DISCLAIMER: We both know I don't own Buffy, Faith, or any of the other characters that are making Joss Whedon and his corporate sponsors/affiliates rich. If I did, this whole college tuition thing would be much less of an issue.
Also, this is my first Buffy fanfic, so be nice.
ANTI-DISCLAIMER (would that be just a "claimer?"): Some of these characters ARE my own creation, as well as many elements of the setting. Use your head. If it never appeared in anywhere in the Kenshin series, then it's probably mine. Not that anyone cares but me.
SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: Everything from Season 1 to Season 5 and Angel Season 1 to Season 3; this picks up after S5/S2.
Onward!!
* * * * *
CHAPTER 3:
THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
*Everything looks so different,* Buffy thought to herself, wrestling with her nerves, which stubbornly refused to lie still. Her first thought was that she was trapped inside the dreams of the Anointed again, but that had been a clear and unambiguous nightmare; everything looked normal here, just not the normal that she remembered. If anything, it was her that looked out of place, as she was still wearing her dress and everyone else was dressed normally. There were children heading by her on bikes with bookbags on their backs, the usual slew of gas stations, convenience stores, fast food chains, and so on. All the familiar landmarks she remembered were where she remembered them; the church on Main Street looked the same as it ever did, as did the public library, though she hadn't been there in ... well, OK, she had never been there, but it was the same building where she remembered Willow spending a lot of time.
Suddenly, something occurred to her. It was early morning, so the students with their bookbags ought to be heading towards the high school. Some of them, at least, looked to be of high school age, though none of them were familiar and none of them waved to her. A few did give her strange stares, no doubt at the sight of her evening attire, but at least she knew she wasn't a ghost or otherwise invisible. The kids weren't headed towards the high school, however; they were all headed away from it. Her eyes narrowed. She had skipped school on occasion, but it looked like the whole school had to be playing hookey.
She rounded the last corner to get to the high school, and stopped, putting both hands to her mouth to muffle a squeak of fright.
The high school lay in ruins. Crumbled heaps of concrete and mortar lay everywhere, despite what looked like a rudimentary and halfhearted cleanup effort. Blackened timbers poked skyward from the rubble, but nothin else remained of the upper levels of the school at any place in the structure. There wasn't even police tape or any other kind of barrier around the school, just a crude sign at each corner of the grounds that read "Keep Off," as if even the police had not wanted to touch the scene or stray too far onto it. The block was practically deserted, as though everyone were giving the grounds a wide berth, and she caught a few suspicious looks from people at a distance, apparently wondering why she wasn't doing likewise. They seemed afraid of the ruins, but also rather accustomed to the sight of them, as though they had stood here for a while. For that matter, the ruins looked ... old. Her first instinct was that the dance had been attacked in the night, and possibly a lot of people had been hurt or killed, but from the looks of things, whatever cataclysm had wrought this might have occurred a year ago or more.
*So no sane person wants to touch this place?* Buffy thought to herself. *Oh well.* She was already heading across the lawn towards the blackened building.
It didn't take her long to discover that a battle of some kind had taken place there; there were even remains of crossbow bolts and other weapons scattered around the facility, with the largest concentration in the courtyard. She wrinkled her nose. There was a distant, lingering smell of charred flesh hanging in the air, somehow even more repulsive than the smell of normal human flesh. It got even stronger when she left the courtyard towards where the libary would have been, and steeled herself again when she came to the hallway that had been just outside the library.
Pieces of flesh dotted the walls, floor, and ceiling; strips of it hung from the jagged edges of timbers and scraps of metal that looked like they used to be lockers. There was no mistaking it for human; something demonic had died here. Something huge. And if the destruction of the demon and the destruction of the high school weren't connected, then she was a boy.
Frightened for a moment, she put a hand to her chest. *Nope, still a girl.* She breathed a sigh of relief.
There were any number of possibilities. It was possible that something had killed the demon, and the demon's death had been so violent that it had destroyed the high school in the process; she had never faced a demon that exploded when it died, but she certainly didn't think it impossible, especially one of this size. Less likely was the thought that the demon had somehow destroyed itself to accomplish something; under normal circumstances, that seemed impossible, but these were anything but normal circumstances. Did this have anything to do with what was happening to her? Had it somehow done something to her before she died? On the whole, though, she wasn't about to believe a demon as powerful as this one had evidently been to be the kind to offer itself for a kamikaze mission. The last alternative was that someone had destroyed the high school in order to destroy the demon.
She felt a sudden, irrational pang of envy and disappointment. *Someone blew up the high school?* she thought. *And I missed it?* That didn't seem like the kind of thing she would have missed. It didn't seem like the kind of thing she could have missed, even had she wanted to.
Her mind jumped back to the remains of the weapons she had found in the courtyard. They were definitely more her type than most weapons that people in the neighborhood might have on hand, but there were far too many of them. Assuming that some weapons had to have been completely destroyed, or carried away by the people that had brought them, there could have easily been dozens of people fighting this thing. Dozens? That seemed impossible. Almost no one she had run into had ever had the guts to stand up to even minor demons. She didn't think the total amount of guts needed to stand up to such things as this existed in the entirety of Sunnydale High--in the entirety of Sunnydale, for that matter. If someone had gotten a large part of the student body together to actually fight back against something like this, whoever it was deserved a medal. More. She could never have done anything like that.
Images suddenly jumped into her mind, like memories from a dream. There was an image of herself in graduation robes and the maroon mortarboard of Sunnydale High. There was one of Angel outside ... only in daylight? Perhaps a severely overcast day? The image didn't look dark enough to be night, but it was so hazy and indistinct that she couldn't be sure. Another image ... a man turning into a giant serpent. She couldn't place any of the images, but she knew for a fact that she hadn't graduated, and that Angel had never been outside with the sun in the sky for centuries; and she was fairly sure that, even with all the strange events she'd seen in her life, she'd remember if a man had ever turned into something that looked like a wingless dragon in front of her. Those weren't the kinds of things you just forgot, though considering that she had no idea how she had gotten to where she had woken up, it wasn't impossible that she was under some kind of spell that was blocking her memory.
