Part 2
The Forgotten

4 days ago
A ship on its way to the Planet Phenias

"So let me get this straight...," Spike tried not to seem intimidated by the ten armed soldiers surrounding him as he eyed the interior of the ship in search of some kind of way to escape. "The Human High Council built themselves an army and they wanted a slayer to lead it so they had their researchers mojo a Buffy copy?"

"A clone," one of the soldiers corrected him.

"And you want me to do what?" he asked leaning back in his chair. He missed wooden chairs and disliked the metallic structures that had totally replaced them. "Turn her into a real little slayer?" he arched an eyebrow. He didn't know how to feel about it all. He had been disconnected from that time and world for so long that it seemed like a faraway dream now that only made his stomach tie up in a knot. Had he really lived it all? London, Cecily, Drusilla, Angelus, Sunnydale, Buffy Summers, death, Los Angeles, Angel...they were all names so distant and so foreign to his ears now, lost somewhere in the long forgotten graves. He hadn't seen the Earth in ages. He didn't want to see it again either. He absently touched the right side of his face, covered in a dark tattoo. He had been there. He had felt it on his own skin. His race dying, slaughtered mercilessly by armies of slayers. He had come close to being eliminated too. He had been lucky in only one thing: Buffy. It was her name, his affiliation to her that had spared him, but his salvation had come after he had been branded. The symbol on his face marked him for decapitation. He had never thought he would live to see the day when he would pity vampires, but then again he hadn't thought he would live to see many things. And perhaps he shouldn't have either.

"No, we want you to turn her into Buffy Summers," a soldier snapped him out of his thoughts.

"Do you?" he smirked. "Now see, that's where your problem is. Besides that she's not Buffy, because she's been dead for almost a 1000 years, how the bloody hell do you expect someone born in this day and age to be exactly like someone who lived in the year 2000?" he looked at them disgusted. "You people have no respect for the dead."

"Let me make myself clear, blood sucker," the captain of the unit that had captured him spoke up. "I have absolutely no interest in whatever you or any of your kind have to say. You're a pest to our society and as far as I'm concerned your very existence is the reason we're dealing with the situation we are in right now. If your ignorant subspecie hadn't crawled out of a filthy primordial soup, there wouldn't have been any slayers. That woman would have never set her powers free and the slayers wouldn't have become bored enough over the ages to question the place and reason of humanity in the presence of their superiority. Now, talk all you want, but you're still coming with us and I'm here to make sure you'll be doing the job you were assigned to do."

"Lucky for you my subspecie in on the brink of extinction then," Spike pointed out smiling again. "If you don't count those lovely petting zoos on Andalla."

"I don't regret what was done to you one bit, but right now I wish they would've done the same thing to those damn slayers," the captain was referring to the vampire death camps that had eliminated a staggering 90% of all vampire kind. Demons had fled to other dimensions. When slayer numbers grew they knew they didn't stand a chance. But though the decision had a good impact on humanity, it was not the most fortunate of changes for slayer kind. Left without a purpose to their powers they slowly, but surely, began considering themselves the dominant species of the Earth and later on, of all life.

"There were a few good ones, even then," Spike thought of the slayer that had fought for his freedom and life when he had been imprisoned in a death camp.

The Planet Corrian
Headquarters of the Slayer Liberation Army

The tall, slim woman paced in front of the slayers seeming calm and undisturbed. In truth, she was angry, but her anger - her army knew - was cold and calculated, more close to hate. And this anger was enough to strike fear into the hearts of men and women. Today, that fear was consuming the crowd of people gathered before her.

"It's been almost 5 months," her voice alone was intimidating, commanding and did not allow interruptions. She was their fearless leader, the model of superhuman perfection. She was Cincineel. "The safest thing to assume by now, I've been told, is that Niya is dead. Isn't that what you told me, Norrie?" Hearing her name spoken, Norrie, a blond girl sitting in the first row, startled and looked nervously around herself. "Well, I've recently received some information from a secure source. Niya is anything but dead. She was kidnapped by one of our own. A slayer. Dollorian Hess. You know, the one that we supposedly lost during a mission. He sold her to the Human High Council."

"I knew it," one of the women spoke up.

"Yes, yes, we've all heard it, Kenya," Cincineel eyed the woman annoyed. "This isn't the time or place to discuss sexist discriminations."

"But it's obvious they're not satisfied with the conditioning of their powers," Kenya didn't give up.

"Not now," Cincineel said with her jaw clenched. "We've been betrayed. Betrayal doesn't follow patterns or genders. It happens. It's just not suppose to happen in my army."

