Title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: Blue Chance
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, but they're not doing much these days so I didn't think anyone would mind if I played with them for a bit.
Summary: Post BtVS "Chosen" and AtS "Not Fade Away": They saved the world again and again, you'd think they'd be allowed to rest… you'd think. A new take on the mythical Buffy season 8.
Author's Note: Hello, there! I don't have much to say except thank you to everyone who read the first chapter, and especially to rhain572 and Idiosyncratic Delusions for reviewing. Both your reviews made me smile and served as a reminder for why I'm doing this. For you guys. For us fans! Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy this next installment!
…
Buffy A Vampire Slayer
Season 8, Act II
"Now What"
…
Palos Verdes, California
This was one of those times in life when, if life was a movie, the camera would be moving in a dramatic circular sweep as an intense dialogue took place – switching angles only to show the face of whoever was speaking, but always circling.
Except, well, no one speaking.
Buffy sat at the head of a rather long dining table in the middle of a dark dining room lit only by a few pillar candles. After having rushed everyone out of what must have been Spike's apartment, Angel had brought them all here. No one knew exactly where here was, but the basics were easy enough to pin down. It was a house and it was on a hill that overlooked the ocean. It was old. It was big enough to have a grand entranceway. Maybe even a ballroom, though none of them had been there long enough to explore – even if they'd had the inclination to do so. There didn't appear to be any electricity. Either that or Angel had learned to take the whole brooding thing to a new and epic level.
Either way, the group could barely make out each other's faces though they all sat together at the table – except for Angel who could be heard elsewhere around the house, securing all entrances and windows.
The tension in the room was high. There was no escaping the truth of this reunion, and the truth was that something bad was coming. From what Angel said, it wasn't just bad, it was the bad. What was there to say?
"Willow," Buffy started, staring at her friend through the strained light. Willow met her eyes. "You cut your hair…"
The redhead smiled almost nervously as her hand went to touch her head.
"You noticed." She said.
"It looks good." Dawn offered with a small smile.
"I cut my hair." Xander cut in. Everyone in the room turned their attention to him and he deflated a little. "Well, it's probably grown out by now…"
"Not that I don't think hair is a stimulating topic for discussion," Kennedy started, looking at Willow, and then glanced around at everyone. "But would now be a good time to start talking strategy? I mean, that's why we're here, right?"
"And I thought we were here just because we missed each other." Xander said.
"Kind of hard to map out a battle plan when you're not sure what you're battling." Buffy responded to Kennedy in a decidedly superior kind of way. Old habits dying very, very hard.
"Yeah, but if it's as bad as everyone keeps saying," Dawn started. "I'm thinking escape plan more than battle plan."
"Escape to where?" Kennedy asked. "Hate to break it do you, but if this thing goes down there wont be anywhere to run and hide."
Buffy turned her head slightly in suspicion at Kennedy as a crease cut in to her forehead. That sounded weirdly definitive coming from someone who, by all accounts, shouldn't have known more than any of the rest of them did.
"How do you know?" Dawn asked, a hint of irritation clearly showing through in her voice.
It wasn't Kennedy who answered.
"We saw it." Willow said. The shift in the room was audible as everyone turned their attention to the red head.
"You saw it?" Buffy asked incredulously.
"I thought you said you only felt it." Xander countered. Buffy's eyes shot to his face.
"You knew?" She asked. Xander shrugged slightly, sheepishly.
"She might have mentioned something over the phone."
Buffy swung her gaze back to Willow.
"And why am I just now hearing about this?" She asked. Willow frowned.
"I didn't know how to tell you."
I didn't know how to tell you.
Buffy closed her eyes tightly for a moment. She'd almost forgotten the incredible shock she had received not even two hours before.
Spike was back. No, he wasn't just back. That made it seem as though he'd merely been gone on vacation somewhere. He wasn't just back; he was back from the dead. And what did that mean, anyway? Was he still a vampire? Did he still have his soul? Had he come back different?
You came back wrong.
Buffy opened her eyes, settling them on Willow's face once again.
"What is it with everyone?" She asked. "You know how you tell someone something? You open your mouth and these things called words come out. Sometimes these words tell stories or-"
"Hey," Kennedy said, clearly ready to jump in and defend her girlfriend. "She's telling you now. Why don't you close your mouth and listen?"
Really, the two of them had never gotten along too well.