Her head was beginning to hurt. Too much thinking on her part, and too much stinking on the part of the demon-flesh. She scurried out of the ruined school, dreading where she figured she had to go next.
She had to go home. There would be no getting around that. Apparently, however it was that she got to that construction site, her purse had not come with her, so she had no money, and her dress was dirty and crinkled after apparently having spent the night on a dirty pile of cinder blocks and picking through the ruined high school. *Ruined high school,* she thought again. If she wasn't dreaming or otherwise hallucinating, that was going to take a while to sink in. However, she was still frightened of what she might find when she got there. Most of the town seemed close to the same as ever, but after seeing what had happened to the high school, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was going to be in for an unpleasant surprise of some kind.
She avoided talking to anyone on her walk across town, both lost in her own thoughts and worried that people would probably look at her like she was crazy, especially going around dressed as she was on what was apparently a school morning. *Hey, waitaminit,* the thought came to her mind as that sunk in. *Isn't it supposed to be Sunday?* On the whole, however, that was obviously not the case. The school could not possibly have been blown up overnight without there being a huge media scene for at least a day. Weeks, more likely. *Weeks?* she thought. *Could it have been weeks? Where the heck have I been?*
She knew that if she didn't get back to her home quickly, she probably would be too scared to do it all day. So she ran, as fast as her shoes would allow her, down the street towards her home, praying that it would still be there, that she wouldn't find that her family had moved. The first thing she saw, at a distance, was her mailbox and her front lawn. That didn't seem abnormal. She slowed her pace somewhat as she came within sight of the house itself. Things didn't look so out of place. There were two cars in the driveway; was that one Willow's? It certainly looked like it. The second, she didn't recognize. Her mother's would probably be in the garage.
She reached the front walk leading up to the porch, and the trepidation that she had been trying to outrun down the street finally caught up with her. Each pavement block suddenly seemed miles long.
Then the front door opened, and a girl came hurrying out.
Buffy didn't recognize her, but she seemed innocuous enough. She was only a few years older than Buffy at most, had short blond hair, and was carrying an armful of what appeared to be textbooks. Her dress was not quite as outlandish as Buffy's at the moment, but was a little more--Renaissancy?--than Buffy would have worn on a normal day. That wasn't quite the word she was looking for (it wasn't even a word), but the only one that came to her head. The girl hadn't seen Buffy yet. Buffy was tempted to call out to her, but something held her back for the moment. She did begin to inch a little forward on the sidewalk, however. Having the girl there to focus her attention on made the paralysis in Buffy's legs recede somewhat.
The girl crossed the grass to the car in the driveway that Buffy hadn't recognized, juggled with her books and keys for a moment, and finally got the driver's side door open. She popped the power locks, apparently intending to put the books down in the back seat, but when she turned towards the rear passenger door, she caught sight of Buffy out of the corner of her eye. Buffy had been approaching the entire time the blond girl had been fidgeting with her keys, and was now only a few strides away.
Buffy stopped and waved at her uncertainly.
With a piercing scream, the girl dropped her books and bolted across the yard. Instinctively, Buffy moved to block her path. Most people didn't know who she was, and of those that did, most of them that reacted like that had reason to want to get away from her. She knew the girl couldn't be a vampire, since the sun was above the horizon by now, but ...
"Apparitus exorcimae!" the girl cried, flinging out a hand at her. There was a burst of verdant green energy from her fingertips, which Buffy only barely managed to twist out of the way of.
*So that's how you want to play, huh,* Buffy thought to herself. *You've got nerve trying this at my own house.*
The girl struck again as Buffy was regaining her balance, having been unprepared for the girl's first attack. With her right hand, she cast what looked to be a handful of dust or seeds from a small pouch at her waist. "Enascoro, circumretio!" she cried as the flecks hit the ground. There was a rustling sound as vines immediately began to spring up around Buffy's feet and attempted to ensnare her ankles. Buffy was faster than that, however. Tearing free of her cumbersome dance shoes, she torpedoed herself into the air and dove at her attacker. The girl was in the middle of her third spell when Buffy crashed into her, leading with her shoulder and sending the girl stumbling, and then sweeping her legs out from under her. A moment later, she had the girl pinned to the ground, a hand clamped over her mouth to prevent any more fancy spellcasting.
"Who are you, and what the hell are you doing at my house?" she demanded, already wondering if it were better to do this inside rather than out on the front lawn in broad daylight.
She never got an answer. A powerful voice from off to her left suddenly shattered the morning calm. "Galadha'belethil govanna!" Buffy had only the briefest of moments to thing that there was something familiar about that voice before there was a brillant flash of light from the direction the voice had come, and she found herself being picked up and thrown away from the girl by some unseen force. Her breath left her for a moment when her back slammed into one of the trees in her yard, and spots clouded her visin. There were suddenly cords, or vines, or brambles of some kind around her wrists, ankles, and waist, pinning her in place. With an adrenal burst, she pulled both her arms free at once, but suddenly the spots cleared from her vision, and she was able to get a look at the owner of the voice that had spoken moments earlier. She gasped. There was a reason that the voice had sounded familiar, but if Sunnydale's most adorable and innocent computer nerd had been capable of things like this last time she and Buffy had met, Buffy had certainly never known it.
"Willow?!" Buffy asked incredulously.
"Buffy?" the redhead was apparently just now getting her first good look at Buffy's face; she would have only seen her from behind, or from the side, beforehand.
"Yes, Buffy," Buffy cried exasperatedly, pulling the bracken from around her waist. Much to her surprise, Willow suddenly raised her hands, and the bracken that she had pulled off moments earlier suddenly leapt up from the ground and pinned her wrists to the tree above her head again.
"Uh, Will?" Buffy asked uncertainly. "You know, much as I might consider this fun some other time, I don't think this is really the time for it ..."
"Shut up," Willow replied, with a colder voice than Buffy had ever heard her use. She did take a sudden look up and down the street, however, as though suddenly realizing what she had just done in public in broad daylight.
"Fine, then you talk," Buffy answered, forcing her breathing to steady, though she kept herself alert. If this was really Willow, then she shouldn't have anything to worry about ... but if not ...