"Do you want us to form a search party and retrieve Niya?" one of the men spoke up.

"No, Thomas, I don't," her cold blue eyes, so light that they sometimes seemed almost white, stopped on the face of the man that had spoken. "I don't want them to know that we found out they have her. Or where they have her. I want them to think that we are absolutely clueless to what they are doing."

"What do they want from her?" Norrie asked concerned.

"Her genes," Cincineel simply answered. "But luckily, for every action there is a reaction," she gave a person sitting in the shadows a nod. The cloaked figure emerged from the darkness. The slayers looked at the stranger curious. "This is...what should I call you?"

"You can call me Erinya," the clad figure answered her. Her entire body was covered in tight dark clothing that made her gender an easy guess: she was a woman. Her face and head were also hidden, only her eyes could be seen beyond the black fabric. From her place in the first row, Norrie tried to guess their color. Were they blue? Or was it green or a light brown color?

"I will tell you in a few brief words what the Human High Council has in mind and what our course of action is. As you all know, they gathered themselves an army, however what you don't know is that they actually brought back Buffy Summers from the dead to lead it," Cincineel said and her audience was taken by surprise. "Well, they wanted a great slayer. They have one. We wanted someone to - of course - destroy her and we have her," she put a hand on Erinya's shoulder.

"But who is she?" Thomas spoke up again. "If you actually risked having her here. If she's just a slayer hunter..."

"Oh, no, she's much more than that," a knowing smiled appeared on Cincineel's lips. "Let's just say, I've seen what's under this mask and Buffy Summers herself will get quite a surprise. Erinya, would you...," she gestured towards her mask. Erinya gave her a small nod before removing the fabric from her face.

"I'll be damned...," Kenya let out as the whole crowd looked at the woman's features stunned.

"Any other questions?" Cincineel smiled satisfied.

Present Day
Planet Phenias
The Mundagoon Complex

"Hello, Anne, I'm doctor Vecka, I'm one of the people from the staff that takes care of you," he said as he neared the girl staring out the large windows of the spacious room/cell that had been given to her. She didn't even look back at him when he entered. She didn't even blink. "Anne," he called out to her. She didn't answer. "Anne," he gently put a hand on her shoulder. She startled slightly and looked up at him.

"Doctor Donner?" she asked confused.

"Domner," he corrected her. "But today is my shift. Doctor Vecka. You'll see doctor Domner again next week."

"What's an angel?" she suddenly asked turning around.

"An angel?" the doctor was taken by surprise. "Whatever made you ask such a question?"

"What's an angel?" she asked again, more insistently. She wasn't about to answer him.

"Well, an angel...an angel is a man with wings," he explained.

"That's not what an angel is," Anne frowned and suddenly attacked the doctor. Three punches to the stomach and a nasty blow to the jaw and the poor doctor fell to the floor, convulsing in pain. Anne returned to the window and began staring outside again. She didn't even bother to turn her head when the doctor struggled to his feet and made a quick exit from the room.

In a different part of the complex, in a smaller, less luxurious cell, Dollorian absently moved a spoon through a plate full of food. He looked up at the girl tied up in her bed and sighed:

"You have to eat sometime, Niya," he told her, but the girl stubbornly refused to open her mouth when he attempted for the millionth time to tempt her with the spoon. "You'll kill yourself like this. Is that what you really want? To starve yourself to death? What sort of honorable death is that for a slayer?"

"What would you know about honor?" she looked at him disgusted. "You betrayed your own kind. We took you in, we made you what you are..."

"And you were going to kill me too," Dollorian reminded her. "A nice suicide mission and poof I'm out of your hair. Excuse me, but I don't think that's fair. No matter what you did for me in the past."

"You knew what you were getting yourself into when you accepted the conditioning. For some men it lasts a lifetime, for others less. For the unlucky few it barely lasts a couple of months," she told him.

"But somehow, I've never met one person for who it lasted a lifetime," he noted sarcastically.

"It's not our fault if they died young. Even those for who it works," she defended herself. "What did they promise you if you brought me here?"

"The one thing you and all your kind can't give me right now. Life," he said honestly. Niya laughed dryly.

"And you actually believed them? You're more stupid than I thought you were. You think we haven't tried everything possible to modify and improve the conditioning? To avoid the waste of life?"

"Perhaps you tried, but they never have," Dollorian pointed out. There was a moment of silence in which he tried again to feed her a spoon of rice. Niya simply turned her head away, refusing to eat. Dollorian closed his eyes exasperated.

"Have you seen her?" she asked more calmly this time, turning back towards him.

