A young blond woman is standing on the balcony of a large castle. It's dark out and she seems to be starring off at something way off in the distance. Below her are hundreds of young women all fighting. They are fighting one another, but not because they are enemies, but because they are training… training for what is to come. After a few minutes a dark haired man with an eye patch comes out to talk to the woman on the balcony. "Buffy. We need to talk." He says quietly.
"Not now Xander. I'm not in the mood." She responds angrily. When he looks in her eyes he can see the pain that she is in. What she did was wrong, and she knew that. The problem is that it didn't stop her from doing what she did.
"Buffy. What you did was wrong. Satsu is a person not something you can just throw around. At least Spike…" but he wasn't able to finish his sentence before she slapped him.
"Don't ever talk to me about Spike! You have no idea what you are talking about! You have no idea what I'm going through, no idea what I've been through! Spike was the only thing that kept me going the last few years back in Sunnydale, and he knew what he was doing. He was the only person in my life that really understood me. He made me feel whole in ways I hadn't felt since…" she didn't bother to finish what she was saying she just stormed off down the hall. He didn't bother following her. He knew that it would only lead to more fighting and then getting his faced punched in.
"God Xander makes me so mad sometimes!" she said to herself as she walked down the long hallway of the castle. The floor was made of stone, just like the walls, but a red carpet lined the floor. Every so often she would pass an ornate carving, or a holder that at one time would have held a burning piece of wood, but was now holding a lamp that looked like a burning piece of wood. "He has no idea what he's talking about… no idea what it is like to be so… alone…" She had been tearing herself up inside for days since the incident with Satsu. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, but she had to try something. She had thought at the time that maybe if she could allow Satsu to love her that maybe she could learn to love again or at least gain some measure of normalcy in her life. Maybe Satsu could help her feel the connection that everyone else was always talking about. She really had tried to be with Satsu, but as she had said before; she's not gay… at least not so you'd notice. It's not that she hadn't enjoyed being with her, not at all, it had been very nice… strange… but nice, but once again something had been wrong. Something with her, and she still had no idea what it was, but this time she had subjected an innocent person to her problems, an innocent girl… an innocent slayer. She was afraid that her friends, especially Willow, would never forgive her for what she had done. She wasn't sure that she could forgive herself.
She walked down the hall of the castle deep in thought until she got back to her room. She walked through the large wooden door and then she sat down on the bed and just stared off into space, trying to figure out what had happened to her to make her this desperate. "This isn't me…" she kept thinking. She tried to remember the last time that she had felt completely whole, but she kept getting stuck. She knew that it was some point before she died… she had never been the same after that, but for some reason she couldn't figure out the last time that she had been truly happy. Spike had tried his best, but he had never made her truly happy… that was impossible because he hadn't really become a part of her life, at least not an important part, until after she died. It seemed after she died that she was just a shell of her former self, just going through the motions trying to keep her sister and her friends safe and happy. However the more that she thought about it, the more that she realized that the changed in her had occurred before that. She thought about how her mother's death had had an impact on her life, or about what she was like after Riley left her, but she still couldn't put a finger on why she was always so miserable.
The more that she thought about her life the more confused that she became. She missed how simple her life had been back in Sunnydale before she had died. It was so simple wake up, eat, go to school, eat, slay, eat, and sleep. Here in Scotland everything was so complicated. She had to take care of hundreds of young girls, and make sure that they were ready for whatever was coming… and something was coming. She was sure of it. Something was always coming. As much as she loved her friends, they had never really understood her. Even now, with hundreds of other slayers out there she still felt so alone. There were a total of two people in her life that had ever really understood her, and she was pretty certain that at least one of them was dead, if not both. Spike had died on the Hellmouth, saving the world from the first evil. Angel was somewhere in L.A. Technically, he was dead, but not in the final forever way. Technically he had been dead the entire time that she knew him so that wasn't exactly new. However she hadn't spoken to him or heard from him in any way since she had told him that the apocalypse had been averted last may. Technically, she had lied and said that she was in Italy, which would explain why she hadn't hear from him, but still… it was odd that she hadn't heard anything even on the demon grapevine. Which is why she wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't dead too.