"Willow?" the girl on the ground was slowly getting to her feet again. "Should we maybe ... go inside?"
"I'm not bringing anything inside that looks like Buffy unless it actually IS Buffy." Willow's voice was adamant.
"Hey! Will, I don't know what's happened to you, but I do believe that this is MY house, you know," Buffy answered, though of course, considering that this world was a bit different than the one she knew, anything was possible. Her voice suddenly much more hesitant, she asked, "isn't it?"
Willow shrugged. "Even if you are Buffy, that isn't quite true at the moment, but that's the least of your problems right now."
"Yeah, I was kind of getting that," Buffy answered.
"Good. Now Tara's right, we can't do this out front." She raised her arm and made a sign in the air with her hand, and the coarse cords that were binding Buffy fell to the ground, though Willow still seemed to be expecting Buffy to attack her. When she didn't immediately, the redhead appeared to relax a little more. "So why don't we go around back?"
Buffy shrugged. "OK, sure. But can you introduce me to ... your new friend, first, if she's going to be coming with us?"
Willow and her friend both tensed again. "If you're really Buffy, you ought to know Tara," Willow declared flatly.
"Umm ... sorry, but no," Buffy answered. "And I don't remember you being all big with the witchly stuff, either."
"You ... what?"
"You were the most innocent little computer nerd at Sunnydale High the last time I saw you."
"Umm ... that was a long time ago, you know," Willow said, clearly getting more suspicious by the moment.
Suddenly, the blond girl--Tara, Willow had called her--reached over and tugged on Willow's sleeve. "Will? Is it just me or does she look ... younger?"
Buffy looked down at herself. Younger? She would have thought she would have looked younger when the dress hadn't been so ragged and dirty; at the moment, there didn't seem to be any reason to think that she should look that much younger. She turned back to look at Willow.
Willow's eyes had nearly doubled in size during the time when Buffy had been examining herself, and her mouth had formed a soundless "O" that seemed to imply that Willow's mind was working in overdrive, and Buffy knew that Willow's mind usually never missed the mark even when working in normal drive.
"You want to share whatever revelation you're having?" she prodded.
"Oh God ... that dress ..."
"Yeah, it's a little worse for wear, I know. I don't know how you're getting from this to me looking younger. I can say for a fact that I've looked better, even if I didn't make the cheerleading team."
"You wore that to the dance, didn't you?" Willow asked, her breathing quickening perceptibly.
"Umm ... yeah, what else would I wear something like this for?"
"Tara, get the paper."
"What?"
"Right there." Willow pointed to the morning USA Today lying where it always had at the front of the driveway. "Go on." Nervously, Tara headed out towards the end of the driveway.
"Buffy, what's the last thing you remember?" Willow asked as Buffy walked away.
"I remember ..." Buffy's hand suddenly went to her throat again. The marks. Her mind darted back in time. The sewers, the underground church, the cavern. Shadows everywhere. Huge, knobbed hands suddenly gripping her from behind. A dark, cracking voice gloating in her ear. A sudden, piercing pain at the side of her neck ...
Tara was back from the front of the driveway with the paper. Buffy realized that her flashback must have lasted a minute or so, and Willow had simply stood there, her mind clearly still racing, letting her think. Willow took the paper from Tara almost absentmindedly, still half lost in her own epiphany.
"Willow?" Buffy asked, trying to bring her back to Earth a little.
"Buffy, I need to ask you a few questions. I just need to see something, all right. And come on, let's walk around back, we've stood out here too long. I'll explain everything in a minute ... I think."
"Umm ... OK," Buffy answered.
"Oh, and by the way, this is my girlfriend Tara," Willow said, her voice suddenly brightening so that it sounded mostly like the Willow that Buffy thought she knew.
"Uh ... pleased to meet you," Tara answered uncertainly, still in seeming disbelief that Buffy didn't already know her.
"Your ... girlfriend?" Buffy sputtered.
Willow nodded, suddenly seeming to grow distant again. "Yeah, I think we're on to something here."
"Huh?"
They were heading around the side of Buffy's house. Willow continued asking questions.
"Have you seen Cordelia lately?"
"Cordelia? Heck no! And why on Earth would I ever want to talk to Sunnydale's most pampered princess?"
Willow just nodded again. That was getting annoying. She came up with another question, even more unexpected than the first. "OK, what's the worst thing you've ever done to Angel?" she asked.
Buffy's eyes narrowed. "Well ... when we first met, I sort of swung down from above him and smashed him in the face. And when Darla was in town, I hunted him down and tried to kill him because I thought he hurt my mom." Suddenly, other images came to her mind, more images like those remembered from a dream that had come to her consciousness in the ruined high school. That reminded her, she had to ask about that some time, but these images were somehow even more ... charged ... than the ones that had come to her at the school. There was a brief, foggy flash of her and Angel together, an image that faded just as she began to realize enough of what was going on in the image that her cheeks flushed; then another image with her locked in a swordfighting duel with the vampire that had been her boyfriend, and another one of Angel surrounded by flares and arcs of scarlet energy that suddenly vanished, along with the whole sequence of images.
Willow was already finishing her next question. Buffy hadn't gotten a chance to see if she'd made with the annoying nod again. She guessed that she had. "Sorry, what was that?" she asked.
"I asked if you knew where your mom was."
"Oh ... at the gallery, I guess, if she's already left." Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Tara miss a step, and heard a soft gasp that didn't sound like surprise. More like ... sympathy? Comfort? What the heck was going on?
Willow nodded again--that was really getting annoying by this point--and slumped down on one of the lawn chairs in the backyard, which they had just reached. "I'm really sorry, Buffy. I believe you. I think I know what's going on. But Buffy ... I hate to tell you this, but you've got a lot of catching up to do."
"I've sort of figured that out myself," Buffy pressed, with only the faintest hint of exasperation. "Will, WHY?"
"The last thing you remember is going to fight the Master, right, just before the dance at the end of our freshman year of high school?"
"Right." That seemed so natural to say, but a dark suspicion was growing in the back of her mind, which Willow seemed to be leading towards, and which Tara suddenly seemed to have grasped as well, because she let out an awed "Goddess ..." and would have dropped her books again had anyone remembered to pick them up before they started around back here.
