Author's note: I do not own Buffy or Doctor Who. Please don't sue me for using them.

This story begins at the start of Buffy season 6 and at no particular point in the Doctor Who timeline.

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled

-Lord Byron.

It was dark.

That was the first thing that Buffy noticed, when she awoke. She noticed it before she even became aware that it was she who noticed it. She opened her eyes, or at least she assumed she did, because there was no difference either way. The darkness was there, pressing down on her.

Buffy couldn't think of any reason as to why she might be somewhere so overwhelmingly dark. The last thing she could remember was –

Then there was a slight fuzziness in her thoughts, and when it was finished Buffy felt perfectly sure that she had fully recalled her last memory, processed it and realised that it had nothing whatsoever to do with her present situation. She was completely unaware that she had in fact done none of these things.

Buffy didn't lie there long. A tentative exploration revealed that she was in a small box. It was soft, as though it was lined with something. Obviously, it was designed to keep her lying down, because with all her strength she couldn't shift the lid at all.

So Buffy lay back and pondered the situation. She was alone. She had to get out by herself or not at all. She couldn't stay there for ever, after all. She had things to do.

Buffy scratched at the lid, trying to move it even slightly. Realising the futility of trying to put pressure on an immovable object, she decided that the only way to get free was to break out. If she couldn't open the box, she could at least break through the lid.

So she did, and she was promptly covered in a deluge of dirt. Okay. So she was buried. Buffy knew what they called boxes that held people that got buried. Coffins. But she wasn't dead. Wasn't a vampire either, not if her heartbeat was anything to go by.

Well, she should probably get out then. Her being buried alive didn't help anyone, least of all herself. She couldn't do anything if she was left to rot underground.

So she clawed her way to the surface, sweeping dirt behind her, scrabbling her way to the surface. It didn't take as long as she had expected. Perhaps she hadn't been buried as deeply as she would have thought.

Before she had even realised that she was free, Buffy noticed how bright everything was. There was light everywhere, from streetlamps to starlight. It had been so long since she had seen light. Her eyes watered as they adjusted.

Buffy scrubbed at her eyes with a sleeve, and looked around. She was definitely in a cemetery. She knew those well. She'd spent a lot of time in them. She hadn't spent time in her own grave before, at least not that she remembered. Still, there was a first time for everything. How often did people climb out of their own burial place, after all? Not often, she imagined. At least not for humans. And she was human, so gloriously human, standing there in the light.

Buffy smiled, and then started walking. She had no particular destination in mind. If she picked a direction and walked in it long enough, then she was bound to end up somewhere interesting. There had to be something out there. After so long underground, Buffy hungered for experience.

She found something faster than she had expected. A pair of demons, each carrying swords, apparently eager to set upon a little blonde wandering down the street all by herself. They paused when they saw the state of her clothes, and stopped outright when they saw her face. She was the Slayer, after all. Of course they would stop before her.

"Looks like there's another one." One of the demons remarked.

The other demon ran a critical eye over her. "Doesn't look like she's in as good a condition as the other one. Won't be nearly as much fun. What do you say to cutting her down right here?"

Oh, no. This wasn't right, wasn't right at all. Demons didn't just stand in front of her and talk so casually about her butchery as though she was a slice of meat that hadn't stopped walking yet. She was the Slayer. Right about now, they should be making a run for it before she cut them down.

They certainly shouldn't be raising their swords and looking as though they were about to be doing something distasteful.

"Stop."

Her voice shouldn't have carried. It was barely louder than a whisper, the merest remnant of a voice that hadn't spoken for a long time. But it did carry, and the demons did stop. They looked about as surprised as Buffy did by their reaction.

Buffy took a breath, and she was surprised to smell smoke on the air, as the wind carried the scent of burning wood and melting plastic and blood to her nose. She wondered why she hadn't smelt any of this before. The answer came almost before she had thought the question – of course, she hadn't taken a breath before.

But then there was a fuzziness in her brain, and Buffy forgot that this was the first breath that she had taken since waking up in the coffin. As far as she was concerned, she had been breathing all along.

"Stop." Buffy said again, and her voice was stronger this time. To her own surprise, as well as that of the demons, they showed no sign of being about to move.

And then the words poured out of her, as though there was a dam that had broken in her throat, a dam that had been holding back a torrent of words that had just been waiting to spill out. "You're scared. You're scared because all you know how to do is pillage and kill and burn your way across the continent, and you can't do that anymore. Even here, in Sunnydale, on the Hellmouth, you could only come here once I was dead and buried. Just one girl held off all of you, and I didn't even know you were there. I didn't know that you iexisted/i, and I still scared you away." A dim part at the back of her mind wonders at what she's saying, because she hasn't the faintest idea where the words are coming from but she knows for certain that they are true as she says them. "You were scared to come here because of me, and you can't go anywhere else because the world has grown up and left you behind. If you rode into another town and tried to take it like you're doing here, you'd be annihilated. The humans would wipe you out without a second thought."

One of the demons says "We're not scared of anything." But the silence that had existed before he gave his response had gone on just slightly too long for him to be even a little bit convincing.

"Of course you are." Buffy said, dismissing him so entirely that he might not even have been there for all the notice that she gave him. And then she looked at him, and smiled, and it was a smile with too many teeth in it and not nearly enough mirth. "And you should be. Because either you die here and now, or you run away. And if you run, you will watch as the world forgets you so entirely that you won't even be remembered as a tale to scare the children. No one will remember you, and you will just… waste away." Buffy took a step forward, and the demons took a step back. Her smile became gleeful, like a child that has discovered a long lost toy. "So what's it going to be? Will you die now, or die later?"

The demons look each other, and then at the dirty little woman with the bleeding hands who wasn't holding anything even close to a weapon.

It was not a fight. Not even close. The only word that fits is 'slaughter'. Because, unlike her, the demons had just been slabs of meat that hadn't stopped moving yet.

Buffy stood there, watching the blood pool on the ground. Both parts of her, the part that had been behind the outpouring of words and the part that had wondered where they were coming from, watched as it spread across the pavement. It was dark and thick, not like human blood at all.

The street lights twinkle above, reflected darkly in the blood as Buffy moved on, not even sparing another glance at the mangled corpses of the demons that had tried to take her town from her.