Rating:  PG

Feedback:  That would be very nice, thank you.  Melpomenethalia@aol.com

Spoilers:  Up to "The Gift"

Distribution: Here.  If you're interested, please let me know.

Summary:  My take on what happened to Buffy after diving into the portal. 

Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy.  Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you.  Thank you.

Author's Note:  Sorry this one took so long to put up.  Quite frankly, the events of "Seeing Red" made me so furious that I needed a bit of a break before posting fic again.

Part 7

Buffy's eyes opened on a room that was strangely blurred.  While she could tell that the objects in the bar were still there – the chairs, the tables, the floor and walls – it was as though a scrim of gray veiling had been rested over the surface of every thing in the room.  Reasoning this out, the Slayer came to the conclusion that this was because things didn't have souls.

The people present, on the other hand, were changed so much as to be unrecognizable.  Features and forms were completely obscured, leaving a soft radiance in their place.  Each one glowed with a depth and intensity of light all his or her own.  No two were alike, yet there was something strangely similar between them all. 

She glanced towards Drusilla, hoping for an explanation, and was startled to find not the dark-haired, blue-eyed woman but a brilliant glow of golden light.  Glancing around the room once more, Buffy realized her companion was one of the brightest souls in the room, perhaps even the most dazzling of them all.

"You… you're…" the Slayer started to stammer in wonder.  "Wow."

"Quite," Drusilla voice said with a lilting chuckle.  "But before you become too impressed with me, perhaps you'd best take a look at yourself."

Buffy moved her hands in front of her face and was shocked to see blazing light, intense as…

"'It's brighter than the fire,' I believe she said," Drusilla chuckled quietly.  "But come now, we'd best see what Darla has been able to accomplish.  I hope she's had more luck than usual."

The two followed the direction Darla had taken, Buffy still half-mesmerized by her new view of the world.  In mere moments, they had passed through a stage door and out into an alley behind the casino, where a truly bizarre sight met their eyes. 

Not one, but two struggles were taking place.  The one that would have been obvious to mortal eyes was the vampire Darla pummeling a rather fat, greasy, flashily dressed middle-aged man.  However, what would have been missed by the majority of humans was an even more surreal display than an attempted biting.  Darla's soul was glimmering just behind her vampire, repeatedly trying to pass through its body in much the same way that she would pass through a wall.  But the vampire itself… Buffy shuddered.  It was a dark gray form, devoid of the beauty present in the humans she had seen, although when she looked at it closely enough, it did have what appeared to be a single spark of light fluttering around the area where the heart must be.

Darla's soul was uttering some decidedly non-mystical language as she was thrown out from the vampire's form time and again.

"Let me in!"  she shrieked angrily, and Buffy experienced yet another shock as she realized Darla was practically in tears.  "That's my body you've got, and I'm saying stop it!"

The single, firefly-like light in the vampire's body drifted as close to the rest of itself, for the Slayer had already realized it was the part of Darla's soul that had become trapped, as it could, straining desperately towards her.

It was too late.  As Dru and Buffy looked on in helplessness, the vampire succeeded in draining the man.  As the light began to separate from the victim's body, Darla howled aloud in anguish, obviously experiencing the same pain that Drusilla had earlier.  In a flash, both of the other females were at her side, attempting to comfort her.  Suddenly, it no longer mattered that Buffy didn't particularly like the other blonde.  Darla's suffering both terrified and saddened her.

As this was taking place, the light that had been inside the man's form detached from the body completely, leaving an empty, gray-veiled object lying on the equally gray alley's ground.  Slowly, the disembodied light faded away, much as Buffy suspected her own had when she'd found herself in Limbo.  The vampire turned to go, but was suddenly joined by yet another dark-gray form.

"That's the other me," Drusilla explained softly as she and Buffy continued to softly support Darla's light with their own radiance.  It was obvious the experience had drained her terribly.

The Slayer looked at the second vampire and immediately noticed a substantial difference between her and Darla.  Instead of a single spark, Drusilla's vampire retained a ball of light the size of a fist, but it crackled and sputtered strangely, sometimes growing slightly larger, sometimes dimming down to a mere candle flame.

"There's more soul in yours," Buffy remarked in puzzlement.  "But it's…"

"Flickering?  That's the insanity.  I may not have it anymore, but since that piece of my soul is still inside a human body, it's as broken as ever it was," Drusilla murmured sadly.  "I can't even try to join with it like Darla does.  Instead, I work through, well, an intermediary of sorts."

"An inter-what-iary?"

"I have to try to approach my soul through another source.  Since it can't understand me on its own, I have to speak to it in a roundabout way."

The Slayer was just about to ask what she meant when it dawned on her exactly what Drusilla was talking about.