Willow nodded one last time. Buffy rolled her eyes, but the silhouette of Willow's conclusion was beginning to take form in her mind, so she was barely paying attention. Willow already seemed to be taking charge of the situation, however, for which Buffy was welcome; Willow seemed to have some kind of handle on what was going on, and was apparently much more familiar with the supernatural than Buffy remembered. "Tara, get on the phone. Get Giles over here now." Now THAT at least made sense to Buffy. She definitely wanted to talk to Giles. "And call Xander, have him get Dawn out of school and get her down here, too." That made some sense to Buffy; she did want to see Xander again, and thought it would be helpful having him around. But who was Dawn?
Tara was already starting for the back door of the house. "Should I bring back anything to drink?" she asked, pausing by the back door.
"I won't need anything," Willow called after her, "But I'm betting she will."
"Oh, thanks," Buffy remarked.
Willow nodded--again! But the redhead had already started talking, so Buffy didn't have a chance to say what was on her mind. "Listen, Buffy, I know you're strong--you're the strongest girl I've ever met, and I'm not just talking about your muscles--but this is going to be rough. You have no idea how rough."
"Just get to the point, I can't stand waiting any longer."
Willow showed off her nodding skills once again. "All right. Let me know if I start to freak you out too much, and we can stop and give you a chance to rest. Anyway, if I'm guessing right, the very last thing you remember is the Master actually ... well, killing you. The marks on your neck sure look they were made by much more than any ordinary vamp. That dress is the same you wore that night, too. You died that night, Buffy. Xander got to you in time to do CPR, though, and you came back to us."
"I don't remember that," Buffy answered.
Willow held up her hand for patience. And she nodded. Again. Buffy clenched her teeth and let her friend continue. "I know, that's what I'm getting to. You came back, but you also died. You were dead long enough for a new Slayer to be called--there are actually two of you now, believe it or not--and so your spirit had to have made it to the afterlife.
"Fast forward a little while. Not long ago--well, about three months ago now, actually--there was ... a disturbance. A disruption in the barriers between worlds. A portal opened, and for a brief moment, dimensions began to bleed together. I can't even describe what happened there that night, and as you see, I've been studying magic a lot lately. It was ... serious. Really serious. The portal was being opened by a half-crazed goddess from a hell dimension that had been exiled here, and she wasn't about to close the portal behind her or do anything else to keep Earth and a couple hundred other dimensions besides from basically getting mixed together in a giant blender with the cap off. A few things did get through before you closed it.
"We stopped her. You, me, Dawn, Giles, everyone, but mostly just you. You got the portal to close. You. And ... it killed you."
"What, I died? Again?"
Willow grinned, the first time Buffy had seen her smile in some time. It definitely brought back more memories of the old Willow than she had seen in a while. "Yeah, you need to stop doing that, dying too often is really bad for your complexion."
"Hey, it's not like I meant to."
"Well ... actually, that time, you did, but I'll come back to that. That's going to be the hardest part of the story. But anyway, in order to close the portal, you threw yourself into it. Basically, for a brief moment, you were at the center, or at least somewhere, in practically every dimension in existence. For a brief moment, there was a portal that basically went from anywhere, to anywhere. Including, I see now, though I'd never have believed if you weren't sitting right here, the realms of the afterlife."
"So I traded places with the me that died?"
Willow nodded, though this time she was actually answering a question. That was what nodding was supposed to be for. "It's not impossible, once you believe that the portal was powerful enough to reach that far, and if you'd seen it, you could believe it. Everything has a kind of spiritual resonance, Buffy, a pattern that marks it almost like a fingerprint, but also links it with anything else that shares the same feeling. If there was another you floating around in the afterlife somewhere--the one that died that night of the dance, the one that caused the next Slayer to be called--it would have been drawn to the portal like a moth to a flame while you were at the center of it. Who knows, the portal might have even opened right where you happened to be in the afterlife, if the afterlife even works like that; I'm not an authority on the subject, but the portal itself was made with a piece of your essence. That's why your sacrifice was able to close it. The rift might have opened right where your essence in the afterlife was strongest. I have no idea how you managed to become flesh again; I would've thought you might have come back as a spirit or something, but now ..."
"Now you're just guessing, though," Buffy interjected.
Willow looked up again, and miraculously refrained from nodding. A moment later, Buffy discerned mist forming in her eyes, and Willow gave a muffled, choking cough. "Babbling, actually," she said, laughing through her tears. With a cry, she suddenly jumped from her lawn chair to the ground right next to Buffy's, and threw her arms around the startled Slayer. "It is so good to have you back," she cried.
Buffy and Willow hugged for a good, long minute, until Tara came back out of the back door, the cordless in her hands. She started to call out to them, but thought better of it, and instead floated down the steps and across the lawn to them.
As though suddenly embarrassed by the girl's presence--this Tara was still a stranger to Buffy, even though she realized now that the other her had probably known her--Buffy pulled back from Willow's embrace and grinned, half-nervously, half-sheepishly. To break the uncomfortable silence, she asked, "All right, Willow, what's with the newspaper?"
That brought Willow back down to Earth. "Buffy, you've been out of action for a while. I told you that you died again, and you look like you're taking that all in stride, but here's something else to sink in. You don't die easily. After the Master, you faced an awful lot of evil before anything brought you down again. I just wanted the newspaper because I thought it would be the most convincing way to show you." With that, she plopped the USA Today down in Buffy's lap.
The first thing that caught her suddenly widening eyes was the headline about a President Bush and an impending war with Afghanistan. President Bush? Hadn't he gone the way of the dinosaurs in 1992? And hadn't his big deal been Iraq? What was up with Afghanistan? Finally, she made her eyes settle on the date.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2001.
"Holy sh ..." the words burst from her mouth in a forced whisper.
* * * * *
COMING SOON: Chapter 4, "Two Alone." Faith discovers Angel half-mad with grief for Buffy and unable to help her, and cannot make herself face Cordelia or Wesley. She ends up homeless for a time, but help comes from an unexpected source. Also, Buffy was not the only familiar face to come back through the portal.
