Chapter 26 - An Einstein-Rosen Bridge Too Far

Disclaimer: I own neither Buffy, nor Roswell, nor SG-1. The characters and worlds of these are the property of their respective owners. I have created only the plot.

The wormhole closed as SG-15 returned home to the SGC. This planet was a regular stop-off for the SGC, one of the few places willing to trade them naquadah. This small, dense world on the close edge of Goa'uld-occupied space had been long forgotten by whatever Goa'uld had originally owned and colonized it. Daniel, the few times he'd been here, had remarked that it felt a lot like Abydos to him, which always caused his eyes to retreat into some sort of distant nostalgic haze.

Daniel wasn't here now. Which was unfortunate, because if he had been, he might be able to tell Dawn and Willow where 'here' was.

Also, they were pretty curious about why they didn't seem to have bodies.

That's not to say they were some sort of invisible, intangible ghosts. No, it was worse than that.

They were energy. The energy that they'd cast out to go on their 'trip' had been caught up in the singularity at the terminus of the wormhole. And when the energy anchoring the wormhole had been turned off, they were essentially slingshotted back to this end of the wormhole. Sam would have found the process fascinating. Willow, who was also geeking out about it just a little bit, was more concerned with the fact that their 'silver threads' were gone. They were dead.

"It's kinda tingly," Dawn remarked.

"Yeah..." Willow replied, "I don't know how it's working... but all the electricity that normally runs through our bodies, still is running through our... well, not bodies. But since there's no nerves and stuff for it to run through, it's just sparking through the air. Which it shouldn't be able to do."

Dawn regarded Willow, and realized that she wasn't a random collection of sparkles in the air, but she could follow the lines made by the little sparks and see the general shape of a person. And in the center, where Willow's stomach would be if she had a stomach, was a tiny green sun which gave off a slightly eerie green light, and occasionally flowed out to mingle with the other sparks. Surrounding the green sun was a pool of silver fire which filled up what would normally be her torso.

Dawn looked down at herself too, to see a cluster of balls in her abdomen-space, a green ball half the size of Willow's, with yellow, blue, red, purple, and orange balls of roughly the same size intermingled, forming a blindingly white spot in the middle where they all overlapped. She too had a pool of silver fire surrounding it all, but it didn't fill her as it did Willow, but danced around her little multicolored suns.

"Ooh," Willow exclaimed. "Pretty!"

"Wills?"

"Yeah Dawnie?"

"Any idea where we are or how we got here?"

"No on 1, Yes on 2... but only a guess."

"Will I care?"

"No. I say we look around and see if there's any place around here where we can find a..."

"Wills?" Dawn interrupted.

"Is it supposed to do that?"

"What?"

"Your green ball thingy..."

Willow looked down and they both watched as Willow's green core seemed to sink out of her, falling slowly towards the ground.

"I'm not doing that." Willow claimed.

"What's happening. I've seen that green ball before, Will. That's your life force!." As she said that, the pool of silver fire started to follow it out as if all of Willow's light was swirling down a drain in the ground.

"My life's leaving me? I'm still here. And my magic too? I can still feel it..."

"Hmm..." Dawn said. "Try some magic."

Willow cast her consciousness out and found a bird of some kind flying nearby. "Thicken!" she said. A green thread stretched up from the earth to her belly, and then in the blink of an eye, a tendril of silver fire shot up along it and then out to make a circle in the air around the bird, which instantly froze.

"See?" Willow demonstrated. "Working."

"Maybe..." Dawn concentrated and moved her sight like she had become accustomed to, following the tendril of green down to Willow's ball of life, which had reached the center of the planet and begun to stretch out in other directions, as if growing roots in the world. Dawn watched in awe as the thin strand of green and silver connecting Willow to this planet gradually grew thicker and thicker, until it was a rope nearly as thick as the one she'd had on earth.

"Wicked..." Dawn said.

"She's coming along nicely," said a voice from behind Willow.

Dawn and Willow both turned to the voice and faced Oma.

"So Daniel was wrong? It's Willow?"

"Um... hi... a little out of the loop, here. Dawn? Help a Scooby out?"

"Oh, right! Willow, this is Oma Desala. Oma, Willow Rosenberg."

"A pleasure, Willow."

"So... Willow's Mother Earth?"

"I think she is coming to that level, yes." Oma replied. "You have had a breakthrough yourself, Dawn, if you've taught somebody else how to ascend. Even partially, as you have."

"But... but... it was an accident... and with the blue... and swirly... and then the big, sucky thing, and then, we were just here like this."

