AN: Okay, okay. I've been asked why Riley did what he did, well I tried explaining it as best I could. I saved the email that I sent the enquirer and here it what I wrote (good luck with comprehending it): ...well, it was mainly an excuse to blow part of the house up but Riley is Buffy's ex-ex. Tyler is Buffy's ex (refer to Becoming Pt.1 for Tyler references). If you really want to hear my reasoning, Riley is pissed off that Buffy didn't come running back into his arms after her boyfriend cheated on her with her best friend (refer to BtVS original 1992 movie for that detail...). She was neglecting her relationship with Tyler at the time because she was busy with her new career. I treat her superstardom as her Slayerdom. It started when she was really young (yep, 15 is young, but it was the same with Mandy Moore). So now Riley comes crawling back, repeatedly trying to get back with Buffy. She's moved on and Riley doesn't want to let go. He hears rumours that Buffy's forgiven Jennifer (Jennifer Walkens, not Jenny Calendar) and is pissed that she would forgive her for something that was unforgivable for a best friend to do. And so Riley strikes out and decides to blow out her front window. There, that's my inner workings of Riley-logic. Of course, my logic refuses to include Pike, but that's okay. Luke Perry doesn't belong in my Buffyverse.
Part 15
With Christmas on its way around, Buffy found herself gift shopping at Sunnydale Mall with Will, Xand, Oz and Gunn. She'd been together with Angel for 3 months now, she'd been at SHS for 4 months and she'd been a resident in Sunnydale for 5 months. But still, Buffy felt as if she were living in la-la land. They'd gotten their SATs over and done with and all had, well, in general, received outstanding results. (Buffy had refused to tell her exact score to anyone except for Willow, Angel, Giles and her family. All she DID say was that she got over 1500, which, in itself was an amazing score; Xander had even offered to punch her in the head to help her lose brain cells.)
She seriously doubted she'd even go to college, though—for obvious reasons. Besides having to study, she'd be travelling around, recording a new album, giving interviews and never have time to do assignments or even attend class. Such a hope would be...well, unlikely to be fulfilled (put bluntly).
Relationship wise, they were all doing great—except for Xander, of course. He was struggling to find a girlfriend since the time when he'd gone out with Amy Madison the year before and had had his ego damaged when he was dumped for the Michael, the creepy Goth guy. Willow and Oz were inching towards their one year anniversary, Spike and Faith were horny as always, Buffy and Angel were...getting to be pretty serious and Gunn and Cordy had split shortly after returning from LA. But then Cordelia introduced him to her cousin, Fred, and they were now dating as well. One month for them now, going on two in a week.
It was just over a month until Buffy's 18th birthday and she couldn't wait. Her family was going to be coming to Sunnydale for Christmas and would stay over New Year's until her birthday. The only thing she didn't look forward to about it was that she had to clean up her room. It was a mess. As per usual.
Buffy sighed; it couldn't be avoided. The only way she'd gotten out of spending the whole of her Saturday cleaning her tornado of a room was by telling Giles that they'd made plans a long time ago to go gift shopping. It wasn't a complete lie, but it also wasn't the complete truth, but it seemed to get him off her back and that was all that mattered. **Now, what should I get Angel? God help me; I hate gift shopping.**
*****
"There's a new girl," Xander announced in a sing-song voice the following Monday as soon as he caught up with the rest of his friends, who were currently hoarding around Buffy's locker, laughing.
"Hey Xand," Buffy greeted him with a smile. "There's a new girl?"
"How come you always seem to know when there's a new girl?" Willow asked with mocking suspicion. "You just come to school and just seem to know. It's creepy."
"His locker is just outside Snyder's office," Oz said, revealing one of Xander's most coveted secrets (or so he liked to think).
"Hey! Don't you know anything about being mysterious?"
Oz just shot him a Look and, in his usual tacit way, shrugged casually.
Xander nodded, "Oh, yeah, right...musicians with all their mysteriousness. Damn, if only I'd learnt the guitar instead of the French horn..." He looked inside Buffy's locker, which he hadn't forgotten they'd been laughing about before. "So...what were you guys laughing at?"
"Oh, it's just that I got some pictures of me and Angel developed and I finally got the MTV photo booth pictures scanned and printed so I could show you guys," Buffy beamed, seeing her boyfriend approaching. "Speak of the devil."
"There's a new—" Angel started to say.
"A new girl. Yeah, we know already," Buffy interrupted him. "Are you people always like this when a new person comes to the school? And what about when I was new?"
Angel and Xander swept their eyes guiltily at the ground.
She just laughed and slammed her locker shut. "Let's go find her then."
*****
"Where'd you transfer from, Anya?" Faith asked, poking her spork into a shrivelled up piece of broccoli and wrinkling her nose in disgust.