As always, classes are torture, so it may be a long time between updates. I shouldn't be working on this as much as I am ... but it's just so much more fun than schoolwork.
Also, this is my first Buffy fanfic, so be nice.
ANTI-DISCLAIMER (would that be just a "claimer?"): Some of these characters ARE my own creation, as well as many elements of the setting. Use your head. If it never appeared in anywhere in the Kenshin series, then it's probably mine. Not that anyone cares but me.
SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: Everything from Season 1 to Season 5 and Angel Season 1 to Season 3; this picks up after S5/S2.
Onward!!
* * * * *
CHAPTER 3:
THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
*Everything looks so different,* Buffy thought to herself, wrestling with her nerves, which stubbornly refused to lie still. Her first thought was that she was trapped inside the dreams of the Anointed again, but that had been a clear and unambiguous nightmare; everything looked normal here, just not the normal that she remembered. If anything, it was her that looked out of place, as she was still wearing her dress and everyone else was dressed normally. There were children heading by her on bikes with bookbags on their backs, the usual slew of gas stations, convenience stores, fast food chains, and so on. All the familiar landmarks she remembered were where she remembered them; the church on Main Street looked the same as it ever did, as did the public library, though she hadn't been there in ... well, OK, she had never been there, but it was the same building where she remembered Willow spending a lot of time.
Suddenly, something occurred to her. It was early morning, so the students with their bookbags ought to be heading towards the high school. Some of them, at least, looked to be of high school age, though none of them were familiar and none of them waved to her. A few did give her strange stares, no doubt at the sight of her evening attire, but at least she knew she wasn't a ghost or otherwise invisible. The kids weren't headed towards the high school, however; they were all headed away from it. Her eyes narrowed. She had skipped school on occasion, but it looked like the whole school had to be playing hookey.
She rounded the last corner to get to the high school, and stopped, putting both hands to her mouth to muffle a squeak of fright.
The high school lay in ruins. Crumbled heaps of concrete and mortar lay everywhere, despite what looked like a rudimentary and halfhearted cleanup effort. Blackened timbers poked skyward from the rubble, but nothin else remained of the upper levels of the school at any place in the structure. There wasn't even police tape or any other kind of barrier around the school, just a crude sign at each corner of the grounds that read "Keep Off," as if even the police had not wanted to touch the scene or stray too far onto it. The block was practically deserted, as though everyone were giving the grounds a wide berth, and she caught a few suspicious looks from people at a distance, apparently wondering why she wasn't doing likewise. They seemed afraid of the ruins, but also rather accustomed to the sight of them, as though they had stood here for a while. For that matter, the ruins looked ... old. Her first instinct was that the dance had been attacked in the night, and possibly a lot of people had been hurt or killed, but from the looks of things, whatever cataclysm had wrought this might have occurred a year ago or more.
*So no sane person wants to touch this place?* Buffy thought to herself. *Oh well.* She was already heading across the lawn towards the blackened building.
It didn't take her long to discover that a battle of some kind had taken place there; there were even remains of crossbow bolts and other weapons scattered around the facility, with the largest concentration in the courtyard. She wrinkled her nose. There was a distant, lingering smell of charred flesh hanging in the air, somehow even more repulsive than the smell of normal human flesh. It got even stronger when she left the courtyard towards where the libary would have been, and steeled herself again when she came to the hallway that had been just outside the library.
Pieces of flesh dotted the walls, floor, and ceiling; strips of it hung from the jagged edges of timbers and scraps of metal that looked like they used to be lockers. There was no mistaking it for human; something demonic had died here. Something huge. And if the destruction of the demon and the destruction of the high school weren't connected, then she was a boy.
Frightened for a moment, she put a hand to her chest. *Nope, still a girl.* She breathed a sigh of relief.
There were any number of possibilities. It was possible that something had killed the demon, and the demon's death had been so violent that it had destroyed the high school in the process; she had never faced a demon that exploded when it died, but she certainly didn't think it impossible, especially one of this size. Less likely was the thought that the demon had somehow destroyed itself to accomplish something; under normal circumstances, that seemed impossible, but these were anything but normal circumstances. Did this have anything to do with what was happening to her? Had it somehow done something to her before she died? On the whole, though, she wasn't about to believe a demon as powerful as this one had evidently been to be the kind to offer itself for a kamikaze mission. The last alternative was that someone had destroyed the high school in order to destroy the demon.
She felt a sudden, irrational pang of envy and disappointment. *Someone blew up the high school?* she thought. *And I missed it?* That didn't seem like the kind of thing she would have missed. It didn't seem like the kind of thing she could have missed, even had she wanted to.
Her mind jumped back to the remains of the weapons she had found in the courtyard. They were definitely more her type than most weapons that people in the neighborhood might have on hand, but there were far too many of them. Assuming that some weapons had to have been completely destroyed, or carried away by the people that had brought them, there could have easily been dozens of people fighting this thing. Dozens? That seemed impossible. Almost no one she had run into had ever had the guts to stand up to even minor demons. She didn't think the total amount of guts needed to stand up to such things as this existed in the entirety of Sunnydale High--in the entirety of Sunnydale, for that matter. If someone had gotten a large part of the student body together to actually fight back against something like this, whoever it was deserved a medal. More. She could never have done anything like that.
Images suddenly jumped into her mind, like memories from a dream. There was an image of herself in graduation robes and the maroon mortarboard of Sunnydale High. There was one of Angel outside ... only in daylight? Perhaps a severely overcast day? The image didn't look dark enough to be night, but it was so hazy and indistinct that she couldn't be sure. Another image ... a man turning into a giant serpent. She couldn't place any of the images, but she knew for a fact that she hadn't graduated, and that Angel had never been outside with the sun in the sky for centuries; and she was fairly sure that, even with all the strange events she'd seen in her life, she'd remember if a man had ever turned into something that looked like a wingless dragon in front of her. Those weren't the kinds of things you just forgot, though considering that she had no idea how she had gotten to where she had woken up, it wasn't impossible that she was under some kind of spell that was blocking her memory.
Her head was beginning to hurt. Too much thinking on her part, and too much stinking on the part of the demon-flesh. She scurried out of the ruined school, dreading where she figured she had to go next.