Oma suddenly looked slightly worried. "You haven't ascended? But.. you're existing as pure energy. That is the largest and hardest step on the path to ascension..."

"All I know is we were surfing around the currents of magic and gravity. I've been learning to do it for a while now, moving along the lines of power. I've been a few stars away from Earth before, but... I was always tied to my body, and then I saw this big, like, weaving of blue energy, and I went to investigate it, and... we got stuck."

"Weaving of blue energy?"

"I see the energy in colors. Life is green... magic is silver... I think gravity is blue. Yellow is mind, I don't really know what the other colors mean yet."

"I see... and you say you saw a weaving of gravity..."

"Yeah," Willow piped up. "I saw it there too. It was like a spiral-woven tunnel of gravity."

"The Astra Porta."

"The who-a what-a?" Dawn crinkled her eyebrows. Languages, she loved. Science was annoying at the best of times.

"The Astra Porta is an Ancient device that creates wormholes. I believe that your people call it the 'Stargate'."

"Last stop. Everybody out." Xander said. He smiled as he turned off the old Volkswagen and hopped out.

"Thank god, finally!" Isabel said, stretching as she got out.

Xander watched her as she stretched, her body well-shown in her tight little spaghetti-strap tank. The other girls watched him watch her, and a couple pointed and giggled. Isabel smiled wickedly and then went inside, the other girls following her like ducklings. Xander shook his head, and brought up the rear. Once inside, he started to give the Speech.

"Girls, welcome to Slayer Central. First things first," Xander looked around for the young brunette, "Dawn... she's probably around her somewhere... will sort out your room assignments. We have... ah, here's the Slayer now," he interrupted himself as Buffy came down the stairs. "Buffy Summers, this is... Buffy?" Xander had noticed the extreme level of 'disheveled' Buffy was sporting. She didn't say anything, she just ran at Xander, and buried her face in his chest, and burst out in a fresh round of tears.

Xander, shocked, put his arms around Buffy and hugged her for all he was worth, knowing that eventually she would tell him what was going on. It was all he could do to stroke her hair and make soothing noises while casting a questioning look at everybody over her shoulder at Isabel. Isabel nodded and said, "I'll go find Wills or Dawn or Kyle..."

Buffy burst out in a loud round of sobs at that point, and Isabel ran upstairs, trying to find somebody to explain what was happening with Buffy.

Xander just stood there, preoccupied with a sobbing slayer.

And then there was a scream.

Isabel ran downstairs, screaming, and slammed into Xander's less-occupied side. The two girls were now BOTH sobbing all over him. "Xander..." Isabel managed to get out. "Dawn and Willow..." He looked down expectantly.

"They're dead," Buffy said, a barely audible whisper as if afraid that as long as she didn't say it out loud, it wasn't true.

"What?" Xander exclaimed.

"Their... bodies... are upstairs." Isabel said.

"What happened, Buffy?" Xander said with a look of rage in his eyes. "Was it the First? Did anybody else get hurt?" Xander was changed. Gone was the happy-go-lucky jokester slash goofy sidekick. Xander's whole demeanor had changed. He was all cool military precision now, icy and hard as steel, but those who knew him knew that the sun would feel like the arctic compared to the fire that had been lit inside him. There was only one thing Xander could not stand. Besides diet soda. If someone hurt his girls, they had to pay.

"I don't know. We weren't attacked. I just went up to get them for dinner so they could eat before the potentials got back from their training with Giles... and they were cold and dead." Buffy sounded like such a little, lost girl.

Xander handed her over to Isabel, and left to go upstairs and take a look for himself.

Something had happened, and he would find out what. Period.

Dawn and Willow were slowly becoming used to their fate. Oma had slipped off as sneakily as she came. It was like having Batman for a spirit guide.

"Wills, Oma said there were people here, before she left. I think we'll freak them out, though, if they see us like this."

"I can glamour up the illusion of our bodies," Willow said. "Hold on a minute."

Willow closed her eyes and bowed her head, and then a minute later, the illusion of their bodies began to appear around them. At least, she thought it was their bodies.

Willow looked like herself, but as though somebody had painted her portrait and decided she should be airbrushed a little for posterity. She still looked like Willow, but subtle differences had made a vast improvement in her appearance. She was hot!

"Vain much, Wills?" Dawn giggled.

"Huh?" Willow asked.

"You look like a supermodel version of yourself. Your boobs are bigger, your cheeks are slightly more pronounced, your lips are subtly fuller... It's all really subtle, but all of it together is enough to notice. Why did you think you needed to be prettier?"

