A/N: Short chapter but when I tried to continue into the day proper, it would have ballooned up into being much longer.

Thank you to everyone that has left a review. I love reading them and knowing you are all enjoying this tale.

Zekken182: Glad you decided to dive in! The story is going to run for a while as I've got a lot of ground to cover.

Nesthor5000: In the comics, Buffy was able to deflect and cut through active magical effects which is what I'm basing its abilities on since we saw so little of it in the series. As for Amber, we'll see. When it comes to Ozpin and the Relics, I actually posted a theory on that over on the RWBY subreddit. It is the one about the Great War and was done in the last week or so. Give it a read for my opinion on the chain of events that led to the use of the vaults.

Camgodking: Glad to see another fan of Buffy and the Buffy verse! Thanks for posing questions that make me stop and think and then go back through everything I've done. You made me do math! Evil reader... Still, I might have to make a google doc with the answers for when I get this question again. Check your DM's if you haven't.

AstroKitty: Glad you are enjoying it! I've got plenty more to come.

G119: Nora is one of my favorite of the Original Cast from RWBY. She was one of the reasons I decided to put Buff/Summer where she is team-wise. I wanted to write her but not as the main character.

Chapter 10

Now I Lay Me...

She awoke in a queen size bed in a room she didn't recognize. Four walls, plain, painted a cream-colored off-white. No doors, no windows. Above her a ceiling fan hung, its blades spinning lethargically. It was less a room and more of a box that a bed sat in. Pushing herself up, comforter and sheet spilling around her. She didn't need to look to know she was dressed for the day in the Beacon Academy uniform.

As she pondered why she was in the room, she could feel the bed start to shift under her. A glance to her side revealed a brunette woman. She looked to be about the same age she had been before awakening on Remnant. The brunette's dark brown eyes watched her with amusement.

"So here we are again, B," the curvy brunette said, a smirk on her lips. "Been a while since we've been here."

She nodded to the brunette in agreement and said, "Not long enough. We can never say what we mean here."

The brunette shrugged before sitting up, "Stacking the deck doesn't work if the dealer knows you did it."

In tandem with her dark counterpart, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. "I'm not sure where I was, truth be told," she said as she reached down for the sheets that were pushed down further on the bed. "Someone took the cards out and shorted the deck."

"Fewer cards to count," the brunette said as she took her side in hand and the two of them pulled the sheet up and over the pillows. "You know where you are going, though. That is better than knowing where you were," the brunette said as they tucked the sheet in under the mattress. "From what I heard, it's going to be even better where you are."

She shrugged her shoulders, finishing with the sheet and moving to the comforter. "If I knew the time would it lay bare the pit? If I knew the line, would I regain my wit?" She knew she was speaking nonsense. But here in this room that wasn't a room, it was the only kind of sense that made any. If regular sense made any then the walls might grow ears and the floor eyes.

The brunette joined her in pulling the comforter up the bed and then smoothing it. She noticed one portion that stayed wrinkled, refusing to lay down flat. "It won't lay down and stay flat," the brunette pointed out, glaring at the comforter. "Cut it away and be done with it," she said, the Slayer Scythe suddenly in her hands.

She reached over, gently taking the Scythe from the brunette and setting it aside. "Cut away the grass, and the hill still remains only to be covered again in the trappings of mortality. Deeper, I think I must see."

"You have a question, then?" The brunette asked with a raised eyebrow and presented a lamp. Its design was old-fashioned and reminded her of sand, wind, and tales of the night. The lamp was forged of gold and a crystal so blue it would make the ocean look pale. "You did once before, you could ask it again. Or tear down the hill and reforge from bits and bobs, steel and fire."

She shook her head in response to the brunette's offer. "Like the monkey's paw, it would be, released without constraint. It would spread like locusts. Only a Queen and only a Warrior can lead and find the choice to make."

The brunette smiled at that, her eyes shining with excitement, "Choices dance and twist ever-changing, the steps you know well, Queen B."

A well-dressed man stepped to the edge of the bed. He wore a suit of green with a blue shirt under the jacket. In his hands, he held a platter covered in slices of yellow, orange, and white. He smiled at the two and said, "The cheese will rule them all."

Summer awoke with a start and shot out of her bed. As she scrambled across the room, she zeroed in on her desk. A drawer was yanked out, her hand probing for her journal and pen setting there. A slammed drawer later and three suddenly awake roommates, but she was seated at her desk, journal open as the pen scratched across the pages. She knew every word, every breath, every movement could be the key that unlocked the dream.

