Lines
Summary: Sometimes they blur. Sometimes that's for the best. Buffy isn't Buffy, not anymore.
Reread Fray this weekend and this quote "In your dreams, you're someone else. A slave. A princess. A girl in a sunlit school." Inspired me to write this.
Warnings: Rambly and confusing, little bits of gore, murder, death, nothing terribly bad.
Published: 11/20/11
She is fifteen dreaming of blood. There is a stake in her hand and she is dark-haired, dark eyed, and scrawny in a way that indicates starvation. She is white-blond cursing her gods in a language, her unconscious mind vaguely recognizes as not her own. She is black her skin dark like chocolate, fighting on a subway. On the other side of death lies waking and she has died.
A million different ways as a thousand different girls, she always dies alone.
Her dreams are not so different from reality. She is golden blonde with green eyes, and every night she fights them.
Her grade improved in French after she was Called. It is the only bonus of the slayer package that comes without a price.
Memories that are not her own taste like regret, colored by hundreds of girls who died too young. The taste is the only way she manages to keep track of what is hers and what is the collective consciousness of the Slayer.
It's harder to keep track of what is Buffy and what is Slayer after she dies. Alone like all her sisters.
She drowned you know. And then she was no longer one girl in all the world. It makes things worse.
Her name is KendraandBuffy and every night she fights them. It would be alright if this bond was two way but Kendra is not Buffy. Buffy is Kendra.
Giles doesn't need to tell her to be afraid of Spike. She knows. She asks what happens on Saturday, with Xin Rong hanging over one shoulder and Nikki Wood over the other. When he says I kill you, she remembers.
Her last gasp on a train as he snaps her neck, last words in a chaotic world. That bastard is wearing her coat. It's hers and Nikki Woods and Xin Rongs and every slayer's before them and they scream kill.
Then Kendra is dead and Buffy dreams of her murder. Buffy is there when she was murdered. Buffy closed her eyes in California and woke in Jamaica and has lived with double vision since Xander decided to play god.
Faith is all hard edges. Sharp lines and blurry spaces in between. Kakistos is Faith's monster but Buffy is the one who wakes screaming. She is the first and the last and the slayer line will die with her. She draws their dreams like light in darkness, and pulls all the ugly in Faith into herself.
It makes her strong. It makes her afraid because in her dreams she is part desert, part girl (and the girl is dark haired and dark eyed and feral).
(They chained her to the earth and remade her. She was weak once but never again.)
Buffy is all tangled up in Faith even more then she was in Kendra. They are interwoven the two of them and it's Faith's words but Buffy says them and Faith doesn't even notice.
Until.
You did it B. You killed me.
She walks in Faith's dreams helping her sort out what is and isn't and what's to come. Faith hasn't even begun and this makes her weep. Because one day faith will be everything.
Then Faith wakes and now she knows just what they are. Faith is Buffy for a bit, but Buffy is always Faith.
She is in a desert, every grain of sand a fallen enemy, every rock a fallen sister. She faces her eldest sister (herself) and says "There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones. I'll be the fireman with the floods roll back. But I won't be more then that."
She spoke prophecy. Truth spilling from her lips without realizing that she is Slayer now and a pretty girl with a silly name died with dreams of picket fences and white houses.
There is blood on her hands. It drips red on to desert sands.
She knows Dawn isn't real. Because Kendra has no memories of Buffy's sister and Buffy is Kendra. The monks miscalculated. She loves Dawn, and she wonders only once how she is her sister.
But not in the same way as she is Faith.
Faith and Buffy are interwoven, tangled up together, the lines between them nonexistent. Buffy and Dawn are separate people with borders in common. Buffy passes it off as being raised together and Dawn never notices.
It is a relief, dying.
Heaven defies English and the other human tongues she speaks as a result of what she is. The Sumatrans had a word that came close and four demon languages have words that encompass all that it was but they have no translation.
So she looks at her friends and hurts and she does not have the words necessary to tell them what they have done.
She is part desert, part girl, part sky (because angels burn a symphony of fire and starlight). The girl is blonde haired and green eyed and weeping, and she has never been more afraid.
Things never come to a head the way she expects. Sure there is the usual chaos, death, apocalypse found on the Hellmouth but they never notice that she spends most of her first year back curled up in Faith's head (because Faith doesn't remember heaven and sometimes she just wants to forget).
She avoids mirrors because sometimes when she catches sight of one out of the corner of her eye she sees her wings and the itch between her shoulders intensifies.
Time passes. She survives.
She suspects the spell Willow proposes will kill her. But she would be the mother of her line. The First. Better her then Sineya and death begins to lose meaning after three times.
Under the Seal she can feel them gathering. It's the End of Days. Again.
She has done the impossible before, has been impossible before but not like this. She wears two skins and fights in a tunnel and a crypt and she nearly killed Caleb as she was blown up. Her awareness is expanding.
She can feel the spell working. It jumps from her to the next girl to the next to the next. She is the epicenter. Focal point. Hub. For one moment the Earth turns and she stands still on the center of a mystical convergence.
Scattershot. It jumps from one girl to the next like electricity and She spreads thin. Insubstantial she spreads a net and catches their minds. She is every single one of them.
Under the seal she takes a knife to the gut and Faith falters. Amanda dies and Kennedy lashes out. Across the world a girl wakes up gasping, having dreamt of Buffy's first death.
This is the beginning.
These days everybody calls me Ma'am.
AN: Buffy fans will see the quotes and references woven into this. Reviews please? Tell me if you liked it, hated it whatever