She had to go home. There would be no getting around that. Apparently, however it was that she got to that construction site, her purse had not come with her, so she had no money, and her dress was dirty and crinkled after apparently having spent the night on a dirty pile of cinder blocks and picking through the ruined high school. *Ruined high school,* she thought again. If she wasn't dreaming or otherwise hallucinating, that was going to take a while to sink in. However, she was still frightened of what she might find when she got there. Most of the town seemed close to the same as ever, but after seeing what had happened to the high school, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was going to be in for an unpleasant surprise of some kind.
She avoided talking to anyone on her walk across town, both lost in her own thoughts and worried that people would probably look at her like she was crazy, especially going around dressed as she was on what was apparently a school morning. *Hey, waitaminit,* the thought came to her mind as that sunk in. *Isn't it supposed to be Sunday?* On the whole, however, that was obviously not the case. The school could not possibly have been blown up overnight without there being a huge media scene for at least a day. Weeks, more likely. *Weeks?* she thought. *Could it have been weeks? Where the heck have I been?*
She knew that if she didn't get back to her home quickly, she probably would be too scared to do it all day. So she ran, as fast as her shoes would allow her, down the street towards her home, praying that it would still be there, that she wouldn't find that her family had moved. The first thing she saw, at a distance, was her mailbox and her front lawn. That didn't seem abnormal. She slowed her pace somewhat as she came within sight of the house itself. Things didn't look so out of place. There were two cars in the driveway; was that one Willow's? It certainly looked like it. The second, she didn't recognize. Her mother's would probably be in the garage.
She reached the front walk leading up to the porch, and the trepidation that she had been trying to outrun down the street finally caught up with her. Each pavement block suddenly seemed miles long.
Then the front door opened, and a girl came hurrying out.
Buffy didn't recognize her, but she seemed innocuous enough. She was only a few years older than Buffy at most, had short blond hair, and was carrying an armful of what appeared to be textbooks. Her dress was not quite as outlandish as Buffy's at the moment, but was a little more--Renaissancy?--than Buffy would have worn on a normal day. That wasn't quite the word she was looking for (it wasn't even a word), but the only one that came to her head. The girl hadn't seen Buffy yet. Buffy was tempted to call out to her, but something held her back for the moment. She did begin to inch a little forward on the sidewalk, however. Having the girl there to focus her attention on made the paralysis in Buffy's legs recede somewhat.
The girl crossed the grass to the car in the driveway that Buffy hadn't recognized, juggled with her books and keys for a moment, and finally got the driver's side door open. She popped the power locks, apparently intending to put the books down in the back seat, but when she turned towards the rear passenger door, she caught sight of Buffy out of the corner of her eye. Buffy had been approaching the entire time the blond girl had been fidgeting with her keys, and was now only a few strides away.
Buffy stopped and waved at her uncertainly.
With a piercing scream, the girl dropped her books and bolted across the yard. Instinctively, Buffy moved to block her path. Most people didn't know who she was, and of those that did, most of them that reacted like that had reason to want to get away from her. She knew the girl couldn't be a vampire, since the sun was above the horizon by now, but ...
"Apparitus exorcimae!" the girl cried, flinging out a hand at her. There was a burst of verdant green energy from her fingertips, which Buffy only barely managed to twist out of the way of.
*So that's how you want to play, huh,* Buffy thought to herself. *You've got nerve trying this at my own house.*
The girl struck again as Buffy was regaining her balance, having been unprepared for the girl's first attack. With her right hand, she cast what looked to be a handful of dust or seeds from a small pouch at her waist. "Enascoro, circumretio!" she cried as the flecks hit the ground. There was a rustling sound as vines immediately began to spring up around Buffy's feet and attempted to ensnare her ankles. Buffy was faster than that, however. Tearing free of her cumbersome dance shoes, she torpedoed herself into the air and dove at her attacker. The girl was in the middle of her third spell when Buffy crashed into her, leading with her shoulder and sending the girl stumbling, and then sweeping her legs out from under her. A moment later, she had the girl pinned to the ground, a hand clamped over her mouth to prevent any more fancy spellcasting.
"Who are you, and what the hell are you doing at my house?" she demanded, already wondering if it were better to do this inside rather than out on the front lawn in broad daylight.
She never got an answer. A powerful voice from off to her left suddenly shattered the morning calm. "Galadha'belethil govanna!" Buffy had only the briefest of moments to thing that there was something familiar about that voice before there was a brillant flash of light from the direction the voice had come, and she found herself being picked up and thrown away from the girl by some unseen force. Her breath left her for a moment when her back slammed into one of the trees in her yard, and spots clouded her visin. There were suddenly cords, or vines, or brambles of some kind around her wrists, ankles, and waist, pinning her in place. With an adrenal burst, she pulled both her arms free at once, but suddenly the spots cleared from her vision, and she was able to get a look at the owner of the voice that had spoken moments earlier. She gasped. There was a reason that the voice had sounded familiar, but if Sunnydale's most adorable and innocent computer nerd had been capable of things like this last time she and Buffy had met, Buffy had certainly never known it.
"Willow?!" Buffy asked incredulously.
"Buffy?" the redhead was apparently just now getting her first good look at Buffy's face; she would have only seen her from behind, or from the side, beforehand.
"Yes, Buffy," Buffy cried exasperatedly, pulling the bracken from around her waist. Much to her surprise, Willow suddenly raised her hands, and the bracken that she had pulled off moments earlier suddenly leapt up from the ground and pinned her wrists to the tree above her head again.
"Uh, Will?" Buffy asked uncertainly. "You know, much as I might consider this fun some other time, I don't think this is really the time for it ..."
"Shut up," Willow replied, with a colder voice than Buffy had ever heard her use. She did take a sudden look up and down the street, however, as though suddenly realizing what she had just done in public in broad daylight.
"Fine, then you talk," Buffy answered, forcing her breathing to steady, though she kept herself alert. If this was really Willow, then she shouldn't have anything to worry about ... but if not ...
"Willow?" the girl on the ground was slowly getting to her feet again. "Should we maybe ... go inside?"