"If you two know something, you should have told her!" Dawn said, taking up Buffy's side of it.
"Why is she so important that she has the right to know every thing?" Kennedy asked, anger rising in her voice. "Not the only slayer in the room, last time I checked."
"Hey, hey, hey!" Xander interjected, standing up from his chair, using the tabletop to help balance him – wincing visibly as he moved. "Far be it for me to betray my gender by putting the kibosh on a good old fashioned cat fight but... The maturity level in the room has dropped precariously close to E when uncle Xander has to step in."
The room went silent for a few moments.
"Precariously?" Willow asked, seeming insultingly impressed. Xander didn't seem to mind.
"Yeah, I bought one of those word a day calendars."
"… Uncle Xander?" Dawn asked, a little less impressed and a little more puzzled.
"Okay, that… I have no excuse for." He said, and then sat back down pointedly.
"This house should be safe for now." Angel said suddenly from the dining room archway. Buffy looked at him and was able to ignore two things simultaneously: the slight flip in her stomach that always seemed to come from hearing his voice after any kind of an absence, and the question as to who "this house" belonged to. That was something that she really didn't want to bother with knowing at the moment. If he said they were safe for now, for now that was all that mattered.
"Is the here and now ready for those answers that you were talking about earlier?" Kennedy asked. Angel came in to the room but didn't join the rest of the table, opting instead to lean against a dingy wall. He said nothing. Either that was his way of saying he wasn't going to answer any questions, or it was his way of saying that he was.
Buffy took a deep breath.
"Willow, what did you see?"
"It wasn't anything we saw." Willow started. "It was like learning something knew, and knowing it was right." She shook her head. "Except it's not right. It's wrong. It was a feeling of helplessness and…" She paused.
"And what?" Buffy asked.
"It felt like… the end." She responded.
"What does that mean?" Dawn asked, fear evident on her face as well as in her voice.
"What we saw, it-" She caught herself. "Felt. It was like seeing in to a future filled with nothing."
Buffy was becoming increasingly confused and frustrated.
"So did you see it or did you feel it? Will, you're not—"
"That's what she's trying to tell you." Angel interrupted. He'd been so quiet; Buffy had almost forgotten he was standing there. Xander had once suggested a collar and bell for the man, and it had never actually struck Buffy as a bad idea. "She didn't see it because there was nothing to see."
He stepped forward and the candlelight danced against his dark features, his grave expression saying more than words ever could.
Buffy closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them she stood up from the table and began pacing a little in front of her chair. Her mind was racing with this. Apocalypse? She could deal with that. She had dealt with that – many many times. But if Willow's third eye or sixth sense, or whatever exactly it was that she had, looked in to the future and saw nothing, what did that mean? She stopped her movement and looked toward Angel.
"How do we fight nothing?"
…
Spike walked slowly through the hallway to his apartment. Okay, so maybe leaving the slayer and the nibblet wasn't the best idea he'd ever had, but at the time he had thought staying around and confusing them more than they clearly already were was a worse idea. Besides, he'd made sure they were both awake by the time he'd left. He'd meant what he said to Angel, after all. They were two strong and capable women who didn't need—
He smelled blood just before he realized his door was unlocked. He stood still for a moment listening.
Nothing.
Spike opened the door and stepped in to the small flat cautiously, smelling for anyone who didn't belong there… but it was empty. He turned quickly to the couch where the smell of blood was obviously coming from. It wasn't Buffy's blood and it wasn't Dawn's blood. That meant that someone else had been here with them before…
Hang on. Where were they?
Spike suppressed the feeling of panic that was threatening to rise up in his chest, and tried to think rationally about this. He began a mental checklist of things he knew for sure.
Someone had been bleeding in this apartment within the last couple of hours.
Dawn and Buffy were gone.
The feeling of panic was rising again.
No, Spike thought, keep it together, mate… What else did he know?
The scent of blood on the couch wasn't strong. Whatever wound it had come from, then, couldn't have been very serious. Also, Angel had only gone to get the birds and the boy from the very nearby airport. He would have been back before even the Summers girls could have found themselves some trouble. But then again, it was Buffy and Dawn.
Sodding, buggering, bloody hell…
Spike went to the weapons chest in the corner of the room and swung it open… only to find that several things were missing, including Angel's very favorite retractable stakes. Spike tucked his tongue under his teeth and managed not to curse as he slammed the weapons chest closed.