"I lived in Boston with my Aunt Josephine while my mom was sick and my dad was looking after her. They didn't want me hanging around all the time at home by myself, so they sent me to my aunt. She decided to move here to be closer to the rest of her family, so I came with her. She makes really nice butter cookies," Anya said with a smile.
"Boston, huh?" Faith replied. Next to her was Spike, who obviously wasn't paying attention to the conversation and had turned his attention to the rest of the people around their table. Anything to avoid polite conversation with the creepy (and in his opinion, much too peppy) new girl. "You're one weird chick, but I think I'm gonna like you."
*****
A week later, they were out of school and enjoying their Christmas break by spending time with friends and significant others and having fun when it'd started to hail on Christmas Eve. It was the closest Sunnydale was ever going to get to a white Christmas, but it suited them just fine. It felt like it was snowing. It just wasn't cold. And it had been rather loud when the hail had begun. Okay, so there were very few similarities. Close enough.
Buffy slipped between the covers and quickly fell asleep, even with the exciting anticipation of celebrating Christmas with *both* family and friends, for once. As soon as she closed her eyes, she dreamt...
|| Upon opening her eyes, she felt the coolness of the surface she was lying on—a stone floor. Her vision was blurry until she rubbed her eyes and got up on her not-quite-awake legs.
She felt a pang in her heart as she wandered through what looked like a slightly Gothic mansion. She looked toward the fireplace and felt a warmth in her heart as she remembered its exuberant source of heat, even seeing it blazing there in the hearth for a fraction of a second. A ghost of a flame haunted her along with the memory of a dozen other things about this room that she couldn't for the life of her recognise.
It was darkness everywhere. The only sources of illumination were the dim sconces that were spread sparsely along the edges of the room. Its ceiling was high, and as far as she could tell, no one lived there. It looked abandoned. The table was smashed into pieces and a small, metal pitcher was crushed. To the naked eye, it looked as if it were simply thrown or smashed with a hammer, but when she looked closer, it seemed as if it had been crushed by a person's hand. **Strange.**
On the wall hung a set of manacles fastened from a bracket on the wall. They looked ancient and slightly used. The sight didn't scare her; they just created a familiar feeling in her mind. She recognised their presence from some time in her memory before, like déjà vu, but she knew for a fact that she'd never been here or even seen *manacles* in her life. When could she ever have seen a pair of manacles anyway?
She turned her head and found that a small part of the wall there had been blasted away. The feeling it evoked within her was just like those other times when she'd had déjà vu. Only it was so much stronger now. It was as if it were showing her, no, telling her that something was wrong. A feeling in her gut that told her she'd felt the same way and had done the same things before.
Tracing the pattern on the floor, her gaze rested upon a pair of feet in black leather boots. Slim legs in leather pants all the way up the face of—
"Faith," she said, not quite surprised to see her in her dream.
"It fades. It all fades," the brunette muttered in a barely audible voice, her image flickering as she said it, a bloodied knife appearing in her hand. "Getting towards that time," she said, and disappeared completely. All that left in her wake was the bloodied knife falling to the ground with a seemingly deafening crash.
She lifted her eyes from where they were transfixed on the fallen knife and looked through the doorway through to what looked unmistakably like a bedroom. She took a few, cautious steps toward the doorway and felt as if the more she walked the farther she was away from it. Grinding to a halt, she found herself standing in the doorway, looking at the lifeless form of her boyfriend in the bed. He was draped lightly with a maroon blanket that she longed to feel the texture of. It looked so silky and heavenly. It was beckoning at her to come closer with its ripples and folds.
She reached her hand outwards, but her hand was stopped by another. The skin on the hand was folded in such a way that one simply couldn't call it 'wrinkled'. It wasn't wrinkled. It was folded and bumpy. It had a yellow tinge and the dips between the folds were a blackish brown. The face of the...creature was familiar and was folded in much the same fashion as on her hand. Only it was in a vague pattern that was centred on its nose.
Buffy took one look at it, stumbled back...and screamed. ||
Buffy woke up in a cold sweat, her blankets twisted around her limbs in an odd fashion. She had been writhing, she inferred. She remembered every last detail of her nightmare and it haunted her through the rest of the morning until she couldn't stay still anymore. She had to go. She couldn't stay in this sparklingly clean room of hers...she couldn't stand the sight of it. That thought frightened her almost as much as the thought of the dream haunting her dreams in the nights to come.
*****
She climbed the tree with ease. She could've used the front door, of course, but it was early on Christmas morning and she didn't expect anyone to be awake yet. She bit her lip and wrapped her jacket tighter around herself. Buffy jumped onto the roof from her perch on the branch and rapped on the window three times.
