And here's the next riveting part. Feedback will be loved, relished and patted. I'd like to say a really huge thank you (huge
because I probably should have thought of it before now!) to my beta readers, Fab and Erica Olson. hugs Thanks!

Blinky the Tree Frog



Part Five

"Before too long
I'll be repeating
What's happened before in my mind
Before too long
Over and over
Just like a hammer inside"

Before Too Long - Paul Kelly

In the small community of Scathck (which is located in a small pocket dimension that is only accessible from an erratic portal located in Southern Borneo), Dust is a completely reasonable name. Not a very wonderful or heroic name, to be sure, but perfectly serviceable.

In the three and a half years that Dust had been travelling with Andrew Wells, he'd started to get the feeling that the small community of Scathck may well be only place that Dust is a perfectly reasonable name. Most of the exotic people that he'd met as they wandered across miles of countryside and through dozens of dimensions had looked terribly bewildered when he'd introduced himself. Some were polite or oblivious enough not to mention anything, but he did get asked why he'd been named after dirt quite a lot. It was kind of disconcerting.

As Dust slowly wound his way up to consciousness, it occurred to him to wonder why in the world he was even thinking about his name anyhow. It was ridiculous; if his mind was going to be stuck in complaint mode there were plenty of worse things it could have latched onto. Like the fact that he'd been knocked unconscious yet again, to pull something out of the air. Honestly, before he'd started travelling with Andrew he could have counted the number of times he'd been knocked unconscious on one hand. On two fingers, if he wanted to be really precise. Now…

Now it happened all the time. Now he spent his days wandering from place to place and helping people deal with all manner of bizarre situations, just because it was a nice thing to do. Now he was living a lifestyle that would not by any general consensus be considered safe.

He wouldn't swap it for the world.

Travelling with Andrew was strange, panic inducing and at times ludicrously dangerous, but it was rarely boring.

He winced. Yup, definitely becoming conscious. The world was starting to intrude on his musing, he heard sounds and felt stiff from lying on something hard. And the pain. The pain blossomed at the back of his head and arced it's way across his forehead and… oh god, it hurt. He was never going to try to travel through time again. Never, ever, ever, for as long as he ever lived. Well, other than getting back to his own time, obviously. If this had even worked anyhow. God, this might not even have worked. Tucker might still be out of their reach and Andrew could be already dead and the time continuum might be seconds from imploding from the paradoxes and…

God, his head hurt. Dust groaned and opened his eyes.

He blinked a few times to focus and realised there appeared to be a glass hovering over his face. Okay, that was a little strange. Probably he should say something about that.

"Whadis?" he managed.

A face appeared next to the glass, and Dust realised belatedly that Andrew, who was looking down at him with a faint expression of worry, was in fact holding it. Right. That made a lot more sense.

Andrew proffered the glass. "Medicine", he said.

Dust blinked at this. "Medicine?"

Andrew nodded. "Think you can pull yourself up a bit so you can drink it?"

He attempted this. The world tried to spin around a little, but he stubbornly ignored it. "Is that proper Earth medicine, or is it some weird magic stuff that you tried to brew up?"

Andrew looked somewhere between offended and amused. "There's nothing wrong with my magic brewing abilities…"

"That depends on whether you're making something for demons. Which I am not, you may have noticed." He managed to get into a sitting position and winced again as his head began to really pound. Andrew had been completely understating it when he'd said that the trip might shake them up just a little, but that wasn't unusual.

Andrew sighed and passed over the glass "It's proper medicine. Strong painkillers. I got them at the local convenience store."

"You managed to walk enough to get to the store?!"

"Well, it was a little more swaying than walking, but yeah. Drink."

He drank, and then sat with his head in his hands, breathing deeply and waiting for it to take effect.

After a few minutes the pounding ebbed away to a tolerable ache and he carefully raised his head. "So, uh… Did we make it?"

Instead of answering, Andrew looked triumphant and turned the newspaper he'd been reading around so that Dust could look at it. Dust frowned and summoned up all of his still-admittedly-dodgy English reading skills.

"Sun-ny dale. Times. Oh. Cool. Times what?"

"It's a newspaper thing. Kind of saying 'this is a record of the times of Sunnydale'. Or something like that. The point is we definitely made it. It's ten years in my past, we're in Sunnydale, and all's… well, not well. All's pretty bad actually…."

"Well, from what you've said, that's about right, right?"

"Pretty much."

"Has Tucker eaten anything so we can get a bead on his location?"

"If he has, I was too unconscious to sense it. But that's okay. We're in Sunnydale and at the moment my younger self is at least not horribly dead, so I'm fairly relieved."

Dust looked startled at that. "You went and looked for yourself? I thought we agreed that we were going to try and interact as little as possible because we don't know anything about time travel!"