"Right." He said out loud. Of course. No danger, here. They'd just decided to leave him behind.
The air changed.
Spike was around in an instant – facing the door and catching an arrow in midair before it found its mark. Presumably his heart, Spike realized, snapping the very wooden arrow in half with one hand.
"Hey!" He said angrily as he eyed only the foot of the assailant as it turned and ran from the door. Spike gave chase out through the door and down the hallway. It was maybe three seconds, five at most, before the would-be assassin was struggling, back against Spike's chest. "That wasn't very polite." Spike growled, twisting his prisoner's arm behind his back. "Try to kill a bloke and then don't even stay for tea?"
It was a vampire, obviously. No heart beat, no warmth… terrible taste in clothes. God, did they all look that bloody stupid?
"Who sent you?" Spike demanded.
"I'm not going to tell you a damn—" Spike twisted the thing's hand harder. "We know the slayer and her friends are back in town, we don't want her here, and we're sending her a message!"
Spike almost laughed.
"The slayer?" He asked. "I think I'm the one who's got a message for you, friend."
"Ha, you think we don't already know?"
Spike frowned and spun the vampire around to face him.
"Know what?" He asked in a low and menacing voice. The thing laughed.
"The slayer's got her army, and now we're making ours."
"Very soon to be minus one."
It laughed again.
"For every one of us you see, there're a thousand of us you don't."
Spike's face shifted to the demon that was always just beneath the surface.
"Preaching to the wrong choir." He responded.
"And you're playing for the wrong team."
"Never been much of a team player."
"Well, you and your not teammates are going to find yourselves very dead very soon."
Spike's lips pulled back over his fangs in to a smile.
"Well, the thing about me and my not teammates?" He asked, taking the vampire roughly by its hair and speaking close in to its ear. "Even if you manage to kill us once or twice, it's keeping us dead that's the trick."
…
Buffy stared quietly through the ratty curtains of the dark bedroom that Angel had directed her to for the night. She could hear the moonlit waves rolling in on to the beach even through the glass, and it was almost… nice. With everything that had happened, she hadn't really been able to stop and think about the fact that she was home again. America. California. It seemed like such a long time.
She leaned her head against the cold glass and closed her eyes.
She was suddenly very tired.
"Buffy?" Came Dawn's voice. Buffy opened her eyes and looked toward the entrance of the room. Dawn's form was illuminated by the moonlight pouring in to the room through the curtains that Buffy still held open. She'd taken off her plaid button down shirt and now stood before her sister in a spaghetti strapped undershirt, her hair pulled back in to a simple ponytail.
"What's up?" Buffy asked. "You okay?"
Dawn stepped in to the room.
"This is…" She looked around, and then sat down heavily on the old bed in the middle of the small space. "Weird, isn't it?"
Buffy let the curtains fall closed, and went to sit next to her sister.
"Trying to win the award for understatement of the millennium?"
"I've never been in it for the recognition." Dawn quipped.
The two were silent for a moment.
"What's going to happen tomorrow?" The younger sister asked. Buffy took a deep breath.
"I don't know." She said, and then ran a hand through her hair. "Research. Something."
"Why did we have to come here for that?"
Buffy thought about it, and the only answer she had wasn't exactly a good one.
"Because we're better together than we are apart." She answered.
Dawn nodded a little.
"Then why did we stay apart so long?"
…
Xander lay on his back in his dark room with his arms behind his head. Well, that hadn't been so hard, had it? The vampire attack and its accompanying pain had quickly snuffed out most of any potential awkwardness. Kennedy had protected herself and Willow, of course. Angel was obviously able to protect himself. But Xander? Good old human-y Xander who didn't even have a complete set of eyes? He might as well have started flailing his arms around wildly and introducing himself as "sitting duck".
Wow, it'd been a long time since he'd felt helpless.
For every blow he blocked, the vampire attacking him landed about three. By the time Angel and Kennedy's vampires had been dusted, Xander was on the ground and bleeding. It hurt his pride a little more than it hurt his face seeing as how he'd had more than enough experience fighting the undead to be able to at least hold his own, but in his defense he had been weaponless and also taken off guard.
Still though? It was almost hard to mind. It gave the whole meeting back up thing a sense of urgency that it had honestly kind of lacked to begin with. There hadn't been any time after that for the hi-how-have-you-been's. It had been all about the fray and jumping in to it, or maybe out of it. But there had definitely been fray. Really, that's what they'd all been used to. It made things easier in a way. He'd meant what he said to Buffy when he saw her for the first time in a very long time.
