A/N So I'm in the mood to clear out all the fanfics I have festering on my computer. This is a little Buffy oneshot sort of inspired by Kairos Impending's 'Those We Wish Were Here With Us'. Check that out, it's awesome. Anyway please read and review!
This is her favourite time of day, dusk. It's not dark yet so she can still see the ground under her feet and sense the sun, but it's not blindingly bright either. She can't see everything; it isn't all laid out before her in technicolor glory, all the bodies and the gore.
The wind still bites harshly at her as she pulls the ragged blanket closer. Sometimes she wishes she could spend less time outside in the dusk and go inside. A blazing fire and the warm lights of a happy home were luxuries she never had as a teenager either. Anyway, she likes the dusk and it's not like she has a house to go to now, much less a home.
Perhaps if she found a stake she could go to the cemetery and kid herself that she's still sixteen. Her creature of the night boyfriend could come and join her and they could have a picnic only to be interrupted by her annoyingly loyal human friends. But she's not sixteen, she's twenty-five and to be quite honest she has no idea where her friends are. As for the boyfriend, he hasn't been such in a long time and anyhow she's pretty sure he's dead.
Screams nearby interrupt her enforced solitude so she runs toward them, wishing that this didn't have to be her job. There were some others for a while and that was refreshing but they were young and eager to prove themselves and the young and eager were first to fall. Old and cynical, that's her, at least in Slayer terms.
The screams turn out to be from a young woman who must have been either very smart or very lucky to survive this long. She thinks it's probably the latter.
However, before she gets a chance to stake the damn vampire someone else has pulled it away and it is dust. The man nods at her in acknowledgement. It's good to finally see a familiar face in this wasteland.
"Buffy," he says.
"Robin," she replies. There is very little feeling in her voice.
They stick together after that. Splitting up is never a good move in post-apocalyptic California. He seems to remember most of what he's been doing since the last time she saw him which is more than she can say for herself.
He was with Faith and Dawn when they had been forced to split, and the three of them had joined forces with Angel and his son, Connor. Buffy finds that she does care after all for news of her sister, not that Robin has any. When the five of them were separated, Robin ended up alone.
It is up to Buffy to tell him that his girlfriend is dead. She saw Faith and Angel maybe a month previously and fought alongside them but in the end it was futile. It always is.
Buffy and Robin don't talk much but she is grateful for the company. Conversation, however sparse, is the only thing to stop a person going mad when the world's in this state.
Yet it isn't Robin that snaps her from her almost-catatonic state of uncaring. That's Xander's job, or rather Xander's corpse's job. They find him on Buffy's twenty-sixth birthday and she can honestly say she's never had a worse birthday present.
After that, General Buffy returns. She begins to seek out fellow freedom fighters; to form an army. Before long there are ten of them. Andrew Wells (and Buffy has no idea how he made it and Xander didn't (she doesn't think it's fair either)), three people who knew Angel: Nina Ash, Kate Lockley and Groo, and four others who may or may not have been slayers (except for Todd).
Even in the midst of the apocalypse they can still save people and that feels good. It feels less good to know that the vamps and demons probably got them another night when the Scooby Gang Mark 2 couldn't be there.
They've even formed a family of sorts; it's a strange, large, constantly bickering and fighting for their lives dysfunctional sort of family but it's no worse than when the Potentials were camped out at Revello Drive, something Buffy, Robin and Andrew can all agree on.
Of course, there is a downside to having such a large group. They aren't as inconspicuous as they had hoped to be and they're dropping like flies. Then again, with such an abnormally fast recruiting rate it doesn't make too much difference to their numbers.
There are fourteen of them when it happens. Todd comes back from a scouting mission to tell her that there's another gang in town. He's pretty sure they're human.
So the Scoobies ambush this alien gang. Buffy gets the surprise of her life (and there have been a few) to discover that this new gang is also named Scoobies 2 and their leader in none other than her best friend.
It is the happiest she's been in a long time when she meets the other Scoobies. There's Gunn, an old friend of Angel's, his girlfriend, Anne, who Buffy thinks she met when she ran away that time, Spike, Rona, Vi, Gwen, another old friend of Angel's, and then there's Connor. This isn't the way she's expecting to meet her probably-dead vampire ex-boyfriend's impossible son but it gives her hope. Connor was the only other surviving member of the team that her sister had been in. She hopes and hopes for her sister and in that moment goes through more emotions than she believes herself capable of.
Then Connor steps aside. Dawn is there. It's the happiest reunion ever and for one glorious minute Buffy forgets that the world has been overthrown by unspeakable evil. She forgets that Xander, Angel, Faith, Nina and Giles are gone. Then she remembers.
In the following weeks the two groups combine. They now have something that could count as an army and she feels hope that they can lead the world from the darkness. And they're good. She has Dawn and Willow and finds a solid friend in Connor.
Until it all falls apart. They prepare for their big battle to take back the world and it comes. It's bigger and stronger than anything they expected. Within hours they are all dead. Except her. Robin, who she'd stayed with for so many months, irritating little Andrew, loyal to the end Willow and her sister, Dawn, are all gone. So she finds she really doesn't care anymore. There is no reason to save the world if there is nothing left in her world she wants to save.
So she finds herself outside under a ragged blanket, at dusk. Dusk is her favourite time of day. It isn't peaceful like it used to be. The lilting wind does nothing to comfort her. Dusk is harsh and real. It lets her know she's still alive and it never, ever, lets her forget.