This story takes place after Buffy's twentieth birthday, but before Crush. Feedback can be sent to cobalite@yahoo.com. No flames please, they give my deleted messages folder indigestion. I own nothing. Please don't sue, all you'll get is my CD collection. Buffy Summers is dead. You can't fight the course of Fate.
Time, look where we are
And what we've been through
Time, sharing our dreams
Sharing every little bit of our dreams to you
Time, It goes on and on everyday, baby
Time is what it is, come what may
By Cobalite Ice
Buffy stood over the hospital bed, and brushed Faith's hair away from her face. "I'm so sorry we couldn't save you. You…did so much better this time around. You were only working for him to help us. It wasn't supposed to end up this way. You weren't supposed to end up like this again. Not knowing what I know."
A hand touched her shoulder. "How bad off is she?"
Buffy relaxed into Angel's arms. "The doctors say she may never wake up. Angel, you know what this means."
"Buffy, no. Please."
"I can't, Angel. It was different when Faith was going to be here, but I can't leave them now. I can't go to LA with you."
"I promised Liam. I promised I would bring you with me."
Buffy lead him out of the hospital. "This isn't over. It will never be over between us. I'm getting my license, I'll come and see you when ever I can."
"What am I going to do with that huge office building?" Angel knew she was right, but the idea of living with her had been his number one reason for surviving the latest apocalypse.
Buffy thought of the flashes she'd seen of Cordelia. "Don't worry. I can guarantee you won't be alone."
-----
"Introduction to Psychology. Oh, up there." Willow pointed to three of four books stacked on the edge at the top of a bookshelf.
"I'll get'em. You know, this store discriminates against short people."
"Oh, I think there's a protest next week."
Buffy reached up and accidentally knocks the books off. "Woah." They fall on the head of a young man crouched underneath. He staggers back but recovers. "Oh, ahh. Oh god, I'm so sorry."
He stands up, and Buffy goes as stiff as a board. "I'm okay. It's okay. Well, that was bracing."
Willow noticed Buffy reaction. "Buffy, are you okay?"
"You're Riley Finn." Buffy's face was a blank mask.
"Yeah." Riley bent down and picked up some books. "Let's put a few of these down here." He puts them on a lower shelf. "So, uh, are you girls taking Intro Psych, or do you just want me dead?"
"Wait a second." Willow grabbed Buffy's arm. "This is Riley?"
"Am I famous or something?" Riley wondered why that girl seemed so shocked to see him, and knew his name.
"My name is Buffy Summers. This is Willow Rosenburg. She's going to buy my books while we talk." The Slayer was in full force.
"Wow. I have to say, girls in Iowa are never this forward."
"I'm not hitting on you. This is a confrontation. I know who you are, and what you people are doing under Lowell house. Now, do you want me to interrogate you in the middle of this library, or go somewhere private?"
"Private." A few minutes later, they were in her dorm room. "I don't see why we couldn't go to my room. It's more secure."
"You're room is bugged."
"How do you know all this? Are you from Internal Investigations?" All the II agents Riley had met were very military men in their late fifties.
"I'm the Slayer, this is my town. What you and the Initiative are doing is destabilizing the balance of power here. This is a Hellmouth, you cannot go dissecting demons and not expect retribution."
"I don't care if you're the President of the United States. No one could know all that from just listening to the Hostiles."
"I didn't listen to the Hostiles. I listened to you." Buffy watched his disbelief with joy. She'd been planning this for two whole years. To make Riley Finn so uncomfortable that he'd never love her, and he'd never suffer. "A little over a year from now, I will be killed in an automobile accident. You, and two other men were sent back to save me."
-----
"Why do you think Riley did it?" Buffy and Spike walked down Main Street, towards the cemeteries.
"Cause he made the same mistake way too many of your male friends do. He was in love with you, Slayer."
"I tried to stop it. I never acted like I had any romantic interest in him. I thought maybe he wouldn't end up in some vampire whore house if I could stop him from loving me."
"So you don't love him. You can't love anyone but Angel. Hell, Riley's just a kid, he probably doesn't even know what real love is."
"I'm younger than he is. Do you think I don't know what love is?"
Spike realized he'd just demeaned her entire relationship with Angel. "You're an old soul, Slayer. For you to have made it to twenty is proof of just how tied you are to this world."
"You think he doesn't really love me?" She actually looked comforted by the thought.