"Feels just like old times."
Xander turned to his side.
Yeah, just like old times… except with one major difference.
He tried to ignore the dull stabbing pain in his chest when he thought about how the last time they had all been together working toward a solution for yet another doomsday scenario, Anya had been there with them. He didn't remember her actually having helped a whole lot, but she had been there through all of it providing… What had she called it?
Much needed sarcasm.
It was needed. Xander didn't realize how needed until she was gone. He hadn't even gotten a chance to say goodbye.
Goodbye. What a stupid concept. Like that would have made it any easier. Goodbye was just another way of not getting what you wanted. He didn't want a chance at goodbye; he wanted a chance at hello. A chance at making things right. A chance at being with the woman he loved. Didn't everyone deserve that?
…
"Ugh, she's already starting in with the ego trip." Kennedy said with a roll of her eyes as she turned away from Willow in their bed. The witch put her arms across the brunette's waist and buried her head in her neck. "Did you hear her in there? 'Why didn't you tell me? Why wasn't my glorious self the first to know?'"
"Buffy's a leader." Willow responded. "I don't think that kind of thing is easy to just turn on and off."
"Are you defending her?" Kennedy asked, not so much in an angry way but more of a disappointed way. "Because I really want to mad right now, and that's going to ruin it for me."
"I'm not defending, I'm explaining."
Kennedy sighed.
"You're defending."
"Maybe a little."
Kennedy turned back over to face the other woman.
"She just… she gets under my skin, you know?"
Willow smiled a little.
"As much as I love Buffy," She started, bringing her hand up to caress her girlfriend's cheek. "I don't want her having anything to do with your skin."
Kennedy stared in to the green eyes that stared in to hers, and she smiled, too.
"Are you handling me?" She asked.
"Only if you say 'pretty please'."
Then, as if on cue, the smile faded from both women's faces. Willow took a deep breath and tried to force the smile back, but all she could manage was a worried frown. What was going to happen if they couldn't figure this out? A big ball of nothing seemed tame enough, but when that nothing was in place of a future… it seemed so much scarier. It was like a college student's nightmare.
"We'll stop it." Kennedy said, and Willow wasn't surprised that her girlfriend had known what she was thinking.
"We've done this kind of thing so many times. I don't know why this one's giving me the butterflies."
Kennedy reached down and clasped Willow's hand. She could sense that those words were coming again, the ones that Kennedy seemed to mean with all her heart, but that she herself couldn't bring herself to say. It's not that she didn't feel it, she just couldn't say it.
"We should get some sleep." She said hastily before Kennedy could get her words in. She kissed her softly on the forehead and turned around. Kennedy said nothing for a moment.
"Yeah, I guess." She said, sounding disappointed. "Goodnight."
…
Angel was awake. He could sense the still of the air all around him and knew that his guests were finally falling asleep. He, however, was not tired. It was a little strange, after a year at Wolfram and Hart, to find that his sleeping cycle had gone almost immediately back to what it used to be before the sun-proof windows and a 9 to 5 kind of day. He adapted quickly.
Spike, on the other hand, still kept a strangely human routine. He woke up and stayed up late, but still most of his waking hours were spent during the day. Angel often times wanted to pass this off as Spike inefficient usage of his time; vampires couldn't do much during the day, after all… but sometimes, when Angel was being real honest with himself, he saw it for something different. Spike had always been a little more human than other vampires. Than himself. Even before he went for the ultimate form of flattery and got his soul, he had been different. Angel had never understood what that meant, and still didn't. He also wasn't sure that he cared, except now…
Now that he had signed away his right to the Shanshu—
Angel's thoughts were cut off abruptly before he could really think about that.
Someone was at the door.
He was up in an instant and opening the large oak slab, letting in a nice gust of cold night air.
"Took you long enough." He said as Spike gave him an annoyed glance and walked past him in to the house.
"Yeah, well… not like I knew exactly where you lot'd run off to, did I?" He asked, turning to Angel as he shut the door. "You try following a scent for 30 miles on a particularly windy night. If it sounds fun, you're imagining it wrong."
Angel crossed his arms over his chest with an almost amused smirk on his face.
"Are you… whining?" He asked.
