"How is she?"  Fred turned as Cordy, Lorne and Wes walked down the stairs into the lobby.  Fred and Gunn had been waiting while the other three took care of Buffy.

"Sedated."  Lorne smiled, but there was sadness behind the smile.

"So it's her?"  Asked Gunn.

"Yes, I'm afraid so."  Wes sighed.

"What's bad about her being back?"

"Nothing, it's just that we have no idea why or how she got back."  Cordy may have never really gotten along with Buffy, but she still thought of her as a friend.

"Right now she can't talk, her vocal cords have been severed.  They will heal, as will the rest of her injuries.  The only wounds that may take longer or never heal are the emotional ones."  Lorne looked around at the others as he said this.

"So what do we do?"  Gunn and Fred looked at Wes. 

"Do we call Sunnydale?"

"No."  Wes frowned.  "When we mentioned that to her she started to have an anxiety attack.  We can only assume that she does not yet want her friends to know she is alive."

"Why not?"

"Because she isn't ready." 

"I hate to be the one to bring up the bad news, but does anyone have an idea of where she might have come from?"  Lorne looked at the others.

****

Over the next two weeks, the group and Buffy got closer.  Buffy's wounds healed and she began to talk, though one conversation was not exactly...fun.  Three days before the 14th, Wes - who Buffy had gotten the closest to, she now referred to him as a second father -  sat the group including Buffy down.

"Buffy, I...we know this is hard for you, but we need to know if you remember anything from your past three months.  The group looked at Buffy, and noticed how much she had changed.  She was not the healthy young woman they had all - except for Fred - once known.  Her long blonde hair that reached down past her waist was now regularly braided back by Cordy or Fred.  Her deep green eyes were not as bright as they used to be, but weren't as dim as they first were when she had come back.  She was skinnier, and her muscles were not what they used to be.  Most of her wounds had healed, but not as fast as they should have.  The group had deduced that Buffy was no longer a slayer, or at least she did not have enhanced Slayer abilities.  But even behind all of that, she still had her original spunk, and spirit as she did, possibly as far back as the first day she moved to Sunnydale.

Buffy sighed and smiled faintly.  "I don't just remember anything, I remember everything."  Buffy didn't hesitate when the group became quiet.  "How could I forget three hundred years of torture."

"What?"  Cordy was the first to speak.  The others followed with similar comments.

"What you need to understand is that in hell dimensions, time moves different then in our dimension."

"So you were in a hell dimension.  Cause I was trapped in one, and which were you..."  At a look from the others, Fred stopped talking.  "Right, sorry...I..."

"No, it's fine.  I was in Kytosiea.  The demon that was in charge of my torture, he would inject me daily with an anti-ageing toxin.  It kept me 22 for three centuries.  It also kept my wounds healing over so I would be fresh for a new day of torture."

"Buffy..."  She held up her hand as Lorne started to speak.

"I don't know exactly what happened to me when I jump through the portal last May.  I do know that I died.  My guess is that my soul was captured in the hell dimension, leaving my body a shell.  I'm also guessing that it is no longer existent in the ground in Sunnydale.  That a new shell was formed by the demons in Kytosiea.  I don't know how or why I was brought back, but I do know that I couldn't be happier to be back."  Buffy smiled around at the others.  They understood and were content, for now.

Over the next few days, they worked on finding out more about what had happened to Buffy, but on the fourteenth, they hit a forgotten bump in the road.