Season 1 Episode 0:
Prologue
As usual while a lot of the characters in this fic are my originals I do not own or claim any part of Joss' Buffyverse
The barmaid had had the life drained from her. Those before her were killed by beasts of different sorts. A few had slowly willed themselves to their deaths after many hours of torture. There had been so many girls and so much blood spilled. Few were old enough to be considered women yet they were old enough to die for the world. And she watched.
"You and only you, alone," said the Shadow in the desert. Stretching its long body over a rotting log, the hiding place of a thousand critters desperate to escape the scotching heat of the sun, she watched it. And she asked again, the same question, and her voice was swallowed up by the desert wind and the Shadow did not listen and was gone.
And there was a little girl. She stood there in rags and dark skin and a face smeared with the dirt of the desert.
"You are of them, of her, reborn in new flesh, to create more bloodshed in the name of Men against the Old Ones. You are their destruction; you are their death, absolute. You are nothing else, but alone," said the little girl. Once again she tried to speak, to scream, to ask that same question and again the wind swallowed it up from her throat. "Look," said the little girl, and she saw. The Men. They had Chosen, they had chained to the rocks, ignoring cries for freedom. They summoned the Shadow and she became it. Yet, she was Chosen. "As you are, as all have been since then, you shall become Death.
And there's nothing I can do about it.
Rinnie awoke shaking as if she had left her body while asleep and had fallen back into herself.
"Holy crap, what a nightmare," she was hit with a sudden wave of pain. Her ears were popping. Damn this high altitude. The old woman sitting next to her gave her a nasty snare. Got a problem, lady? She wanted to say. Instead she asked, "I'm sorry, did I disturb you?" in the most polite voice she could manage. The old woman only made a sniffing noise and turned away from her. Rinnie sat back in her seat and watched the clouds drift by in her window.
God, get me off this freakin' plane. Anywhere's got to be better than this. Well, except for where I'm leaving. The last few months, well more like the last year had been hell back in Seminole. First they'd shipped her off to the clinic and that hadn't been a picnic. The doctors said she was unresponsive to treatment. Treatment, what freakin' treatment? How could you treat what was going on with her? It wasn't like she had a sickness that could be flushed out with pills and a shot of penicillin. She had said as much to Dr. Morris but he'd only shook his head at her and responded with 'It's a sickness of the mind'
Crap
So mom took her home and they played it like everything was normal. Normal in the way that she didn't bother to go back to school and her mom pretended not to notice or even care. After six weeks of this and a several calls from the school her mother had decided it was best to ship Rinnie off to somewhere she was not. 'So I don't have to look at your face anymore, knowing that you're just going to take up space in my house and not do anything useful with yourself', she said. It was why Rinnie hadn't fought when the idea of sending her off to Grandma's had come up. That and the fact that she'd get to see Kimber again. That was just an added bonus to the deal.
Who knows, maybe I'll stop having these dreams. Maybe I'll stop being mad at everyone and everything. Maybe this will work. Perhaps all she needed was a new town, a place where no one had known her since the first grade. She could start over here, be normal like she had been before except this time she would be better, she would be happy. The plane decreased altitude and she realized they were coming in for a landing. The PA system cracked and the almost discernable voice of the pilot was muffled.
"Welcome to Sunnydale Airport, the Sunniest Town in California. Please remain seated as we come in for a landing."
Home, sweet home, here I am.
AN: This is just a really short kick off my AU Buffyverse fic that I'll be working on starting January. I've planned to treat this like a series and have close to 8 seasons (12 chapters each) mapped out. I hope this gets you guys wanting more. Please Review :)