Spike looked offended.
"No!" He said. A beat. "Although it would have been nice to have been informed that the party was moving to a new venue."
"If you had stayed at the apartment like I told you to, you would have been there when the leaving it actually became necessary." He paused, but not long enough to let Spike say anything. "Where did you go?"
"Out." Spike responded, though he very suddenly looked confused as he surveyed his surroundings. He had a deep furrow between his eyebrows when he looked back at Angel. "How did I get in here?" He asked.
Angel let out a short laugh, and turned to walk back in to the dining room. That would have been the first question he would have asked if he had just walked in to a house without an invitation. Spike followed.
"Do you own this place?" The blonde vampire inquired, picking up a candlestick from an old sideboard along the wall as Angel took a seat at the table.
"Don't touch anything, Spike." He said. Spike cocked an eyebrow.
"Right." He said as he set the candlestick down. "Answers that question."
Spike walked around the length of the table and paused at the head, staring down at the chair there. His hand hovered over a wooden armrest for a few moments as though he could feel heat coming from it, and he was just warming his skin. His eyes were filled with something Angel didn't quite recognize from him… what was it? Brain activity?
Spike's hand fell back to his side as he looked up and then around.
"How's, uh…" He took a seat across from Angel, which was not the one he'd just been regarding.
"She's fine." Angel answered as he flipped through a rather thick and particularly boring tome of nonsense. This wasn't his area of expertise. Research had always been Wesley's department.
But Wes was gone.
"Fine way to say hello." Spike scoffed, settling in to his chair. "Didn't even have the decency to stay conscious."
Angel looked up from the book at Spike, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.
"What?" He asked. Not that he cared.
"Well, I'm just saying." Spike responded indignantly. "Doesn't see you for a spell, and what do you get? A big wet 'hello'." He said, forming overly punctuated air quotations with his fingers. "I come back from the dead and it's lights out."
"I'm sure it was a shock." Angel said, returning his eyes to the book. "Or a disappointment." He added under his breath.
"I wasn't prepared to see her when she came back from her little death jaunt." Spike said more to himself than to Angel, uncharacteristically passing over his last comment. "You didn't see me passing—hey!" He said angrily.
"Spike, do you have anything important to say, or are you just going to annoy me for the rest of the night?"
Spike smiled with a slight tilt of his head.
"Hopefully both." He answered.
Angel let out an exasperated sigh and Spike sat forward.
"I was attacked at the apartment." He said. Angel nodded.
"Doesn't surprise me. So were we."
"Vampire?"
"Six of them."
"Did you get anything out of them?"
"Ashes." Was Angel's laconic response.
"I had a nice little chat with mine."
"Anything interesting?"
"They know the slayer's in town. His words, not mine. They know about the army our girl raised, and they still call her the slayer, which makes me think she's got a big target on her head."
"Of course she does. Always has."
"Blasé." Spike said, cocking his head back a bit.
"Look, we know they're after Buffy. They've always been after Buffy. Got anything remotely useful?"
"He said something about raising an army of their own."
Angel sat back.
"That makes sense." He shook his head. "Dammit."
"More or less what I was thinking. There're only a finite amount of slayers, even with the stunt Buffy pulled. Vampires… it only takes one of us to sire thousands. I don't know what took them so long to come to this conclusion, honestly."
"Do we know if this has anything to do with our other problem?"
Spike shrugged.
"In my experience when something looks too much like a coincidence, it's not."
Heavy silence fell over the room, as the two men seemed to ruminate over what had just been said.
"Buffy looked nice." Spike said, his mood changing abruptly.
"Yeah," Angel agreed without hesitation. "I like how she's wearing her hair."
"It's the highlights. Lighter's always looked better on her."
The room became quiet again, albeit a bit more awkwardly.
Westbury, England
The study was almost more of a library than it was a study, but not quite large enough to really be a library. Old books lined the walls in shelves that went up to the ceiling, and instead of a desk there was a large wooden table in the middle of the room. During the day sunlight streamed in through the windows, and at night the fireplace was almost always lit, so the books very rarely saw any kind of artificial light. At this moment the sun was up, but behind a cover of clouds… so the room was bathed in a kind of dim white light.