"I'm not bringing anything inside that looks like Buffy unless it actually IS Buffy." Willow's voice was adamant.
"Hey! Will, I don't know what's happened to you, but I do believe that this is MY house, you know," Buffy answered, though of course, considering that this world was a bit different than the one she knew, anything was possible. Her voice suddenly much more hesitant, she asked, "isn't it?"
Willow shrugged. "Even if you are Buffy, that isn't quite true at the moment, but that's the least of your problems right now."
"Yeah, I was kind of getting that," Buffy answered.
"Good. Now Tara's right, we can't do this out front." She raised her arm and made a sign in the air with her hand, and the coarse cords that were binding Buffy fell to the ground, though Willow still seemed to be expecting Buffy to attack her. When she didn't immediately, the redhead appeared to relax a little more. "So why don't we go around back?"
Buffy shrugged. "OK, sure. But can you introduce me to ... your new friend, first, if she's going to be coming with us?"
Willow and her friend both tensed again. "If you're really Buffy, you ought to know Tara," Willow declared flatly.
"Umm ... sorry, but no," Buffy answered. "And I don't remember you being all big with the witchly stuff, either."
"You ... what?"
"You were the most innocent little computer nerd at Sunnydale High the last time I saw you."
"Umm ... that was a long time ago, you know," Willow said, clearly getting more suspicious by the moment.
Suddenly, the blond girl--Tara, Willow had called her--reached over and tugged on Willow's sleeve. "Will? Is it just me or does she look ... younger?"
Buffy looked down at herself. Younger? She would have thought she would have looked younger when the dress hadn't been so ragged and dirty; at the moment, there didn't seem to be any reason to think that she should look that much younger. She turned back to look at Willow.
Willow's eyes had nearly doubled in size during the time when Buffy had been examining herself, and her mouth had formed a soundless "O" that seemed to imply that Willow's mind was working in overdrive, and Buffy knew that Willow's mind usually never missed the mark even when working in normal drive.
"You want to share whatever revelation you're having?" she prodded.
"Oh God ... that dress ..."
"Yeah, it's a little worse for wear, I know. I don't know how you're getting from this to me looking younger. I can say for a fact that I've looked better, even if I didn't make the cheerleading team."
"You wore that to the dance, didn't you?" Willow asked, her breathing quickening perceptibly.
"Umm ... yeah, what else would I wear something like this for?"
"Tara, get the paper."
"What?"
"Right there." Willow pointed to the morning USA Today lying where it always had at the front of the driveway. "Go on." Nervously, Tara headed out towards the end of the driveway.
"Buffy, what's the last thing you remember?" Willow asked as Buffy walked away.
"I remember ..." Buffy's hand suddenly went to her throat again. The marks. Her mind darted back in time. The sewers, the underground church, the cavern. Shadows everywhere. Huge, knobbed hands suddenly gripping her from behind. A dark, cracking voice gloating in her ear. A sudden, piercing pain at the side of her neck ...
Tara was back from the front of the driveway with the paper. Buffy realized that her flashback must have lasted a minute or so, and Willow had simply stood there, her mind clearly still racing, letting her think. Willow took the paper from Tara almost absentmindedly, still half lost in her own epiphany.
"Willow?" Buffy asked, trying to bring her back to Earth a little.
"Buffy, I need to ask you a few questions. I just need to see something, all right. And come on, let's walk around back, we've stood out here too long. I'll explain everything in a minute ... I think."
"Umm ... OK," Buffy answered.
"Oh, and by the way, this is my girlfriend Tara," Willow said, her voice suddenly brightening so that it sounded mostly like the Willow that Buffy thought she knew.
"Uh ... pleased to meet you," Tara answered uncertainly, still in seeming disbelief that Buffy didn't already know her.
"Your ... girlfriend?" Buffy sputtered.
Willow nodded, suddenly seeming to grow distant again. "Yeah, I think we're on to something here."
"Huh?"
They were heading around the side of Buffy's house. Willow continued asking questions.
"Have you seen Cordelia lately?"
"Cordelia? Heck no! And why on Earth would I ever want to talk to Sunnydale's most pampered princess?"
Willow just nodded again. That was getting annoying. She came up with another question, even more unexpected than the first. "OK, what's the worst thing you've ever done to Angel?" she asked.
Buffy's eyes narrowed. "Well ... when we first met, I sort of swung down from above him and smashed him in the face. And when Darla was in town, I hunted him down and tried to kill him because I thought he hurt my mom." Suddenly, other images came to her mind, more images like those remembered from a dream that had come to her consciousness in the ruined high school. That reminded her, she had to ask about that some time, but these images were somehow even more ... charged ... than the ones that had come to her at the school. There was a brief, foggy flash of her and Angel together, an image that faded just as she began to realize enough of what was going on in the image that her cheeks flushed; then another image with her locked in a swordfighting duel with the vampire that had been her boyfriend, and another one of Angel surrounded by flares and arcs of scarlet energy that suddenly vanished, along with the whole sequence of images.
Willow was already finishing her next question. Buffy hadn't gotten a chance to see if she'd made with the annoying nod again. She guessed that she had. "Sorry, what was that?" she asked.
"I asked if you knew where your mom was."
"Oh ... at the gallery, I guess, if she's already left." Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Tara miss a step, and heard a soft gasp that didn't sound like surprise. More like ... sympathy? Comfort? What the heck was going on?
Willow nodded again--that was really getting annoying by this point--and slumped down on one of the lawn chairs in the backyard, which they had just reached. "I'm really sorry, Buffy. I believe you. I think I know what's going on. But Buffy ... I hate to tell you this, but you've got a lot of catching up to do."
"I've sort of figured that out myself," Buffy pressed, with only the faintest hint of exasperation. "Will, WHY?"
"The last thing you remember is going to fight the Master, right, just before the dance at the end of our freshman year of high school?"
"Right." That seemed so natural to say, but a dark suspicion was growing in the back of her mind, which Willow seemed to be leading towards, and which Tara suddenly seemed to have grasped as well, because she let out an awed "Goddess ..." and would have dropped her books again had anyone remembered to pick them up before they started around back here.
