A New Freedom Chapter 4: I Break the Back of Love for You, a buffy: the vampire slayer fanfic

A New Freedom

Post Blue, Placebo

It's in the water baby, it's in the pills that bring you down
It's in the water baby, it's in your bag of golden brown
It's in the water baby, it's in your frequency
It's in the water baby, it's between you and me

It's in the water baby, it's in the pills that pick you up
It's in the water baby, it's in the special way we fuck
It's in the water baby, it's in your family tree
It's in the water baby, it's between you and me

Bite the hand that feeds
Tap the vein that bleeds
Down on my bended knees
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you

Chapter Four: I Break the Back of Love for You

Elizabeth made her way to the parking lot after her last class, head bent over her books. She had quite a lot of homework to do and was vaguely annoyed at recognizing the assignments from her dream reality- assignments she hadn't done then because of time restraints, and her job as the slayer.

She had avoided the library at all cost during the day, to the point of not getting a book for an assignment and deciding to pick it up at the local book store before getting her hair done that afternoon.

"Buffy!"

She froze. Just stopped right there in the middle of a jammed parking lot as seniors and lower classmen attempted to escape the confines of school property in record breaking time. She froze because she knew that voice better than she knew her own mothers or fathers. That voice had been part of an illusion, something that wasn't, that couldn't have been real.

"Buffy. We've been looking for you…We thought you might have wanted to talk." Willow Rosenberg, Buffy's best friend. Behind her stood Xander, he had both of his lovely brown eyes. They're alive! Buffy screamed out to Elizabeth. Elizabeth was watching them with wide eyes, fear.

"I- I can't. I have to go to the book store, get a hair cut." Elizabeth looked back to the parking lot, to her mom's car. Her mom was waiting patiently, happy to see her daughter talking with people her own age. She wouldn't be happy if she knew how much Buffy knew about these people her own age. Elizabeth backed away from her had-been friends, practically running for her mother's car.

"That didn't go so well… Did you see the look on her face?" Willow's heart was breaking.

"She's getting her haircut at a bookstore?" Xander watched as Mrs. Summers' car pulled out of the lot.

"Xander! Be serious. She looked at us like we were going to kill her." Willow pulled her books closer to her chest, the bag over her shoulder holding her new purchases from the local magic shop she had visited the day before. Purchases she had to keep hidden from her mother who was still very worried about Willow's previous comma, a comma that was caused from unknown reasons. Xander would be taking her magic items home with him.

"Come on Wills, it's Buffy. She'll come around. She came back from New York didn't she?" This was true, but Xander's attention was somewhere else. For being worried about Buffy (which he was), he looked after the girl Annie who in another life had been the women he loved.

It was killing him that she didn't remember. Which, she didn't as he had tried talking with her multiple times in the last two days.

Buffy's mom was pleased to take her to a beauty salon. She went to the book store to pick up a copy of Angela's Ashes for Buffy's history class while Buffy waited in the salons hard plastic chair flipping through magazines for the hair colour she would change to.

She had settled on a red-brown, and looked like foil was attempting to eat her skull, by the time her mother came back with the book and a chocolate bar. It still pained her to see how her mother had aged with worry, to think about her younger sister that didn't exist. Who hadn't really existed in her old reality.

"Elizabeth?" Buffy turned from her magazine to address the voice. Annie. Anya, Buffy insisted. "Can I…Talk to you for a minute? Alone?"

Mrs. Summers smiled and moved away to talk with the women who had foiled Elizabeth's hair about a perm for her own.

"Buffy, I- This is going to sound so odd…Or not. I remember you. I remember things, weird things. There's this overlapping, and I didn't remember things yesterday that today feel like they happened just yesterday. I remember Xander, and all these girls, a blonde boy about to be killed- I remember scary things Buffy, and you helped me."

Elizabeth was shaking. Buffy was rejoicing.

"Oz?" Willow looked to the red-head that was currently looking quite shocked (an odd expression coming from Oz) and standing in the door way to the library after school.

Willow had thought he had been ignoring her, after all- he hadn't been a werewolf his whole life, surely some of his memories would have been brought back. Some of his memories of her? But he hadn't so much as looked as though he had ever seen her before since she had started school again.

"Willow? Xander?" Oz fell to his knees, "I have a headache."

"They remember." Giles said wondrously, Willow was holding a cold towel to Oz's head and had given him three pain-killers. "The ones that were half-human are starting to remember things."

"It's been pretty weird the last few days, like I'm living a life while I'm sleeping. I wake up and I have these memories of people I don't remember knowing. Things that in all honesty couldn't happen. They're so real, not like dreams, but memories of another life.

"And it's happen to others. Annie came to me complaining of a migraine at lunch, she went to the nurse."

Xander thought of the principal and what would happen if he received all of his memories back, or had he already done so when he had first died in their dimension.

"Memories are overlapping, ours are taking over. Slowly." Buffy stepped into the library, Annie behind her. She looked different than the girl Willow had followed into the parking lot after school. Her hair was darker, healthier looking, and she had the familiar look of the slayer in her eyes- determined, unafraid, sure.

"The game has changed." She said finally.