"I don't think someone like him could really love someone like you. You told me how badly things turned out when you were together."
They come to an intersection, and Spike pauses to light a cigarette. Buffy waits for him. "Yeah, but if it weren't for the Initiative, I would never have had the Big Bad as my friend."
Suddenly, the squeal of breaks filled the air. Buffy watched as a drunk driver barreled through the intersection. "Oh my god. If I hadn't stopped…"
"You would have been killed." Spike looked at the cigarette in his hands. "This is the night. They stopped it, three years before it ever happened."
"I remember what happened tonight. When you stopped, I kept walking because I was distracted." She smiled at Spike. "If it weren't for your damned cancer sticks, I'd be dead."
-----
"Give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now -- you have to take care of each other. You have to tell Angel, it will be all right. It was worth everything, these last few months. It would have been worth it for one more morning. You have to be strong. Dawn. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me." She wipes a tear away, taking the moment to memorize Dawn's face. She kisses her, and she turns and runs toward the end of the platform. As Dawn watches, crying Buffy sails down into and disappears in white light, causing the energy to go even wilder.
As Buffy falls, her eyes slowly closing, the energy expands and suddenly contracting out of existence. Buffy's dead body hits the ground. The smoke clears, and the Gang comes slowly toward her. Dawn, having climbed down, the farthest behind, is the most alone. Xander carries Anya, and Willow weeps openly. As does Spike, who hides from the coming sunlight, collapsing in wretched sobs at his failure, at the death of his love. Giles comes the closest, standing over the body of his Slayer, the others folding in behind.
-----
Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn and Fred move through the garden. They are tired but glad to be home. "That portal jumpin's a fun ride, sell it to a theme park, we could make some money.
"You're sure about that?" Fred continues her interrogation of Cordelia.
"Trust me, tacos everywhere, and soap." Fred smiles.
"Can I say it? I'm going to say it." Angel almost seems to vibrate with joy.
"Say what?" Wesley asks as they all enter from the garden.
"There's no place like ..." Angel stops talking. Spike sits alone on the round couch, the hand holding his cigarette shaking. He looks like a man who's just fallen off a building. "Spike?"
"Hi. What's ..." Cordelia stops speaking, realizing something is very wrong. In the two years of their shaky alliance with the chipped vampire, she'd never seen him look so terrible.
His eyes are rimmed red, and Angel doesn't even need to ask. "It's Buffy."
-----
"I never thought I'd be doing this. I'd always seen myself in those chairs down there, somewhere in the back, watching them put her into the ground, knowing in the end I'd won. Well, things change. For the better part of three years, Buffy and I spent most of our time trying to kill each other. Then, a man came to me, and warned me about what my future could be like. Maybe that was when it started. That was the year I lost Dru, and I was bitter. Then, that same man came back, and changed my life again. He knew what I couldn't even imagine. Most of you that know me think I just hung around because I had no where else to go. You're in shock that Buffy's Will asked me to give the first speech, and this is the first time you've ever heard me call her by her true name. None of you realized I had fallen in love with her."
-----
"I never wanted to do this either. I'm sure none of did. When Buffy and I first met, she knocked me head over heels, literally. We spent most of her high school years together. Most of all, I'm glad we had the chance to see what our future could hold." He pulled a ring from his pocket. "She wore this for three years, and only recently did I tell her what it meant to my people. She told me that when the time was right, she wanted to make it official." The claghad glittered in the moonlight. "I'm glad I haven't made the mistakes I could have. Without Buffy, I would have been dwelling on the past too much, regretting not being able to save everyone. It could have been one of the biggest mistakes in my life. But my friends, and my beloved saved me. I still loved her as much as the day I first saw her, and that I will for the rest of my existence. I'm not even surprised Spike feels the same way about her. We're more alike than either of us would ever want to admit. We both fell in love with sunshine, and got burned."
-----
"I'm sure none of you expected to see me again. I wasn't expecting the call that came just a few hours after I landed in Nicaragua. The call that told me Buffy was dead. She was a freshman in the Psyche class I was TA for. I knew from the moment I saw her, as soon as I recovered from the head blow, that she was someone special. She already had a boyfriend, but I didn't realize until later that Angel was much more than that. I pursued her though, hoping her long distance relationship would fail. Then, I began to see Buffy could never love me. Oh, she cared for me, and if I hadn't been in love with her, it would have been enough. I had to leave, even though she came to stop me. Buffy always knew that I loved her, even before we met for the first time. But when they found out what I was doing, I got out of this town so fast, I left my wallet behind. Now, I'll always regret I wasn't there when she died. I couldn't make her love me, so I ran, as far as I could, and by the time I was done running, Buffy was gone."