Giles sat in an old leather armchair pulled to the side of the unlit fireplace, pensively watching the girl who sat in front of him in an identical chair. She hadn't said a word in quite a few minutes, but that didn't mean that plenty of them weren't running through her head. He had to be patient with this one, because she wasn't going to give up anything she didn't want to give up. She looked tired and her scraggly brown hair hung just so that he could barely see her eyes.
"I don't know…" Dana started finally, and Giles shifted in his seat just an imperceptible bit, readying to hear anything she had to say. "I don't know if what I'm seeing is real, or if it's a dream, or if it's…" She paused. "If it's a memory."
Giles took a deep breath. He didn't think now was the time to try and to explain to her again the difference between reality and nightmares, though he was certain that when she did understand it her narratives would be a lot more helpful.
"You had another vision last night?" Giles asked.
The girl met his eyes.
"Every night." She answered ominously.
"Are you ready to tell me what is it you're seeing?"
Dana's eyes traveled slowly to the dead fireplace and stopped there.
"I killed them, Mr. Giles." She whispered. "All those people."
Giles sat back in his seat. This isn't where he wanted the conversation to go, but he couldn't ignore it either. He'd have to talk to her about this before she'd tell him anything else. It was how she worked.
"Yes, you did." He responded truthfully.
"Why can't I get them out of my head?"
"Do you think you should be able to?"
Her eyes shot back to his suddenly.
"No." She answered. "I shouldn't be able to do anything. I'm dangerous."
"I'm well aware of how dangerous you are."
"Then why am I here? I don't belong here."
"We've been through this." Giles said, sitting up. "You belong here with us; with we who understand your strength and where it comes from."
"I didn't ask for this strength."
"No, none of you girls did… but what you did or didn't ask for has no bearing on what you've got."
The girl looked down.
"I can't be saved." She said.
"Do you really believe that?"
She took a moment before answering.
"I'm a monster." She said. "Just like them."
Them. Vampires.
"Except I'm worse." She continued, looking in to Giles' eyes once more. "Aren't I?" She asked. "I had a soul when I did all those things."
"A soul isn't a moral compass." Giles responded. "It takes more than just a soul to know what is right and what is wrong. There's enough evil in this world among an ensouled human race without even considering vampires or demons."
"Is that what I am?" Dana asked. "Evil?"
"No. I don't believe anyone is inherently evil, but I do think that circumstances – be they somehow justifiable or not – can drive a person to do evil acts. It takes strength and fortitude of mind to be always capable of choosing the right path."
"I only have one of those." She said. "Strength."
"Yet here you are sitting with me, having a perfectly reasonable conversation."
The girl laughed.
"Reasonable? Visions and vampires? Demons and souls? What's reasonable about this? This might not even be happening." She seemed to not like that idea as she shrank a bit back in to her seat and folded her arms across her chest – a sort of lost look appearing in her eyes and over her face. Giles didn't like that either. When she had first come here her behavior had been very unpredictable and she rarely even spoke in complete sentences. More and more in the past six months, she seemed to be coming out of the dark haze that she'd been in for 15 years. She still slept in a locked, steel fortified room and a close eye was still kept on her at all times, mostly by other more experienced slayers… but there were moments where she almost seemed normal now. Sometimes it was easy to forget how quickly she could regress.
"You are awake, and this is real." Giles told her. She swallowed, and taking a deep breath with her eyes closed she nodded. When she opened her eyes again, the look that had been there moments before was gone, and she seemed lucid.
"I saw darkness." She said, and Giles was confused only for a moment before realizing that she was telling him about her vision now. "Cold, black, empty."
"What did you feel?"
"Afraid." She answered with no hesitation.
"Why afraid?"
"Because I can't hurt it." She responded. "It's nothing, and it's coming."
Giles furrowed his forehead.
"What do you mean, 'it's nothing'?"
She touched her hand to her head and closed her eyes.
"There's nothing to touch or see. Everything's gone. Everything."
"And this is coming?"
She opened her eyes and they were somehow sharper and more piercing than Giles had ever seen them in any of their countless meetings in this study.
"It's the end of everything. Not just our world… it's the end of every world."
She paused. "Your slayer doesn't know it yet, but there's nothing she can do about it."
Giles felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
"My slayer?" He asked, feeling certain he had never mentioned being Buffy's watcher to her or any of the other slayers on the estate.
"He thinks they're hard to kill." She said cryptically, her eyes losing their sharpness, and Giles had no idea what she meant. "He thinks you can burn up saving the world and always come back, because he's done it, and she's done it, and an Angel's done it… but she's going to die before any of us, Mr. Giles… and she's going to stay dead."
