Chapter Four: Blindsided

As Buffy stepped into her house that afternoon, a house she shared with the people that meant the most to her… or, at least, most of them, she realized she had been wrong, ignorantly so. While driving home from her appointment, she had felt as though she finally knew what it was like to hit rock bottom. After finding out what she had learned…. Even if the doctor himself feared he was inaccurate in his hesitant diagnosis, she knew it in her heart to be true. It was simply too agonizing not to be real. Perhaps her automatic acceptance was pessimistic, but too many things – bad things – had happened to her in her relatively short lifespan for Buffy to hope for the best anymore. She was well past the point of blind faith and naïve trust. Once that realization was achieved, a person could not fall any lower… or so she had thought.

With a tired, defeated sigh, she dropped her eyes onto the table by the stairs, the place where she always kept her things. Despite the fact that nothing was the same as it had been just an hour before, that, at least – her habits, shaped and molded by countless repetitions – could remain constant. True, it didn't particularly matter, but, faced with the sudden bleakness of her world, the small familiarity was a slight, if not exactly comfort, than a consolation. Besides, even if she wanted to place her keys in another location, Buffy wasn't sure she'd be able to find an uncluttered, clean spot in the entire expanse of her home to do so.

Both dirty and clean laundry littered the floor. None of it was folded, and none of it was sorted, but, rather, the items were simply tossed about at random, no apparent sense of order or purpose evident. Used dishes lined the kitchen counter and filled the sink, evidence of the fact that someone had been cooking that day but had either decided they didn't want to clean up after themselves or had simply been called away before such action could be taken. The cushions on the couch were tossed off, along with the pillows, creating a maze of obstacles across the living room floor. Knickknacks were moved and misplaced, a thin sheen of flour coated anything that could catch and hold a particle of dust, and books were scattered across the floor, up the stairs, and on top of any free, available surface. There was even a partially filled bag of garbage spewing its contents haphazardly by the back door.

As long as no one was hurt, Buffy knew that she shouldn't care about the mess. After all, she herself had been to blame for several home catastrophes in the past, but, after the day she had just experienced, the last thing in the world that she wanted to do was pick up after somebody else. Physically, mentally, and, more importantly, emotionally, she was exhausted, bone tired, and so weary that she wasn't sure she'd be able to face the light of day ever again. The idea of pushing aside her fatigue to load the dishwasher, run the vacuum, and actually manage to find the floor that she suspected resided underneath the destruction of her home made the tears she had been so careful to push aside, to conceal, come to the surface.

Stubbornly, she had made it through her meeting with Doctor Feldman, out of his office, into her car, and all the way across town without breaking down, but, now, standing in her own foyer, if nothing else, the visible proof that life still did exist, that she couldn't simply shrivel up and die in order to hide from the truth and pain confronting her face on, she finally buckled. Not physically, of course, for no matter what, as the slayer, she could face much more rigorous forms of weariness, but psychologically. The shattered, destroyed sobs wracked her delicate shoulders and chest, silent screams of pain rippling through her, for the sheer force of her emotions was too strong to materialize vocally. With muscles tensed as if, subconsciously, the slayer instinct inside of her wanted to lash out and bodily pummel her unseen, unconquerable opponent, she stood frozen, the shock, and the disillusionment, and the complete lack of hope enveloping her in an impenetrable cocoon of concrete misery. And the tears – salty, mocking globes of self-pity and remorse – didn't stop, wouldn't stop, as if her own body now suddenly was beyond her control.

"Yep, I totally bawled, too, when I saw this place," Xander suddenly announced from the entrance to the living room. Where he had come from, where he had been in the house that she had been so blind and deaf to his presence, Buffy was at a loss to say. "I'm talking when Lassie bit the big one and Little Foot found out his parents went to dinosaur heaven combined tears. It wasn't pretty, let me tell you."

She expected for him to make some kind of joke about how a slayer shouldn't be afraid of a little elbow grease, how she could face the baddies most in need of plastic surgery and not bat a single lash but the idea of cleaning was enough to bring her to her knees, but, instead, Xander pressed on with the one question she knew she was supposed to avoid hearing, the very one she knew she couldn't deal with.

