Willow Rosenberg brushed a dirty strand of red hair out of her eye as she surveyed the broken ruins of Los Angeles. The shattered city stretched out before her, gutted buildings and devastated streets dimly lit by the flickering orange light of a thousand fires.
"Postapocalyptic" was the only word that came to mind, and even that didn't begin to describe it.
A gentle breeze blew away from the city toward the hill on which Willow stood, carrying with it some of the smoke which billowed from the hell LA had become. Willow hacked a pained cough and murmured several words of quasi-Latin under her breath. A fierce wind blew up from behind her, and buffeted away the smoke and stench of the ruined city. She winced and inhaled deeply in relief, sighing as she raised her gaze back to the city.
Willow had been to LA before Sunnydale's destruction several times, mostly to poke around for computer parts that you could only really find at bigger stores in the city. She remembered noisy, kinda smelly streets and towering highrises that had overawed her young adolescent self glinting in the sun.
The city laid out before her was a twisted, evil vision of the one she remembered, its streets clogged with twisted wreckage and its buildings gutted, sagging ruins.
Confronted with the stark reality of the situation, Willow closed her eyes as a tidal wave of emotions threatened to overwhelm her.
So much had happened in the past few weeks. At times Willow managed to convince herself it wasn't real; that she'd been sucked into a parallel Bizarro Dimension, like the one her sadistic evil vampire twin had come from, or that some superpowered crazy was making her nightmares walk the earth again. She and Giles would dig through the books to figure out what was going on, Xander would make some corny jokes, Buffy would utter a couple of really specific violent threats as to what she'd do when she found the monster responsible, and then they'd all go off to slay the baddie together and restore everything to normal, just like they always did.
She could only willfully ignore the harsh truth of the situation for so long, however. The proof was everywhere. People who weren't people anymore running mad, killing anything that moved. Society in ruins, the stench of death permeating the air no matter where you went.
The apocalypse had finally come, and it was more terrible than Willow had ever imagined.
Willow herself had been far from civilization when the wipes happened. Jury's still out on whether that was a blessing or a curse.
She could still remember that last day perfectly; the day before the world went mad.
Willow uncovered plans by a nest of cultists to raise an ancient demon in the mountains to the east. She'd gone to see Buffy to tell her about the sorcerers, and offered to deal with them herself. It wasn't likely to be too dangerous, as the demon was a relative of Gachnar's, and Willow had needed a change of scenery, however brief.
"Alright, Will," Buffy said, "if you think you can take care of these mooks, I trust you. Be careful!"
Willow nodded, smiled, and set off to deal with the badness. She hadn't spoken to her friend since.
Buffy and Xander…God, I hope they're alright, she thought.
When the wipes began they'd both been at the Slayer Council HQ in LA, as far as Willow knew. Willow had no idea if they were dead, or…worse. She'd had no contact with her friends since the calls went out; phones weren't really an option anymore, and Willow didn't think she could do the kind of long-distance telepathy necessary to find them.
Even if I could contact them, she thought, I'd have to search a whole lot of minds in the city, and those poor people's brains scare me. It's like everything that made them who they are has been ripped out and replaced with some kind of mindless rage. If I touched one of their consciousnesses by accident, I don't know that I'd be coming back out. Just gotta hope Buff and Xand are OK and find them the old-fashioned way.
At first, Willow hadn't permitted herself even to entertain the idea that they might possibly have been caught up in the wipes-that they might have gotten that fatal phone call and turned, losing everything which made them the only thing she cared about in this world. The thought that she might never again see Xander's goofy grin, Buffy's impish, teasing smile or Giles' nervous polishing of his glasses ached at Willow like a physical pain.
Willow once again thanked the goddesses for the fact that Giles had been out retrieving a new Slayer in the Australian Outback when all this happened.
He's Giles; he'll figure out what happened way faster than I did, and he'll keep himself safe. He has to.
Willow had had no idea that anything was wrong until she'd come down out of the Rockies after dealing with the cult. Pillars of dark smoke curled over the horizon, while abandoned cars and human corpses began to litter the roadway as she progressed back toward civilization.
Willow had feared that there had been some kind of demon attack which the Scoobies had failed to prevent, and stopped in the first town she could find to ascertain what had happened. A small town of no more than a couple thousand people, much of its populace had been converted already, and those who hadn't were for the most part already dead. Willow was horrified to see apparent evidence of blatant magical attacks on mortals on a scale not seen for anything less than the opening of a Hellmouth or a full-scale invasion by the Senior Partners.
The truth, though, had been worse than she possibly could have imagined.
Willow smiled mirthlessly.
All these years of stopping vampires, tweaked-out demon gods and ultimate evil from ending the world, and the real apocalypse comes from humanity, she thought. No wonder none of us saw it coming.
Willow had been lucky in that she had been able to shield herself from the effects of the wipes with a protective charm. She wasn't exactly certain who was behind the wipes; all Willow had been able to piece together was that a single, mysterious call had gone out globally. Willow wasn't an idiot, though; she had heard the rumors of the Dollhouses. Everyone had, in the past couple of years.
The difference between Willow and everyone, though, was that she believed the rumors.
Once I get to LA, she thought, I'll find this Dollhouse, and I'll make them answer for their crimes. For what they did to my friends.
Willow Rosenberg brushed a dirty strand of black hair out of her eye, and set off down the hill toward the broken city.