Willow nodded one last time. Buffy rolled her eyes, but the silhouette of Willow's conclusion was beginning to take form in her mind, so she was barely paying attention. Willow already seemed to be taking charge of the situation, however, for which Buffy was welcome; Willow seemed to have some kind of handle on what was going on, and was apparently much more familiar with the supernatural than Buffy remembered. "Tara, get on the phone. Get Giles over here now." Now THAT at least made sense to Buffy. She definitely wanted to talk to Giles. "And call Xander, have him get Dawn out of school and get her down here, too." That made some sense to Buffy; she did want to see Xander again, and thought it would be helpful having him around. But who was Dawn?
Tara was already starting for the back door of the house. "Should I bring back anything to drink?" she asked, pausing by the back door.
"I won't need anything," Willow called after her, "But I'm betting she will."
"Oh, thanks," Buffy remarked.
Willow nodded--again! But the redhead had already started talking, so Buffy didn't have a chance to say what was on her mind. "Listen, Buffy, I know you're strong--you're the strongest girl I've ever met, and I'm not just talking about your muscles--but this is going to be rough. You have no idea how rough."
"Just get to the point, I can't stand waiting any longer."
Willow showed off her nodding skills once again. "All right. Let me know if I start to freak you out too much, and we can stop and give you a chance to rest. Anyway, if I'm guessing right, the very last thing you remember is the Master actually ... well, killing you. The marks on your neck sure look they were made by much more than any ordinary vamp. That dress is the same you wore that night, too. You died that night, Buffy. Xander got to you in time to do CPR, though, and you came back to us."
"I don't remember that," Buffy answered.
Willow held up her hand for patience. And she nodded. Again. Buffy clenched her teeth and let her friend continue. "I know, that's what I'm getting to. You came back, but you also died. You were dead long enough for a new Slayer to be called--there are actually two of you now, believe it or not--and so your spirit had to have made it to the afterlife.
"Fast forward a little while. Not long ago--well, about three months ago now, actually--there was ... a disturbance. A disruption in the barriers between worlds. A portal opened, and for a brief moment, dimensions began to bleed together. I can't even describe what happened there that night, and as you see, I've been studying magic a lot lately. It was ... serious. Really serious. The portal was being opened by a half-crazed goddess from a hell dimension that had been exiled here, and she wasn't about to close the portal behind her or do anything else to keep Earth and a couple hundred other dimensions besides from basically getting mixed together in a giant blender with the cap off. A few things did get through before you closed it.
"We stopped her. You, me, Dawn, Giles, everyone, but mostly just you. You got the portal to close. You. And ... it killed you."
"What, I died? Again?"
Willow grinned, the first time Buffy had seen her smile in some time. It definitely brought back more memories of the old Willow than she had seen in a while. "Yeah, you need to stop doing that, dying too often is really bad for your complexion."
"Hey, it's not like I meant to."
"Well ... actually, that time, you did, but I'll come back to that. That's going to be the hardest part of the story. But anyway, in order to close the portal, you threw yourself into it. Basically, for a brief moment, you were at the center, or at least somewhere, in practically every dimension in existence. For a brief moment, there was a portal that basically went from anywhere, to anywhere. Including, I see now, though I'd never have believed if you weren't sitting right here, the realms of the afterlife."
"So I traded places with the me that died?"
Willow nodded, though this time she was actually answering a question. That was what nodding was supposed to be for. "It's not impossible, once you believe that the portal was powerful enough to reach that far, and if you'd seen it, you could believe it. Everything has a kind of spiritual resonance, Buffy, a pattern that marks it almost like a fingerprint, but also links it with anything else that shares the same feeling. If there was another you floating around in the afterlife somewhere--the one that died that night of the dance, the one that caused the next Slayer to be called--it would have been drawn to the portal like a moth to a flame while you were at the center of it. Who knows, the portal might have even opened right where you happened to be in the afterlife, if the afterlife even works like that; I'm not an authority on the subject, but the portal itself was made with a piece of your essence. That's why your sacrifice was able to close it. The rift might have opened right where your essence in the afterlife was strongest. I have no idea how you managed to become flesh again; I would've thought you might have come back as a spirit or something, but now ..."
"Now you're just guessing, though," Buffy interjected.
Willow looked up again, and miraculously refrained from nodding. A moment later, Buffy discerned mist forming in her eyes, and Willow gave a muffled, choking cough. "Babbling, actually," she said, laughing through her tears. With a cry, she suddenly jumped from her lawn chair to the ground right next to Buffy's, and threw her arms around the startled Slayer. "It is so good to have you back," she cried.
Buffy and Willow hugged for a good, long minute, until Tara came back out of the back door, the cordless in her hands. She started to call out to them, but thought better of it, and instead floated down the steps and across the lawn to them.
As though suddenly embarrassed by the girl's presence--this Tara was still a stranger to Buffy, even though she realized now that the other her had probably known her--Buffy pulled back from Willow's embrace and grinned, half-nervously, half-sheepishly. To break the uncomfortable silence, she asked, "All right, Willow, what's with the newspaper?"
That brought Willow back down to Earth. "Buffy, you've been out of action for a while. I told you that you died again, and you look like you're taking that all in stride, but here's something else to sink in. You don't die easily. After the Master, you faced an awful lot of evil before anything brought you down again. I just wanted the newspaper because I thought it would be the most convincing way to show you." With that, she plopped the USA Today down in Buffy's lap.
The first thing that caught her suddenly widening eyes was the headline about a President Bush and an impending war with Afghanistan. President Bush? Hadn't he gone the way of the dinosaurs in 1992? And hadn't his big deal been Iraq? What was up with Afghanistan? Finally, she made her eyes settle on the date.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2001.
"Holy sh ..." the words burst from her mouth in a forced whisper.
* * * * *
COMING SOON: Chapter 4, "Two Alone." Faith discovers Angel half-mad with grief for Buffy and unable to help her, and cannot make herself face Cordelia or Wesley. She ends up homeless for a time, but help comes from an unexpected source. Also, Buffy was not the only familiar face to come back through the portal.
As always, classes are torture, so it may be a long time between updates. I shouldn't be working on this as much as I am ... but it's just so much more fun than schoolwork.