"So, where were you all day, Buff?"

Ignoring his query, she, instead, posed one of her own. "What happened to this place?"

"Willow, new spell book, sudden realization that she forgot to write a term paper," he answered. "That's where she is, by the way – at school, working on it. I must say, despite the mess, that, after years of listening to her lecture me about putting things off to the last minute, I'm enjoying the results of Willow procrastination. I've never seen her more distracted. It's better than coffee. I think I'll be able to use this to my advantage… somehow. Maybe I'll get her to cough me up some sudden inheritance spells or a few handsome potions, not that this face could be improved upon that much more."

He would have continued, he would have rambled on for hours if she would have let him, and she should have let him, because, while caught within the crosshairs of his own vanity and self-worth, he would have completely forgotten about the fact that she had been MIA that afternoon – again, but she couldn't allow him his current track of distraction. Rather, she needed an answer. "Where's…?"

"Oh, she's with G-man," her friend replied without waiting for or, apparently, needing the rest of the question. "But don't ask me more than that, because that's all Willow told me before she literally shoved me out of the doorway and took off on her broomstick." Laughing at his own comment, he added, "not literally, of course. After all, we both know she prefers vacuums. They have more horsepower."

That, of course, was another joke. Not in the mood for another of Xander's common and not really all that humorous stand up routines, Buffy moved towards the stairs, stepping over and bypassing all the clutter strewn across the floor. But Xander wasn't accepting her wordless dismissal. Running in front of her, he blocked her progression towards the steps, crossing his arms to emphasize his determination. "You still haven't answered my question, Buff."

"I was out."

It was vague, it was trivializing, and she knew, before it had even finished leaving her lips, that he wouldn't allow it to settle the issue between them. "Don't," he warned her simply. "After everything we've been through, everything we've helped you with, we – I – deserve some kind of explanation for your recent behavior, Buffy. You've been distant, absentminded, gone, and, when we ask you what's going on, you stonewall us. That's only cool for eccentric Civil War military dudes… which you are not one of."

"Look, where I was, it's personal."

"Oh, you mean like the last time you started doing this," he retorted snidely, the sudden strength of his bitterness shocking and hurting her.

Taking a step back and nearly tripping over an umbrella, Buffy gasped in emotional injury. "You have no right to go there, to throw that in my face. You know now what I was going through back then."

"Yeah, I do," Xander admitted, "and I also know that history is starting to repeat itself."

"It's not… it's different this time," the slayer promised him. Realizing that, no matter what he protested, she did not have to explain herself to him or anybody else, Buffy straightened her spine and rolled her shoulders back. Despite their severe height difference, her intimidating glower caused her friend to step aside. "Look, I've had a really bad day, and the last thing I need right now is the third degree, especially from you. Now, I have to go into work in a couple of hours, so, right now, I'm going upstairs, and I'm going to lay down. If you value our friendship at all, you'll drop this."

Without waiting to see or hear his response, she brushed past him, taking the steps slower than she usually did. It was no more than ten seconds later that she completely forgot her confrontation with Xander. In the grand scheme of her life, their little disagreement didn't really matter. Sooner than she'd like, he'd learn the truth of the matter behind her mysterious actions, and, eventually, their bridges would be mended and all would be forgiven. More importantly, she simply didn't have the reserve of energy left that it would take to worry about the disappointment she had seen shining brightly within Xander's gaze as he looked upon her before she had fled towards the awaiting, temporary oasis of her bedroom.

The journey to her room seemed to stretch out indefinitely before her, never-ending and exhausting in its seemingly unconquerable extent. The stairs felt steeper and more physically demanding, the upstairs short hallway more like a boundless labyrinth, and the effort it took for her to push her bedroom door open was far greater than any effort she had previously been prophesied to use in order to defeat the forces of evil. So, by the time she reached her still unmade bed, she fell to its welcoming, familiar, comforting softness without care of the fact that she still had her shoes on, that one of her few good outfits would be wrinkled beyond measure by the time she awoke later, and that she never did set her alarm for work.

