PARADOX
By Sauscony

E-mail: sauscony@forty-two.co.nz
Rating: R for a couple of rude words
Pairings: Buffy/Riley, Buffy/Giles (if you don't like either, stop reading now)
Summary: A prophecy says the Slayer's daughter will save the world. But's who's to be her father? And is there someone out to change things? (Set in the summer between seasons four and five.)
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel characters are copyrighted ©20th Century Fox, Joss Whedon, Mutant Eniy, UPN and the WB, and are used without permission. No copyright infringment is intended.

* * * * * Prologue * * * * *

Fate really sucks sometimes, you know that?

When I was a kid, growing up in what - if I'm going to be honest, and I guess I have to be while telling this story - was a classic unhappy home, I was fascinated by the idea of time travel.

What if I could go back in time and fix things, correct the mistakes? Turn indifference into love, criticism into compassion, people living behind masks into the true, alive, human beings they were supposed to be.

I could make my father love my mother - love her for her courage, her strength and her own unique personality that he sees only as an embarrassment - not just for her beauty and her body. If that is even love...

I could give my mother back her sense of self-esteem; the power and strength and self-reliance I only ever saw the ghostly remains of when I was a child, as she tried to mould herself to be what my father wanted her to be.

And maybe, just maybe, I could make my father love me, make my mother have the guts to stand up to him.

Maybe.

Then I got older.

For starters, I learned that time travel wasn't actually possible. But even then I still had my imagination, and I could dream, couldn't I? After all, science was advancing every day.

Next, I found out about temporal paradoxes. Like the famous one about how if you went back in time and killed your grandfather you would never be born, so you couldn't go back in time and he would survive and you would be born, so you could go back in time and kill your grandfather... And so on and on and on. You get the idea.

So on the day when I had an unexpected visitor - a most supernatural visitor of the kind my father refused to believe in and my mother never mentioned - who told me that under certain conditions time travel was possible, I was aware of the dangers. But I decided to go anyway. The reward sounded worth it. All my childhood dreams come true.

All I had to do was make my mother happy.

I just resolved not to kill any of my grandparents.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot.

My father named me Rebecca - Rebecca Finn, after his sister who died when she was a baby - and despite what I was told before I agreed to undertake this misadventure, once I had been there for a while I began to suspect that the real reason for my presence was something completely different from what I had been led to believe.

After all, there's more than one way to make sure someone is happy.

Like I said, sometimes Fate really sucks.