The head of her sleepy boyfriend poked out, tiredly gazing at her and wondering idly how she'd known she'd gone to the right window. "Buffy. What are you doing here, on my roof...at seven in the morning?" he yawned, ushering her in.
Buffy stepped through and sat down on the side of his bed. "Can I stay here for a little while?"
"Buffy, what's wrong?" Angel immediately sat down next to her and took him in his arms. "No one hurt you or anything, right? Giles—"
"No, it's not Giles. Not anyone. I had a nightmare and I woke up in a cold sweat. I can still remember it. Every little detail..." Buffy took one look at his face, broke down and burst into tears, "I'm so scared, Angel, I'm so scared..."
All Angel could do was to hold her, comfort her with his words and by just being there for her. "It's alright. You don't have to tell me anything if you can't...or won't."
"Just hold me," Buffy whispered.
Angel kissed her on the forehead and helped her settle in under his blanket. He got in beside her and wrapped an arm around her waist. "I'll be here. Sleep..."
They both slept soundly until they were woken up hours later by a giddy Bertha Blue scratching at the door and barking her head off until all the occupants of the house were up and angry at Bertha for waking them up.
Buffy snuck back out the way she came and disappeared back to her own home where Giles and her whole family were probably awake and concerned that she'd been kidnapped or that she had runaway. And since the second possibility was a lot less probable than the first one, she ran as quickly as she could in an effort to sneak back in without everyone knowing she had been out in the first place.
Surprisingly, she didn't return to a houseful of people who were so worried that they were about to pull their hair out. All of the staff was on leave, allowing her to creep back in undetected. Apparently, no one had tried waking her up yet. Which would be about right since she didn't usually wake up on non-school days until around 11:30 or midday.
Buffy hurried up the stairs and stepped back into her room, careful to close the door behind her as quietly as possible. "...I can't even remember what the dream was about now. Strange."
She never got that dream again.
*****
Her birthday came and went, and they'd celebrated substantially with a bash at the Bronze with the whole school invited. It was fun and normal and had been just what Buffy needed.
Buffy took out one of the bags that she'd stashed in her wardrobe. She was desperately looking for one of her CDs and had been searching for it high and low. She'd even asked Giles if he'd seen it—she'd asked *Giles*. **He probably doesn't even know what a...wait, yeah he would. He's my manager! He's supposed to know stuff.** She rummaged through all the pockets and compartments. Digging into one of the pockets on the inside, she came upon a small piece of paper. She pulled it out.
Jennifer Walkens. She'd forgotten all about her when they'd been in LA... **How could I have forgotten? She was partially responsible for the front part of my living room being blown up!**
Buffy grumbled and searched through the rest of the bag, finally procuring the elusive CD. She put the slip of paper under a paperweight on her desk and went about getting ready for her date with Angel. It was their fifth month anniversary—not entirely significant, but still worthy for a night on the much-too-boring town—and Buffy intended to look good. Plus, she'd gone shopping the day before and had bought a whole new outfit. After all, it *was* a special occasion.
She slipped her CD in the player and pressed 'play'.
//Just a day,Just an ordinary day
Just trying to get by
Just a boy,
Just an ordinary boy
But he was looking to the sky//
She quickly changed her earrings to something fancier. She decided on a pair of silver dangly ones that had tiny stones that matched the colour of her outfit embedded in the design. She took a look in the mirror and felt that her neck was a little too bare.
//And as he asked if I would come alongI started to realize—
That everyday you find
Just what he's looking for,
Like a shooting star he shines//
Buffy opened the top drawer of her vanity table and lifted her box of necklaces out of it. She took off the lid and placed it to one side of the box. Pawing through the box, Buffy tried necklace after necklace until she decided on a heavy silver cross on a simple snake chain. It'd been part of her birthday present from Angel. The weight of it felt familiar to her and she felt slightly safer while was wearing it, even though she wasn't a very religious person.
//And he said: Take my handLive while you can
Don't you see your dreams
Are right in the palm of your hand?//
She reached her hand back into the box to untangle one of the chains from another when her fingers felt the cool hardness of a large pendant with a gem inside. Buffy couldn't place the necklace with just her sense of touch. She yanked it out and gasped.
//And as he spoke,He spoke ordinary words
Although they did not feel
For I felt what I
Had not felt before
You'd swear those words could heal//
She dropped the necklace on the floor as she looked up. Her nightmare came rushing back to her as the creature with the folded skin appeared in the mirror, grinning. She was there, in her room. Slowly, Buffy turned around.
//And as I looked upInto those eyes
His vision borrows mine
And to know he's no stranger,
For I feel I've held him for all of time//
"I've been looking for you."
AN (again): The song was 'Ordinary Day' by Vanessa Carlton.