Disclaimer:  Nope, I don't own any of this.  Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy do.  Well, I did create April, Anne and Anders.  Dee is, strictly speaking, Joss Whedon's creation, since he did give her about ten seconds of screen time in "Chosen."  I'd like to think that I've made her into the woman she is now, though.

Epilogue:

"I guess nothing I say will make it hurt any less."  Oz' voice was infinitely gentle as April walked into his office.

"What happened to me?"

"We think that the vessel described in the ritual of the damned is actually a human soul; in this case, Dee's."  Oz told her.  "What better place to hold a soul than inside another?"

"But, why?"  April shook her head, not completely trusting herself not to break down in tears.

"Well, it actually makes a great deal of sense."  Oz said, "If you had a war to fight, what better way to ensure victory than to make sure that all your best warriors are almost invincible?"  He shook his head, "you find someone expendable, perform the ritual, and then you kill the vessel at the end of the battle to get your warriors back."

"It also made the perfect bait for Dee."  April nodded, her heart heavy.  "I imagine if she'd been turned, it would have had the same effect on me, anyway."

Oz nodded.

"How did Dee know?"  April asked.

Oz shook his head, "I'm not sure she did.  Willow said that the time between her completing the spell and Osiris' Vampires losing their direction was too short for her to have known where your soul was."

"So she did this for a bunch of strangers?"

"I don't know."  Oz told her, "we'll never know what she knew or how she knew it in those last moments."  He shrugged, "does it matter?"

April shook her head, "no."

"Are you okay?"

April shook her head again, "no.  But I will be."

********

It was in the top drawer of Dee's desk at home, for no reason that April could determine.

Dee had told her the story of how she became a slayer so many times, she could recite it by heart.

She wasn't certain why Dee had kept it.  Maybe some part of her knew what had happened that day, even if she wasn't consciously aware of it.  Maybe that part of her wanted to keep some kind of tangible reminder of the day a young, not so abnormal young girl had become a Slayer.

April gently traced her fingers over the thin seams of the baseball in her hand, and for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, allowed herself to smile.

The end

********

Author's note:

To answer the questions which I'm sure are arising: yes, Dee is really dead (and frankly, I'm rather pissed off at Dee for that one.  She goes and kills herself without even asking me first!?  Talk about inconsiderate), and no, I have no intention of bringing her back á la Buffy Season 6.  I wanted to explore the journey from someone who was largely a loner/pragmatist to someone who would sacrifice herself for strangers.  I'd like to think I've done so with a reasonable level of success.  At this point, I have no plans to revisit this character (but don't necessarily rule out the possibility).  At the moment, I've got a new character I've been playing around with (her name's Maria, and she's the main character in a story I'm writing called "Redemption."  The first chapter has already been published).

Mind, if anybody else wants to take the time to play with the characters I've created in this story, you have my permission to do so, on a couple of conditions:

1) I'd really appreciate it if you told me first.  It's not like I'm going to say that you can't use 'em, but I'd like to know what happens with these characters I've put a lot of time and effort into.

2) I've worked long and hard to prevent Dee from slipping over to the Mary-sue end of the character spectrum.  I'd like to think that I've been relatively successful doing so.  If someone out there turns her into one, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hunt them down and shoot them.

3) I was just kidding about #2, but bear in mind that I've grown somewhat fond of Dee over the last year, and it would really bother me to see someone brutalize her character.  So please, be gentle.

4) I'd really rather you didn't bring her back á la Buffy Season 6 (of course, there's not much I can do to prevent you from doing so), so bear in mind that there's a 13 year gap between her being chosen on the baseball field and her assuming the mantle of Slayer in San Diego.  You may not be able to put most of the benchmarks of the Whedonverse in such a story (since she had no clue what demons and Vampires were at the beginning of Dee's Story), but it could make for some interesting storytelling.

Apart from that, I can't think of anything.  Apart from the fact that I'd rather you didn't write Dee better than I do.  I mean, how much would that suck?  Here we have a character who's ostensibly mine (minus the ten seconds of screen time that Joss Whedon gave her in "Chosen"), and someone else writes her better than I do.  I jest, but that really would suck, now, wouldn't it?

At any rate, I hope you've enjoyed these stories, and I hope none of you are too upset at the ending.  Frankly, I have very little control over what Dee will do at any given point.  She took on a life of her own halfway through the first story and I became little more than an observer all the way through this one.