Palos Verdes, California
Buffy opened her eyes confusedly. She'd heard something. What-?
Oh, her phone was ringing.
Buffy sat up on the bed in the dark room that smelled like dust and old leather, and ran her hand over her face, trying to get her bearings. This was the second instance within a relatively short amount time that she had awakened to a place she didn't recognize at first. She stood up off the bed and walked to the chair in the corner where her jacket laid. The phone was lighting up in the pocket, and she took it out and sat down.
"Hello?" She answered groggily.
"Hello, Buffy?" The English accent came from the other end of the phone. Buffy took the device away from her ear for a moment to check the time, and then returned it to her face.
"Giles, it's 3 in the morning."
"Three in the morning?" He sounded confused. "It's noon in Rome."
Buffy winced slightly. Oh yeah.
"That's true. But it's 3 in the morning in California… where I am."
"California?" He asked. "What are you doing in California?"
"Angel asked us to come. Something big is happening."
"Angel?" Giles asked in what sounded like disbelief. "And you trusted him? And who is 'us'?"
"'Us' is everyone." She said, not explaining further. "And I trust him."
She could hear Giles inhale deeply.
"I didn't want to call you until I knew more." She said.
"I believe I may know more." He responded after a moment, and went on before Buffy could say anything. "Dana had a vision."
"Oh, let me guess. Big party of nothing where no one is invited and the DJ plays a whole lot of no—"
"She said you're going to die, Buffy."
Buffy was quiet for only a second.
"She could be getting me confused with a past slayer." She reasoned, shaking her head a bit. "Or she could be seeing the past. She could be seeing my death in the past."
"She was clear that this was a future death."
She didn't understand why, but she wasn't afraid. Her death had been prophesied both times. She'd had dreams about it both times. She had known, somehow, both times. The first time it was written in a book, the second her guide told her… death was her gift. She had to believe that if she were going to die, something in her would know it.
Buffy looked up and was startled to see a dark form standing in her doorway.
"Giles, It's late." She said, trying to sound undisturbed. " I've had a long day. I'll call you tomorrow and we can talk about me dying all you want, okay?"
There was a long pause. Maybe he was cleaning his glasses. Maybe he was scowling as he judged her for her… what would he say? What was a very stuffy thing that he could judge her for? Insolence? No, she wasn't being insolent. Indifferent, maybe. Buffy almost smiled to herself. After all this time, even with everything that was happening, he could still occasionally make her feel like that sixteen year old who always had to try and live up to his expectations.
"I understand." He answered finally, surprising her a little. "We'll talk tomorrow. About… everything."
Did he sound mad? Buffy could quite tell.
"Goodnight, Giles." She said. He was saying goodbye as she snapped her phone shut, and sat back in the chair.
"You found us." She said flatly.
"Couldn't hide from me if you wanted to." Came Spike's voice from the doorway.
"That's what Angel said." She responded. "You've been working for him this whole time?"
"With." Spike corrected, sounding mildly offended.
"Why didn't he tell me?"
"Wasn't his place."
"Then why didn't you?" He asked, biting down on her jaw. She still wasn't quite sure what she felt about this, or if she even believed it, but she knew that him keeping her in the dark about it was wrong.
"Wasn't my place anymore, either."
Buffy didn't know what to say to that. She didn't even know what it meant.
"Right then." Spike said. "I'll let you sleep."
Then he was gone.
Buffy stood up and walked back to the bed. There was something weirdly amazing about knowing that Spike was alive, though it still kind of felt like a dream. She knew, deep down, that it was making her happy – she just couldn't feel it quite yet. Maybe because there was also something sad about him being back, sad about the fact that he hadn't felt it necessary to even tell her. She lay down and closed her eyes. She wasn't ready to process the whole Spike thing, and she couldn't think about it. Not right now.
…
Buffy woke up screaming. Dawn sat beside her on the bed, looking at her worriedly while Willow stood above her.
"Buffy, you're dreaming." Dawn said. Buffy sat up and looked around, feeling something like how she thought a wild animal might feel waking up in a cage after being tranquilized.
"What was it?" Willow asked. "Did you see something?"
Buffy's chest rose and fell in quick succession and her eyes glittered with worry. Yes, she did see something.
Her death.
TBC
…