"No, it's okay…"

"What? It's not okay! We don't know whether changing anything will involve making some horrible future! What about that story you told me with the butterfly and time travelling toaster?"

"Dust, calm down. I didn't go looking for him, I just thought back."

"You…"

Andrew took a deep breath. "Okay, here's the situation. Right now, out there, Buffy the slayer, all her allies and a bunch of girls that aren't yet slayers are preparing to fight the first evil. Remember all the stuff I told you about that?"

Dust gave him a small smile. "You may have mentioned it once or twice."

"Well, at the moment everyone's still at the house, and I'm there too."

"And you know this because?"

"I phoned me up. I had this thing about wanting to help out… I remember I almost always used to answer the phone so I've been calling every hour since this morning and hanging up when I answer. He's… I'm there. And as long as I'm there, I'm safe. Even if Tucker finds his way to the Summers house, he's not going to dare to take on the whole household, there're too many powerful people there. Oh, and incidentally that was actually two stories, Dust. And one of them was from the Simpsons, so…"

"Andrew…"

"…Sorry. Anyway, if Tucker finds his way to the house, and I doubt he will, at least for a while…"

"Can't he track you by scent?"

"He needs a starting point though. I haven't been wandering around Sunnydale; I've been locked up. It'll be hard to find something like that, and there's no way he'd guess where I am."

"Okay. So if he does find you?"

"He'll probably wait for me to go out of the house and attack me then."

"Did you ever go out the house once they had you there? You were kind of a hostage, right?"

"Well yeah, but unfortunately I do kinda remember going out a few times. Not at first, but after they figured out that I wasn't trying to escape they let me go shopping with them now and then. And once or twice I was allowed to the library too."

"Darn. You can't remember specifically when that started?"

"It's been too long, Dust. I mean, I didn't actually think the information would be that important…"

Dust frowned and swirled the dregs of his medicine. "Okay, so what are we going to do? Wait for Tucker to find you and ambush him in front of the house?"

"Someone might see us. Specifically someone in the house might see us and if anything's going to mess up the time line, that will. They don't even know whether they're going to survive this thing!"

"Well, it might be they're not going to. What about that theory you told me about all the multiple timelines that all head off from every point…"

"Hypertime?"

"Was that the comics one?"

"Uh, yeah. That was it. The thing is, that might be true, but it might not be." Andrew bit his lip and twisted the paper in frustration. "That's the whole problem we've got here. We don't know. The only knowledge I've got about time travel is a whole lot of stuff from movies and comics and books. I don't know whether any of it's relevant, I don't know any of it's actually how time works. We're totally blind here…"

"Then we'll just be really careful and try to interact as little as possible with anyone who might recognise us." Dust tried to look confident. Andrew was getting way too depressed. "We'll make sure that Tucker's not already at the house first. If he's not… We'll keep ringing up every hour to make sure you're there. If you're out we'll go and find you and protect you and if you stay there, well, that's good. It'll give us more time to see if we can find Tucker before he gets to the house."

"How? We can't sense him unless he eats something, and that could take hours."

"Well… Look, you're sure he doesn't know where you are, right?"

"There's no way he could. I never told him, no one from my family even knew what had happened to me, and right now present day Tucker is in jail in another state for some weird robbery thing involving demonic cats and a casino vault. Which I guess is good. It means we won't have to worry about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect with him."

"The…" Dust looked puzzled until he noticed Andrew's sheepish look. "Okay, and that was from?"

"Umm… Doctor Who. It's when two people from different time zones touch each other and there's this discharge of energy…"

"That's the one with the phone box and the guy who kept changing his face?"

"The one with… I can't believe this! I showed you like twenty episodes, surely you picked up a bit more than that!"

Dust grinned. "No, no. The correct answer to that comment is: 'Gosh, Dust, I find your complete lack of any Earth pop culture knowledge charming and somewhat whimsical'".

"Philistine."

"Uh uh. Whimsical."

Andrew looked resigned and shook his head. "Fine, don't appreciate the fine art of human television." His expression dissolved into thoughtfulness. "I think what we really need to do is try to act like Tucker."

Dust looked faintly alarmed. "Go around murdering people and screaming about the great gobs of power we have?"

"Err, no."

"Thank goodness."

"I was thinking more… If we were Tucker and we were trying to find me, where would we go?"

"Oh, right. Okay, that makes sense. So where would we go?"

Andrew sighed and fumbled in his backpack for a pad. "Well, let's write a quick list."

*************

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"

Tucker stared at what had once been the Mears residence in total disgust. 'Had once been' was the operative phrase at this point, because there was currently no sign of life and a large 'Sold' sign out the front.

"Dammit!" He aimed a sold kick at the fence and there was a satisfying crack of wood. "This is just the most sssstupid, crappy, fucking sssstupid thing... Where hell are you? Moron!"

He grabbed hold of the letter box and was just about to yank it out and throw it through a window when a helpful voice from the next yard asked, "You looking for the Mears's there, are ya?"

