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

This story begins during the season 5 Doctor Who episode 'The Pandorica Opens' and at no particular point in the Buffy timeline.

This story is the sequel to "The Call of the Void".

Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around;

look at the skulls of the lowly and the great.

Which belongs to one who did evil, and which to one who did good?

-Author unknown

The Pandorica. The most secure prison in the universe. Built to hold the most dangerous creature that had ever existed. Hidden beneath Stonehenge for so long that everyone thought that it was nothing but a myth.

But, in the year 102 AD, it had sent out a message to every race in the cosmos, proving them wrong. The message said only one thing.

It was opening.

And everyone had come. The sky above Earth was filled with more spaceships than could be counted, more species than Earth had ever seen, and each of them were there, the Doctor thought, to make a grab for whatever was in the Pandorica so that they could use it for their own ends.

He'd fought them before, the aliens that filled the skies. He'd driven them back, stopped them time after time. They were scared of him, scared of one man who never carried a weapon. He could use that to buy himself some time.

And so, voice blaring thanks to an augmented megaphone, the Doctor stood beneath the space ships whizzing overhead and said "The question of the hour is, who's got the Pandorica? Answer, I do. Next question. Who's coming to take it from me? Come on! Look at me. No plan, no back up, no weapons worth a damn. Oh, and something else. I don't have anything to lose! So, if you're sitting up there in your silly little spaceship, with all your silly little guns, and you've got any plans on taking the Pandorica tonight, just remember who's standing in your way. Remember every black day I ever stopped you, and then, and then, do the smart thing. Let somebody else try first."

And they retreated. The spaceships that were filling the sky as they descended, ready to make claim on the Pandorica, they retreated. Because they did remember.

"I have something to add."

The voice wasn't the Doctor's. Nor did it belong to any of the Romans that the Doctor had gathered around the Pandorica as a last, desperate line of defence. Nor did it belong to Amy, the woman who travelled with the Doctor.

It belonged to a petite blonde woman. She hadn't been standing there a moment earlier, but she hadn't teleported in. In fact, there was no technology on her whatsoever. Nothing to explain her sudden appearance, and certainly nothing to explain why her voice, despite being at a normal speaking level, appeared to be as audible as if she was standing right behind them. Right behind everyone, whether they were on Earth or on a spaceship.

The blonde looked up. There was no possibility that she could see the ships, not now that they had retreated. Not with just her eyes. But, setting aside that impossibility, it still seemed as though she could. "It isn't the Doctor that you should be afraid of. There's no reason to be afraid of a single man, a man without a plan. Between you, you have more than enough firepower to destroy this planet and everyone on it. You wouldn't even have to see him as you obliterate him from the face of the universe."

The Romans looked at the Doctor. They'd followed him, this mad man who spoke of otherworldly creatures. They'd looked to him as a leader, as someone who could save them. But he was just a man.

"The Doctor isn't the threat here. That would be the people next to you. This alliance that you've made, it can't work. Say that one species does decide to come down here and try their luck. The Doctor would be no obstacle. He can't fight, and you know that he can't talk his way out of this one. The problem is the people that you call your allies. Because the moment you extend yourself, the moment you show your hand… that's the moment that you're weakest. The moment that those people who called themselves your allies only moments ago remember all those things you've done to them, how much power they could have if only you were out of the picture. It's not the Doctor that you should be frightened of. You shouldn't even be frightened of making the first move. The thing that should be frightening you is that, if you don't make the first move, someone else will. And that move might just be to remove you from the game."

The blonde looked down, and saw the Romans who were looking uneasily at the men who only moments before had been their comrades-in-arms. She watched as they wondered whether they might be subject to a friendly yet fatal injury, leaving the way open for their comrades, their murderers, to advance. She saw all of that, and saw that it was good.

"Who are you?' the Doctor asked.

The blonde didn't reply. She merely held up a hand. Seconds later, she closed it into a fist.

At the same time, the sky was filled with light. The Earth shook, and there was a sound like thousands upon thousands of spaceships exploding. Perhaps all of this had nothing to do with her making a fist. Perhaps it was just untold numbers of suspicious races, turning on each other all at once. Perhaps not, also.

The Doctor spoke again. "Who are you?"

The blonde tilted her head and smiled. She looked mildly confused. "We're the people who just saved the universe."

"We?"

There was nothing about the blonde's face that changed. The smile remained exactly the same, and yet there was about her an air of almost palpable sadness. "Don't you recognise us, Doctor? You've met us before. I was wearing a different face last time we met, but then so were you. Don't tell us that you don't remember, Doctor. We remember you. We remember you very clearly. You and the girl that you travelled with. We told you about her. Don't you remember?"

The Doctor paused for the briefest of moments before saying "No. No, I don't remember you."

"Would you like us to remind you, Doctor?" Again, the blonde's expression didn't change. The smile was still there, still unchanged, and yet it no longer looked like a smile. It looked like the mirthless, toothy grin that you might see on a shark right before it tears you to pieces. "I called you the killer of your own kind. I spoke to you in many voices, and I talked to you of rage and bile and hatred. Do you remember now, Doctor?"