-----
The bottle passed between the three of them silently. Neither had said anything since coming back from Willie's. Spike stared at the amber liquid in his shot glass. "Well, mates, where do we go from here?"
"Someone has to stay here. Like it or not, I have work to finish in LA. I can't leave, not now."
"I have to go back tomorrow morning. We're in the middle of a purge." Riley looked to Spike. "What about you?"
"It's not like I can live like the master I was and have happily ever after, is it?" He said sarcastically. "I'll stay here, keep an eye on the kid, make sure there aren't too many vampires running around."
"The Slayer's Slayer, mourning her, getting drunk." Riley muttered, well on the way to being drunk himself. That's why he didn't think it was odd when an ethereally beautiful woman appeared in the center of the room. "Isn't that interesting. I'm drunker than I thought."
"I don't even have a buzz yet." Spike commented. "And who the bloody hell are you?"
The only detraction from her beauty was the tears running down her face. "I am Destiny."
"Get out of here." Spike jumped to his feet. "You're not welcome here, not after what just happened."
"I didn't know." The weeping got worse. "They never told me. They said that if the three of them were willing to sacrifice it all, the world would be a better place. I didn't know they died for three months. I didn't know it was so she could die for them, rather than for Chance."
She looked so pitiful, they couldn't help but believe her. While Riley poured her a drink, Spike pulled out three notebooks. "They came to me in India." No one asked who. "By then, Will getting sick, and Liam felt his time was running out. They stayed with me about a week, until one morning Liam didn't wake up. His body disappeared right after we found it. Will left these books with me, and took off. A few weeks later, one of my minions showed up. He thought I'd been killed fighting some demon or another. That's the only clue I have to figuring what happened to Will."
There was a letter attached to the cover of Angel's book, and he opened it.
To our three otherselves,
You probably won't realize it until I mention it, but as you spoke to each of us, we knew things about the others we shouldn't have know. Liam, Riley, and I weren't exactly friends, not until this adventure. We knew we were going to die, and we didn't want what happened to us to be forgotten. When we weren't stalking Buffy and Angel, or working on that prophecy, we wrote these. That's how I knew about the drugging incident with Rebecca, and Riley knew about Alcatha. We don't want to be forgotten, and that's up to you. Do not open until Buffy's death.
Riley opened his first. They read in silence, while Destiny did her best to defy immortal constitution and get drunk. "Books falling on my head. Then later, the thing with the vampires."
Spike wiped away a bloody tear. "Coming to Sunnydale, and kidnapping Red and the Boy. The Gem of Amara, and getting this damned chip."
Angel swallowed. "It's all different."
"What?" Spike and Riley shouted in unison.
"It's all different. I've never heard of Alcatha, and Buffy never ran away that summer. She met Anne working a part time job while visiting her father. No zombies, she shot down Scott Hope, Faith was our inside man for the mayor. There's stuff in here about a day I was human, that Buffy never let happen. A lot about Darla, and how I couldn't kill her, and the downward spiral I went through. The only thing that stayed the same was Wolfram and Hart." Angel looked at Destiny. "I don't understand."
"Free will. They never took free will into account. You and Buffy are soul mates, but Spike doesn't have a soul. And as far as I can tell, Riley was never supposed to leave the Marines to join the Initiative. The other side must have been responsible for it. But I can tell you this, what you did wasn't for nothing. If Buffy hadn't been there, Dawn would have jumped into the portal. But that wouldn't have closed it, it would have split it wide open. I never knew, until afterward, Buffy was always the intended sacrifice."
"So that's it? There's nothing we can do?" Angel shattered his glass against the wall. "She's gone, and all our hearts are left black and blue?"
Destiny had no answer for him.
THE END
Endnotes: This story was written in honor of the Backstreet Boys Black and Blue concert, held tomorrow morning, in Albany. My friend, and co-conspirator, Sailor Twilight, myself, and five of our closest friends will be attending. I vowed to have this finished by midnight tonight, and with the exception of the soon to be NC-17 interlude, this story is complete. Thank you for your readership.
Created: Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Completed: Friday, June 29, 2001