"Yes," he was silent again. "She has your eyes."

"You think you could take this off me?" she pointed with her chin towards the straight jacket tied around her body.

"You brought that on to yourself. You shouldn't have attacked the medical staff," he reminded her. He hadn't even been allowed to use a fork around her as a precaution.

"How is the good doctor doing?" she asked him smiling.

"Still in intensive care," Dollorian said. "You're lucky they gave up on the drug treatment they were planning on giving you."

"Like those two months I spent asleep - or floating around in lalaland , whatever - weren't enough," she scoffed. "I have like a thousand needle points I have no idea where I got from. Or when."

"They just took some samples," Dollorian assured her. "The doctor told me it could've been different if you had cooperated."

"And become a traitor like you? No thanks," she gave him a long look. Dollorian stood up from his chair and sighing again headed towards the door. "Maybe if you bring me an apple next time you come I'll actually eat it."

"I'll do that," Dollorian nodded before leaving the room.

In the conference room of the Mundagoon Complex, Haydn Cohegen was going over a report he had just been handed by his fellow doctors. The men around the large metal table awaited his reaction patiently. He looked up from the computerized notepad when he was done:

"An angel?" he asked confused.

"You understand why we were so surprised," one of the doctors spoke up.

"Are you feeling all right now, doctor Vecka?" Haydn looked over at the man standing somewhere on the right side of the table.

"I have a few bruises and the left side of my face is slightly swollen, but I'll live," doctor Vecka assured him.

"Perhaps she was outraged by your definition. Man with wings, was it?" he looked back down at the notepad. "Maybe she wanted a more religious definition. Have you tried messenger of god? Higher being? Something like that?"

"That would've been me, doctor," one of the geneticists said rising his bandaged broken arm in the air.

"Really?" Haydn asked surprised. "This is something we haven't counted on. What else can an angel be? Some sort of symbol? The mark of a society?"

"No matter what it is, it doesn't justify her violent reactions," doctor Domner interfered. "Even if it implies some sort of element of her genetic memory, this sort of reaction is abnormal. Deficient."

"We have no idea how she feels right now. She is a person who lived in the 21th century, but without memories, that has found herself in a body that is - but in some ways isn't - her own. She's confused. This sort of reaction is to be expected," doctor Vecka disagreed.

"But an angel?" Haydn asked confused. "Why not a man with wings?"

"Because that's not what an angel is to her," a voice suddenly said startling the doctors. The door had slid open without any noise and the vampire had entered unnoticed. He loved that even after so much time he could still take humans by surprise.

Anne's room within the complex

The girl was still staring out the window when the door opened again and the blond vampire entered carefully, trying to see if she felt him, as a slayer felt a vampire. She knew someone was there. Knew this wasn't another doctor, but that thing, that creature her senses spoke to her about. That something she was destined to kill. But she didn't want to kill anyone or anything. She just wanted to be left alone. To remember. Remember what? She didn't even know that. She closed her eyes sighing. She felt oddly tired, though it seemed she had been sleeping for nearly 20 years.

The vampire was amazed. Her features, her hair - they had actually made it naturally blond - her small hands, her diminutive figure, her smooth skin. Perfection. It was like she had never aged, never died. Buffy Summers, eternal, as she should have been. Never sick, never old, never changing. The same over decades, over centuries, over millenias. That perfect same slayer he had loved so much. Then she opened her eyes and he noticed the difference. Deep blue eyes stared into his.

"What's an angel?" she asked him, not seeming to recognize him. No memories, Spike remembered the doctor's words. How could she have memories that weren't her own? The vampire found himself wondering.

"An angel...," he said nearing her until he was next to the window. "Is a very tall, brooding vampire. With a lot of gel in his hair. Look," he took in an unneeded breath of air and blew on the window gently, then began drawing his best Angel representation on it. Anne smiled at the drawing.

"Angel," she murmured touching the wet surface of the window, but frowned when she realized she had ruined the drawing.

"Don't worry, luv, I'll make you another one," Spike promised. Anne turned her head towards the interior of the room, searching for something. But before the vampire had a chance to ask what she was looking for, she bolted from the window and rummaging through a drawer, brought a notebook and a box of colored crayons back to him.

"Paper? They actually gave you paper?" he hadn't seen a notebook in ages. Paper was deemed useless and a waste of resources so it was no longer used anywhere, people opting for computerized books and notepads instead.

"What is a willow?" she asked smiling.

"A willow is a redheaded witch...." he returned the smile as he opened the box of crayons and taking out a red one began drawing a figure on the first page of the notebook.

End Part 2