He turned. A grizzled old man was looking up at him in enquiry; it appeared that he'd been weeding his front petunia patch. "Look a mite bit frustrated there, you do," he said mildly.

"Really. You don't fucking ssssay."

The old man frowned. "Hey now. No need for that language there."

"Sssure. Right." He pulled himself together. The old man might be of use. "Yesss, I'm looking for the Mearsss. Can you tell me where they are?"

"Moved out about two weeks ago. Don't know the exact address. Somewhere in Canada, I'm thinkin'."

"Canada!?"

"Round there, yeah. Poor woman, she just wanted to get far away from here, she did. After her son disappeared and all."

"Yeah, well that'ssss…" Wait a second. "Her ssson disssappeared?"

"Oh yeah. Vanished into thin air. Poor woman, terrible tragedy. It's a dangerous world nowadays."

He scowled. "You'd think ssso, wouldn't you?"

"Right it is." The old man nodded sagely and started back on his petunias, leaving Tucker fuming on the street.

This was just unbelievable. He'd ransacked his parent's house and managed to find addresses for Warren and Jonathan in an old address book. But when he'd gone to the Levinson's he'd found that the place had been demolished and turned into an apartment complex containing people who had no idea where Jonathan could be found. So then he'd grabbed Warren's address, only to find out not only that Warren wasn't here, but that the idiot had managed to disappear altogether!

He took a deep breath. Fine. That was just fine. He could deal with this. He could deal with anything now. He wasn't going to get help from Jonathan or Warren. So next… What about the high school? They'd rebuilt the damn thing; he'd passed it earlier. Maybe the kids Andrew used to play card games with would still be there. Maybe they'd know where he was. Failing that, maybe Andrew himself had visited the school recently. Tucker's sense of smell had been amplified exponentially by the various demonic essences within him; if he could actually find Andrew's scent trail, even if it was very old, he might be able to track him. It'd take a lot of concentration, but it was worth a try.

He just hoped he'd get results. Otherwise he was going to have to kill something just for the sheer heck of it.

***********

"He's not here."

Andrew grabbed the binoculars off of Dust and did another sweep of the Summers yard. "What if he's using the camouflage trick?"

"Even if he is, Andrew, he's not so hard to spot if you actually know what you're looking for. We've swept the area front and back, we've got as close as we can dare without someone seeing us. He's not hiding here; he doesn't know where you are yet. Let's go and see if we can cut him off before he does know."

Andrew lowered the binoculars and nodded. "You're right." He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. "Okay, we've got my parents place, the Mears residence, Jon…" He bit his lip. "…we'vegotJonathan'soldplace, we've got the local comic shop, DVD Sunnydale and the high school. What do you think first?"

Dust watched Andrew carefully. "Well, how about your parent's place? That seems like the first place I'd go if I was an insane demon powered thing who was trying to find you."

"Sounds fair." His worried eyes flicked over to the house. "I just hope I stay there."

"I just hope Tucker hasn't done the timeline massive damage already."

"We've got to find him as soon as possible. This could be catastrophic."

"No argument." Dust pulled himself up. "Let's go."

*************

Andrew turned off the vacuum cleaner and unplugged it. There. Nice, clean carpet. All the general housekeeping jobs got neglected when people were fighting wars, but he was sure that having things nice and organised would make people feel better. It gave him something to do as well, so Willow could get on with her job. Her demon-looking-up job, which he could probably help with if she'd actually bothered to ask (after all, he was a demon summoner). He wasn't bitter though, nope. He was one of the good guys now, which meant that he'd help out wherever he could.

"Andrew? Are you…oh. You've vacuumed."

He pulled himself up a little and tried to give Willow a confident look. "I've vacuumed, and dusted, and I wiped down the floors. I even cleaned out the toilet. I was just trying to be productive, you see."

She smiled, just a little. "I see. Well, thanks. We've been so busy lately; everything needed a bit of a clean."

Someone appreciated his work! "Oh, you know, it was nothing."

"Buffy will appreciate it. Look…" She hesitated, and he looked at her expectantly.

"Yes?"

"Well, you've been trying to help out a lot lately and I don't think you're going to escape…"

"I'm a good guy…"

She held up a hand. "Andrew, you've told me. Look, do you want to go down to the comic shop with Xander this afternoon? He's got a half day off and I know he's been too busy to pick up some of his favourites." She smiled fondly. "He's just a big geek at heart. And if he goes with you he doesn't even have to make an excuse."

Andrew's eyes lit up. "That'd be cool! I'm really behind on some of my titles!"

"Well, it's settled. He'll be here in an hour or two; I'll ask him to get you out of the house as a favour to me. I think he'll buy it."

Andrew grinned at her. A chance to catch up on his reading! Willow wasn't so bad after all.

***********