Except for the cheese guy. She was pretty certain that was just nonsense.

It had been five weeks since she started classes at Beacon. In that time she had several dreams. Some were violent, showing girls battling monsters that would be at home among the Creatures of Grimm. Some were soft and gentle, memories of a family she couldn't quite see or remember. Others had a sudden finality to them. Desperation and acceptance mixed in equal measures. Those were the worst. Those were the ones about a Slayer dying. Much to Summer's own private horror, not all of those dreams seemed to be of past Slayers.

This dream was different. She knew the moment it started that it was unlike any other dream she had since she awoke on Remnant. The colors were wrong, muted but at the same time vibrant. The edges of things blurred and sharp all at once. The textures of things had a taste and sound had a smell. Even the air seemed to have a reverberation to it that was unnatural. The entire thing stunk of only one thing.

Prophecy.

Summer hadn't had a Slayer Dream since waking up after being found. She had just experienced one, though. There was no way she could mistake it for anything else. Unlike her other memories, the ones about her past Slayer Dreams were just gone. Missing like so much dust in the wind. It didn't change the fact that the moment she woke up she knew exactly what had happened, what to do.

It took ten minutes to write everything down she could remember. Another fifteen minutes were spent making notes. What could be important, what different images might mean. Every bit of intuition worked to try and make sense of the dream. She even found herself remembering topics she had read about at some point before waking up on Remnant. Things that might have purpose or meaning now but that before she couldn't remember. All of it to make sense of the dream.

It was like piecing together a puzzle without the box. You might have some clue what it was supposed to be, but you couldn't know for certain. Even worse, your own interpretations could change what the puzzle showed you. The only way to be certain was to wait until the puzzle was complete, then it would make sense.

She really hated prophecies.

Finally, she set her pen down and leaned back. Summer stared at the open journal that held her notes on all the dreams she had experienced over the last five weeks. The dream journal had been an idea born of her own memories. She had one before, she knew that much. In it, she had chronicled anything that could be a Slayer Dream. This time, the idea had been to keep track of her more mundane dreams since so many of them seemed to be formed from her own missing memories. The hope was that eventually, something might spring loose and fill in the blanks.

Gently Summer closed the journal. She knew that obsessing about the dream would lead nowhere. Slayer Dreams were like that. All she could do was keep an eye for the things that stood out to her in the dream. Parts of a puzzle she didn't have a clear picture of. Still, the clues were there. She'd figure it out eventually.

As she ran a finger across the journal's leather-bound cover, Summer smiled. The journal itself had been a rather thoughtful gift from Nora. She had tried to play it off that the gift was from Ren and herself, denying any part in picking it out or even the idea for buying her something more than the loose paper she had been writing on. She only found out later from Ren that it had entirely been Nora's idea and that she had picked out the actual journal herself as well.

Ren had gone on to finally explain to Summer why he and Nora were so close and had so little. Summer listened as he painfully recounted the Grimm attack that had destroyed the village the two had lived in. Ren then explained that the day they had all learned about Summer's memory loss, Nora had come to him in tears.

'She lost everything just like us, Ren. But at least we have each other and the memories we've made. She doesn't even have that.'

Summer treasured the dream journal for what it was. A treasure, a promise given from one broken girl to another. A symbol that Summer need not be alone. That the offer Nora had made about making new memories was genuine, even as she hoped Summer could reclaim the ones she lost. And now, perhaps a key. A key that would let her finally figure out what it was she was supposed to do now that she was here. Protect Ruby was the only thing she had so far and even that was more of a gut feeling than anything concrete. Summer knew there was more to her journey to this new world than that.

By the time she had come back to herself, Summer noted that nearly forty minutes had passed since her sudden rush to get her Slayer Dream written down. A glance told her that her teammates had gone back to sleep. It was too early to get up for a weekend.

Consumed by a yawn, Summer decided more sleep would be good. She slid the journal back into its drawer along with the pen she used to write in it. As she walked back over to her bed, she watched her sleeping team and smiled. Even if she didn't remember life before Beacon, Nora was right. She could make new memories and she would hold those as precious as she had held her old ones before they had been scrubbed from her mind.

"Break their legs," Nora muttered in her sleep.

Summer fell back into bed and pulled her blanket up and over her. Her Slayer Dreams were forgotten as she fell back asleep, a smile on her lips.