In which your humble narrator gets very pretentious in his attempts to end the story.
To die, to sleep...
To sleep!
Perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of
death, what dreams may come...
But that the dread of something
after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No
traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear
those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
William Shakespeare wrote that almost 500 years ago, and it still holds. Dreams are tricky things. They're supposed to be something our subconscious uses to make sense of what happens to us in waking life. Based in reality, but not real. Problem is, once you start dealing in alternate realities, magic, after-life and all that jazz, you can never be too sure which one is dream and which one is life.
As a certain witch once put it, alternate universes don't stay put. As long as there's walls between them, there's really no problem, but when they start bleeding into each other you're in trouble. Somehow, that needs to be stopped. People have jumped off towers for less. You can play with the idea of multiple worlds, but ultimately, you can't live in all of them. In the words of another great poet, Bob Dylan, "you must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim". It's a painful process that involves sacrificing some things, because there's always something good in every world.
So this is where you make a choice.
In one
(reality)
(dream)
there's a mental patient who, too unable to cope with the real world, flees into psychosis and invents a world where she's a superhero who can handle anything, and can call on imaginary friends to help her out. In another, there's a genuine honest-to-goodness vampire Slayer who saves the world on a daily basis, with the help of actual friends with superpowers of their own, until she sacrifices her life so that others may live. In at least one of these, magic actually works. You can step between worlds, you can create portals, you can go to sleep in one world and wake up in the other. Death is not the end.
In one, there's a car wreck bursting into flame at the side of the road as a horrified State Trooper pulls the only survivor away: a badly hurt blonde girl, thrown clear at the last second. He can't bear to look inside the smashed car since he could have sworn there were at least two more girls in there, and anyone who might have survived the crash is burning alive right now; since he doesn't, we can't know for sure if there was ever anyone else in there. A bit later, there's a doctor telling weeping parents that their recently healthy daughter's car crash ended with severe brain damage, and that they shouldn't expect her to ever wake up again. And here, there are no superpowers, no Slayer healing, no miracles from the powers that be, just tragedy; a coma victim wasting away in a hospital at her parents' expense. Her muscles atrophy over the years, her eyes will never open again, her face grows older as perhaps only a small part of her brain, deep down, stays alive by spinning tales of an impossible life.
In another, a Ford Mustang with three girls on board comes to a halt just outside the house on Revello Drive. Willow turns off the ignition with shaking hands and looks at Buffy.
"OK, that
was... what just happened?" Willow blinks as her brain freezes
up for a moment. "And aren't you supposed to be dead?" Then
she squeaks with joy and hugs her best friend. Buffy hugs her back
with all the strength she dares to use. She casts a quick look at
Tara in the back seat, who is looking just as happily shocked as
Willow, but once again the shy Tara Buffy knew from before all this,
all her painful memories returned again. Buffy has a feeling that the
strong, take-charge Tara she glimpsed
(dreamt?)
back at
the hospital is what Tara might have been under different
circumstances – then again, in this dream, everyone is alive, the
car doesn't have a single dent, no one's shirt is red with blood.
Eventually Willow lets go and starts on a bunch of half-formed questions... the short version of which seems to be that the last thing she remembered was returning from LA with Angel, and then suddenly sitting here next to Buffy, and not understanding how they got from A to B and how the friend she buried just a couple of days ago is suddenly alive. Willow pinches herself to make sure it's real, and Buffy smiles at her even though there are tears in her eyes.
"I can explain. The others are at Xander's; we should probably get over there."
As Willow
drives through the dark streets of Sunnydale she glances at Buffy
every two seconds to make sure she's real, and back at Tara every
other two feeling enormously relieved for some reason she can't
remember. Tara has her hand tight on Willow's shoulder, not daring to let go – Mustangs
aren't very roomy, and hugs will have to wait until they're out of
the car. Buffy sits looking out of the passenger window, seeing the
familiar shopwindows and buildings, the cemetaries, the old school...
places she's called home for five years. Then, one last time,
something flickers. She allows her mind to flash an image
(dream?)
of a girl in a
hospital bed, hooked up to a bunch of machines, her brain barely
functioning. That girl has no worries anymore, she'll never know
pain, hunger, loneliness, fear... or satisfaction, happiness, love.
On the other hand, this girl will have to deal not only with monsters
and apocalypses, but also with rebuilding trust with those she left
behind, with learning to live with the (false?) memory of her friends dying...
But at least for this one, there's still the possibility of a happy
end, if not tomorrow then maybe somewhere down the line.
She asks herself if that is real, or this? Is that a dream, or is this?
Then as they pull up in front of the building where Xander and Giles are just helping the bleeding Dawn out the door to take her to the hospital, her heart decides. This has to be right.
Buffy is home again.
She steps out of the car and takes a deep breath of night air as the others stop and stare. Then they come running to embrace her.
Those are the options, as far as I can tell. The rest, for now, is silence. And as to which one was the dream, and which one was real, well... pick one or the other. I know which one I'd choose.
THE
END
(s-o-r-t
of. Except for the really silly coda that is the next and last
chapter. Read it at your own risk; it's just my way of tying up a
loose end and hopefully getting a cheap laugh at the end to make up
for all this darkness.)