were crowded around her, trying to help, but things didn't look good.

Willow closed her eyes, muttering something under her breath, and their joined hands began to glow a pale white. As the younger of the two men broke off, yammering about pens, Willow's eyes snapped open – the woman was breathing again.

Xander gaped. "What how? I thought you couldn't do that unless it was...mystical? Reviving the dead?"

"She wasn't dead," Willow replied tersely, gazing impassively ahead. "Come on."

Before long, someone called, "Willow! Xander!" The witch spun round, a hopeful smile on her face – please Kennedy, please Kennedy – but her hopes were dashed as a battered and bruised Andrew ran toward them, waving his arms.

Rolling his eye, Xander murmured, "We're at a plane crash, and he still does this. Can that guy ever not embarrass me?"

But as the skinny geek got closer, they saw his expression, and all joviality and disappointment drained from them. Something was wrong.

"Guys..." he panted, coming to a skidding halt, bending over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath, "...it's Dawn. They...we were in the jungle, and she was..."

"What?" Willow prompted, grabbing him by the shoulders in an unusual show of aggressiveness. "C'mon, you stupid dork! Speak! Use your words!"

"They took her!" Andrew gasped. "Some weird Tarzan people came out of the trees and took Dawn! They hit me in the head and ran off and I didn't even hear them coming...or going..." He shook his head as they stared at him in horror. "Dude, it was like they beamed or something. Dawn's gone."

To be continued