"No." The Doctor said quietly. "That's impossible. You died. I saw you die."

The smiled fell from the blonde's face, and pity dripped from her voice as she said "Oh, Doctor, do you really think that I could die? I did tell you. The thought of me is forever. But enough about that. Don't you remember me? We wore this face, oh, about eighteen-hundred years from now. We'd been in a fire. You found us, and we turned and walked into a shadow. We wouldn't blame you for forgetting, you know. That's what you do. And it was a long time ago." The blonde smiled. "I was called Buffy then. I'd almost forgotten. I went to Lux. Little planet, six suns. Only has a nightfall every few thousand years. I thought it would be good for us."

Before the Doctor could stop himself, he asked "What happened?"

The blonde's smile widened. "Sunset."

It was a perfectly innocent statement. It was delivered in a perfectly conversational tone of voice, and there was absolutely no reason for those words to send a shiver down the spines of everyone who heard them.

"If you're telling the truth, if you are… who you say you are, then why are you here? No, scratch that - what did you mean, you just saved the universe?"

The blonde laughed. The laugh rolled on and on, bouncing off the rocks and echoing in ways that no laugh should. It didn't stop even when the blonde shut her mouth, and it only quietened when she started talking. "Have you looked in the Pandorica yet?"

"No. It's not open yet."

"Would you like to hear a secret?" The blonde lowered her voice to a whisper, although that didn't diminish how audible she was in the slightest. "It's empty."

The Doctor frowned. "No. No no no. That doesn't make sense, all those aliens, all those ships, they wouldn't show up just for an empty box. The legends say that-"

"There's a nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. We remember. Tell us Doctor, if the Pandorica is empty… who do you know who fits that description?"

"Lots of things. The Nightmare Child. You."

"You flatter me, Doctor, but that rumour isn't about us. It isn't as though that prison could hold us, in any case." The blonde leant forward. "It's you, Doctor. The most feared being in the universe."

The Doctor started back in surprise. "Me? Me? What did I do? I'm not… I don't-"

"You don't force an armada of more spaceships and more species than has been seen since the Time War to retreat, just by saying a few words?"

The Doctor looked thoroughly nonplussed. "But… why?"

"Silence will fall." The blonde said simply. "They've seen the cracks in the universe. The universe is ending, Doctor. Someone broke it." She shrugged. "It wasn't hard to convince them that it was you."

"You-"

It began to get darker. This was strange, because even though it was night, the stars were shining and the moon was full. The torches that the Romans were carrying did not go out. They were still as bright as they had ever been, but they seemed to be less effective than they had been a few seconds ago. "I will not have you bluster at me, Doctor. We have had a civil conversation, but I will not stand here and listen to you lecture me. Do not forget who it is that you are talking to." If the blonde had sounded scary before, if she had caused people to break out in cold sweat just by speaking calmly, that was nothing compared to how she sounded now. There was an odd resonance, an echo in her voice which spoke of the death of stars and the extinction of galaxies.

And then she smiled, and the light came back, and you could be forgiven for thinking that she was nothing more than the petite blonde girl that she appeared to be. "Besides, it's what they're for. They died, all of them, and they'll blame it on you. The Doctor, the most feared being in the galaxy. Just another piece to your legend. Soaring high on the blood and fear that you leave behind you wherever you go. The universe is afraid of you, and this will show them why. Today we rise. Never to fall."

"But the cracks… they had nothing to do with me. And this… people won't even get to hear about this. Not now. Not after you've killed them all. There's no one left to tell the story."

"We'll tell it. We'll tell it on a billion billion different worlds, and when you show up in your little blue box they'll run the other way. You know as well as I do that no matter what you do, no matter how many lives you save, in the end all that people will remember is the story. And, Doctor, I am so very good at telling stories." The blonde paused for a second. "They would have worked it out anyway, you know. The link between you and the cracks. Your TARDIS explodes, and the universe dies with it. We just made them get there a little faster. They would have ruined everything, Doctor. They would have locked you away so that you couldn't stop it. We just led them to right conclusion and then made everything a little… darker."

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but the blonde held up a hand and the words that he had been about to say never made it past his lips. "Shh. It's our turn now. We don't like silence, Doctor. I thought, once, that it would be better if all you little creatures with your little suns just died and left nothing but the darkness and the quiet and the chaos. But then I met a little girl who was so desperate to save people that she didn't realise what she was turning them into. I learned from her and I thought… why kill them? There's so much more that you can do, just by talking. So much despair, and you can keep coming back. There's always more to sow. So we keep them alive, Doctor, where we can. That's why we're here. So that you don't get stuffed into the Pandorica and you can fly your TARDIS away from here. So that you can stop the explosion. We saved you, Doctor, you and the universe. We're not done with it yet. So we save worlds, save the universe… and damn it, at the same time. Because, Doctor, in the end no one will remember if we were truly good or truly evil. They'll only remember the stories. We aim to be the storyteller, and if that's going to happen then there needs to be people to hear us. Hear both of us. There can be no silence. Goodbye, Doctor. Look for me under different circumstances."

And then she was gone, as though she had never been standing there. Slowly, ash began to rain from the sky.