But it didn't matter. Sleep, a rather elusive pleasure for her under normal circumstances, had been either unbearably absent from her life lately or difficult and painful once she found it. That afternoon proved no different. Shifting restlessly, she dreamed of another day, of another dream, of another memory.

Angel was sitting across from her. Together, in a kitchen she didn't know but recognized intimately in every, single detail, they sat staring at each other. There was a stiffness between them, one that she recognized as uncertainty, but even that she found comforting after months of being separated from him. As they stared, they drank tea, or, at least, they held cups of tea, with the shared, common teapot resting precisely halfway between them. It was, as though, the inanimate object was to act like a moderator.

It didn't.

Instead of really opening up to each other like she could sense in her dream that they needed to, the two of them, as always since that night that changed everything, kept a part of themselves closed off, distanced. There was so much between them, both new and old, and Buffy knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that, if they didn't confront and surmount their issues that evening, they never would. While there was no looming clock in this nightmare, for, again, that's what the experience felt like, time was still essential, still controlling them… just in a different way.

But she was powerless in her dream to help. Her voice disappeared into the quiet space between the ex-lovers, and she held no corporeal form in her subconscious mind. Instead, she was just a voyeur into the couple's moment, no more real than the nightmare itself. Again, though, she questioned the merit of her own assumptions, for, despite the fact that she knew herself to be sleeping, what she was experiencing, what she was seeing in the dream, didn't feel imagined at all. It felt more like a memory, as if she had really been there once – in that dark yet homey kitchen with Angel seated across from her, talking to the man she loved more than life itself like they were passing acquaintances and not soul mates.

Their interaction was cold, not for a lack of feeling but out of necessity. They were both acting logically instead of irrationally, empirically rather than emotionally, and she knew such behavior was foolish. When life was so fickle, so short, Buffy knew that reason meant nothing to a broken heart, and, as she watched herself rationalize away what she was feeling, she knew that's what she had, both now and then… whenever the dream memory had actually taken place, if it had taken place at all. The pain she felt from the heartache was palpable, was real, was tangible, but it wasn't centered inside of her chest but, instead, deep within her body, her abdomen.

Ricocheting up out of bed, Buffy launched herself to the bathroom. While she never paid particular attention to her cycle, for what did it matter if she was a few days early or late when she wasn't currently sexually active, the sudden cramping was a relief. Even she knew when her period was more than a month late. Despite the fact that she didn't fear pregnancy, that did not mean that she wanted something else to be wrong, so the sudden, albeit uncomfortable, reappearance of her menses was calming. There was nothing wrong with her. Her body was fine. She'd be able to have kids someday if she wanted… as long as she didn't die first from other, less natural causes.

But she quickly realized that the sharp pain in her stomach wasn't cramps at all. Putting the tampon she had come into the bathroom for back into its box, she turned off the light and shuffled back to her bed, the ache subsiding into a mild, constant twinge. Closing her eyes, she reached a cool hand under the loose constraints of her pajama top to rub soothing, spherical caresses into her tender abdomen. The touch was relaxing, gentle, and, moments later, Buffy was, once more, sound asleep.

The dream of the past ended just as abruptly as it had begun, and Buffy woke, slowly, unsurely, tentatively. There was no pain like there had been years before, and her only recently dried cheeks became wet again as a new, fresh batch of tears found their way upon her pale, clammy face. If there had been pain, then, at least for a moment, she would have been able to believe that she was reliving her life, that she had been given a chance to go back and redo everything… even if such an opportunity would never be able to change her present.

No, what was could not be altered, or defeated, or circumvented. It was predetermined, just as set in stone as the prophecies which ruled her life as a slayer. One could not hide from it by turning back time, for it had always been there, since the day of its inception, waiting, dormant, anticipating, even if hiding was the only thing Buffy wanted it to do.