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part ten

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Buffy walked through the familiar streets, the sun on her face. She wore a long yellow dress, with pale flowers clustering along its soft, cotton surface.

It was a hot summer afternoon. Things had been quiet, strange since that day.

He hadn't come to see her, hadn't been at the Bronze, hadn't appeared while she patrolled.

But she knew he was working, unseen. The numbers were still high-- higher than they had ever been before the summer. But she could handle it, and noticed the difference that he'd made. And yet she did not see him, and he did not come to her.

She crossed the street, the heat from the pavement warm against her ankles.

She walked into the cemetery, through the familiar grey stones. It seemed different-- a peaceful place in the daylight. Not a hunting ground, but a resting place. She heard a bird crying out in the trees as she walked calmly down the empty path.

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He was sitting on a carved sarcophagus, his back resting against where it joined with the wall. He was holding a guitar, playing it softly. No particular melody, just what came to mind, streaming up and down the registers with his thoughts.

He hadn't known what to do. Strange he could remember it all-- being the man. He could remember thinking his thoughts, feeling his emotions-- and that person had not been able remember him, what he was before.

Things seemed different, but he didn't know the shape of that change-- something was different, in the world around him, what he saw. The colors were different.

And he sat in the crypt, the warm air blowing in like a draft.

And the door opened. She was there. He didn't look up.

He continued to play, softly, and bit his lip unconsciously. He had utterly no idea what to say to her, how to change things.

And she looked at him. He seemed better, healed. Only a slight hint of a wound on his cheek. But it was more than that.

She didn't know what to say to him, and instead, walked around the crypt in a semi-circle, looking at the armchair, at the lamps and candles. And she came to a row of cardboard boxes filled with books, rescued from a ruined bookcase.

She removed a book. It was by Dostoevsky. And she walked up to him, and she didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say.

And she sat down, beside the sarcophagus, and opened the book, flipping through the pages, settling to the end, looking at the print, the words moving past her.

"Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations, at least," one line read.

She paused a moment, listened to the strange and quiet music above her. And she turned to the beginning, began to read, comfortable in the quiet warmth.

He did not look up, but he felt her presence, and smiled at her, softly.

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"He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story-- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiaiton into a new unkown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishement.

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the end.