"That's it. I can't stay here any longer." She said to herself. She got up and began to search around the room for things that she could pack. "I'm going to go find Giles, and tell him that I quit, and then I'm on the next flight out of here. I don't care where the flight goes, I'm going away, far away." She was still packing her things when she heard a knock on the door. "Who is it?"
"It's me. Willow." She heard a familiar voice say.
"You can come in, but I can't really talk right now. I'm busy."
"Busy with what?" She heard her best friend say as she walked into the room. Willow gasped when she saw what Buffy was doing. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm leaving."
"but you can't leave Buffy. These girls need you. We need you. You are the leader, and without you everyone here will be lost." Buffy could tell that she meant it, but she didn't really care. She didn't believe it anyway.
"You guys will be just fine. You and Xander can handle it. Besides Giles will send you another slayer and I can't stay here Will. I need a break. After everything that I did…" She really didn't want to go down that road. That was a bad place. Bad Buffy! "I need some space. I'm going to see Giles and tell him that I'm leaving and then well…"
"Where are you going to go?" Willow asked her. Buffy could tell now that her friend was concerned.
"If I knew that, it would spoil all the fun." She said jokingly, but in reality she meant it. Buffy had no idea where she was going, or even where she wanted to go. She just knew that she couldn't stay here.
"Buffy. You can't just take off like this. We need you. Dawn needs you.
"Dawn can take care of herself. She's a lot bigger now, and besides there is nothing I can do to help her. You're the only one who can do that. Once she's smaller she's just gonna go back to school anyway." She felt bad about this. She really did care for her sister, and the thought of having to leave Dawn in this… state… well, it almost changed her mind… almost… but only for a second.
Buffy would have left that day. She really really would have, and she wasn't sure that she would have come back if it weren't for what happened next. All of a sudden she heard screams coming from down the hall where a few of the new Slayers had been relaxing and watching T.V. in their free time. Buffy pushed past her friend, ran down the hall, and into the room where the girls were sitting. She knew something was wrong before she even looked at the T.V, however she never would have expected what she saw next. "The entire city of Los Angeles disappeared today…" a news anchor reported solemnly. All of a sudden everything just stopped. Buffy could tell that people were trying to talk to her, ask her what was wrong, but she didn't fully hear them. All she heard was the rushing noise in her ears. She just stared at the television in disbelief. "Gone" she mumbled "It's all gone. He's gone. Just gone."
At one point Willow came into the room. As soon as she saw what was on the television, she knew that it was going to be along night. She quickly shut the television off, and told the other girls to wait there in the room while she took Buffy back to her room. She could tell that the other girls were scared, not just because of what they had seen on the television, as if that weren't horrific enough, but by the reaction Buffy had had to the news.
Most of the girls knew that Buffy and her friends were from California. They even knew that Buffy had grown up in Los Angeles, but they had no idea that she would react this way. They had expected her to want to go fight, or do research… but this. This was a side of their leader that they had never seen before. It was as if Buffy's world had come to a screeching halt.
Willow carried Buffy down the hall to her room and sat her down on the bed. "It'll be all right. I'm sure whatever happened there is an explanation for it. I'm sure they are all right. We'll get to the bottom of this don't worry." She tried to comfort her friend, but in her heart she knew that it was never going to be all right. Their friends were most likely dead, and there really wasn't much that even she could do about it. She could bring people back from the dead, but she couldn't restore whole cities.
"What are we going to tell the girls?" Buffy asked in a whisper. She still couldn't wrap her mind around it. The entire city of Los Angeles was… gone. Cordelia and Wesley were gone, most importantly though, Angel was gone.
"I'm not sure." Willow responded. "I'll think of something." And then she left. She knew that this was going to be hard because some of the girls had family in Los Angeles. She also knew that she was going to have to leave as soon as possible to go talk to their other friends and the slayers that they were working with. She thought about having to tell Giles, Andrew, and Faith… oh god Faith. She hadn't really thought about that. Faith was the only other person who knew Angel and his friends. After everything that Angel had done for her Faith was rather attached to him, and was going to be very upset. "This is a nightmare." She said to herself.