Willow was really confused. "I have no idea what you mean. I didn't change my looks... the illusion should be just plain old me."

Dawn giggled. "Sure, Wills. Whatever. Anyway, let's head over to that town and see what we can find out."

Barnes and Franco's Tel'tak came out of hyperspace over Anubis' homeworld. They were planning on allying themselves with Anubis, but they were fairly shocked to find it surrounded by other Goa'uld ships. It didn't take long for them to get noticed.

"Unidentified Cargo vessel, you are entering restricted space. All of Anubis' former territories and holdings are now property of Ba'al. Change course to approach vector and land for inventory."

It was something that shocked them both, but Barnes slowly broke into a smile. "Acknowledged. Changing course for approach." He cut off the comms.

"Why are you so happy?" Franco asked.

"We came to Anubis because he's strong. But I didn't like him. Perhaps this Ba'al will be a better fit."

It didn't take long for the little cargo ship to make its way to the Ha'tak's hangar and land. Franco and Barnes strode out, and were met by a Jaffa patrol. Upon learning that they were Goa'uld, the Jaffa lieutenant contacted his master for instructions. The two Goa'uld were given an honor guard and escorted to meet Ba'al.

They took it as their due.

Xander rifled through Dawn's neatly labeled magic kits. He thought they were neatly labeled anyway. All the labels were written in other languages. The ones in Latin he almost understood. The rest could be anything.

There had to be something in here that could help him find out what had happened. Buffy was still in tears, Isabel was keeping her company. Buffy needed her time to grieve. He knew that sooner or later, she'd snap out of it and then be just as driven as he was.

He needed magical help. He toyed with the idea of calling Anya, but she probably wouldn't help him. Vengeance demons were not exactly known for helping those who've wronged them in the past, after all. No, he needed real, expert help.

Dawn's things were just a last ditch effort to avoid doing what he needed to do.

Stalking out of the room and heading straight down to the kitchen, he steeled himself for his very last resort.

He had to call Angel.

Max, Liz, and Giles arrived home with the potentials and while out, had quite a good time with them. However, walking in Buffy's front door was like a smack in the face. Max, learning what had happened, ran straight upstairs, while Liz went for her bag and got out the healing stones.

Giles sat down to have a few moments to grieve in his silent, British way, and then moved to hold and comfort Buffy.

Max laid his hand on Willow's body and it began to glow slightly. Instantly, he could feel that something wasn't right. It took him a couple of minutes of poking around to realize what was bothering him. "It should be medically impossible."

"What should?" Liz asked, entering the room to see Max talking to himself next to Willow's body.

"They've only been dead for a couple of hours."

"So?"

"So, recently deceased bodies have some kind of ambient energy in their systems."

Liz nodded. "Yeah, that's what causes rigor mortis - the chemical reactions in their bodies keep happening, and energy released into cells still seeps out until the cells' fuel supplies are expended."

"And their bodies... they're completely devoid of any and all energy. Their magic, their psychic energy, natural electricity, everything."

"What could cause that?"

"I don't know. But suffice to say I don't think they just died."

They looked at each other significantly, and then ran downstairs.

"So they're not dead?" Xander asked.

"Well, technically, yes, they're dead." Max said.

"But Max and I talked about it and we think that there's a possibility that their energies... went somewhere else." Liz added.

"Huh?"

"Think of it this way, Xander. They're dead because their minds, their souls, no longer inhabit their bodies." Liz explained.

"As good a definition of dead as any," Xander snarked.

"Fine, But what if their minds and souls just got cut off from their bodies, but they're still out there somewhere?"

"You mean Wills and Dawn are like, ghosts?"

"Not exactly." Max said. "But I think that if we can somehow find their consciousnesses, I could maybe reattach their bodies to them with the healing stones."

Xander's eyes bugged out of his head. He stood for a moment, staring at the both of them, looking at first Liz, then Max. Then he took a deep breath, and let it out with a sigh.

"So then, what are we waiting for?" he asked. "Let's tell the others and then saddle up!"

Author's Note: I apologize to those of you who've been waiting for this. Also, I apologize for my tendency to go all pseudo-science sci-fi geek on you. I've read a lot of stuff, and I always think about how things could feasibly work. I do believe in magic (as the manifestation of collective will - ie. whatever enough people believe will tend to happen) but I've always been a scientist at heart.

Who guessed right on the Dawn/Willow/Mother Earth thing?

I promise I'll get another chapter out as soon as I can. Having been on a break for so long, I forgot how much I love writing this! But churning out this chapter has inspired me, and I've already got half of the next chapter written.