Chapter Text
Tell me what did I do wrong to make you stay away so long
-The Supremes, “Baby Love”
****
She was ready.
Five stakes, three knives, and her beloved Scythe were all strapped to various parts of her body. It was Buffy’s usual battle arsenal and it made her feel prepared to face the demon hordes that would come with the setting of the sun. Already the war drums of Hell’s Legions were beating. Their constant pulsing a heartbeat of terror. Or they should have been, but she’d forgotten how to be scared, or happy, or anything other than a weapon.
Idly, she checked the bindings of her bracers one last time.
Twenty years ago, when Angel had unleashed hell on earth in his misguided attempt to break the Circle of the Black Thorn, he had paid for it with his life and those of his friends. Los Angeles had fallen, but after the world’s initial panic, life had continued on, more or less. The uptick in demonic activity all over the globe had been so gradual that no one had noticed until, a dozen years later, even several thousand Slayers hadn’t been enough to stem the tide of evil.
For most of two decades now Buffy and the other Slayers had been fighting a losing battle. There was no rest, no breaks, nothing. The humans who were left were hidden inside walled enclaves, often with little food and even less law.
Buffy didn’t know what she was trying to save anymore.
Hope was a distant memory. There’d been whispered rumors for years of a group of warriors belonging to the light who were supposed to save mankind. Depending on who you talked to It was a legend, or a prophecy, or a stone cold fact. But no magical warriors had appeared, and it didn’t look like they were going to this day, either.
Buffy walked to the window to look out over the dusty plains where humanity was making its last stand. From atop the walls of the Barstow enclave she watched the sun slip towards the horizon. Most likely it was the final time she would ever see its light. The desert scrub seemed to stretch away into infinity.
Not quite willing to pray, she settled for wondering where her sister was and if she was safe. Dawn had disappeared several years ago, leaving with a group of people who had faith that The Powers That Be still gave a shit about the world and what happened to it. They were traveling to some sacred spot to communicate with the divine. Dawn had believed. She’d begged Buffy to go with them, but if Buffy had done that, then San Francisco would have fallen earlier than it had. To her, every single sunrise where humanity wasn’t gone had been a victory. Life was precious and you needed to treasure every moment that you were granted. Well, unless you were her, but she struggled on so that others would have another chance to kiss the ones they loved and hold them tight.
“Hey, Buff.” Xander’s hand fell heavily on her shoulder. “We’re waiting.”
Buffy sighed. Time to be the general. If–more like when–her little rag-tag army of Slayers, witches, and stalwart humans failed tonight, then the last human controlled area in California would be lost. For all she knew it was the last place in the United States, or maybe the world. There was no way to know. The lines of communications had all been severed more than two years ago, leaving them blind.
A telephone call sounded like a tall tale. Imagine picking up a little bit of plastic and wire and being able to talk to someone you couldn’t see. You didn’t even need magic! There’d be kids fighting and dying in the battle tonight who didn’t remember when light switches worked.
“Do you ever miss anything? From before?” she asked Xander. It was a taboo question, no one wanted to remember when the world had been easy.
He rubbed her shoulder. “Sure. Cheetos. I can’t believe I ever took puffy orange cheese for granted.”
She snorted and shook her head. “Not what I meant.”
Xander’s hand fell to his side. “I wish I married Anya,” he said. “I think about it all the time. As if that one action would have saved the world. That if I’d had the guts to do what I wanted to, instead of listening to my fears, then today I could be close to paying off a mortgage on a house that needs new plumbing and playing with my kids, instead of preparing to man a gun-emplacement while the hordes of hell try to tear away the last settlement of humanity. How about you?”
Turning away from the window she looked at her friend’s grizzled face. It was thin and tight and his hair salt-and-pepper, emphasis on the salt. He had half a week’s stubble on his chin and cheeks. The white lines of scars mapped out a road on his skin. The patch over his missing eye was frayed and tattered. It was his battle one. He had a nicer one, for when they weren’t fighting, but she couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn it.
Xander wore his scars and wrinkles well, he always managed to look dashing. She, on the other hand, hadn’t aged at all. Buffy looked the same as she had twenty years ago. She never would look any different. Something had gotten messed up along the way, probably a mix of Willow’s spells from resurrecting her and activating all the potentials. She was essentially immortal, a girl frozen in time. Grievous wounds turned into scars almost overnight and faded to nothing in a month. But she knew there’d be things there was no coming back from, if she burned or was beheaded she would die. It scared her that she found that comforting.
“Oh, Xander.” Buffy shook her head. “I miss them all. Tara, Anya, Cordelia, Angel, Oz, Willow, Giles, Mom, Dawn…” she trailed off, emotion choking her. She hadn’t dared to speak his name out loud for years. It made the pain more real to hear it.
“It’s okay,” Xander soothed. “Today you should say it.”
“Spike,” she whispered and the tears began to fall. After so long she thought there shouldn’t be any more left, but they came anyways. She missed him with a bone deep ache that never went away. Over the years she had tried to do what Spike had wanted her to, and live, but any of the associations she’d had that could only charitably be called relationships had never lasted longer than a few weeks. At the end the guys had all said the same thing: she was unavailable, heartless, cold. At some point she’d simply quit trying and had accepted she was military asset, not a flesh and blood woman.
Of course she was empty inside. She’d died when Sunnydale had collapsed into a crater. Her heart had stopped beating the day she’d learned Spike had returned and not once sought her out. Had he not believed her? Had he not known how much needed him? Spike had lived and died again without so much as mailing her a letter or leaving her a voice mail. It hurt beyond the telling of it.
Buffy had come to believe she’d deserved the punishment for the hundreds of transgressions she’d made against him. Not that he’d been a saint, but in her memory his sins against her amounted to less than an anthill while hers piled up taller than Mt. Everest.
Awkwardly, Xander put his arm around her for a hug. “Might as well say it all, Buffy, god knows you’ve held it in for so long.” That this was her last chance to do so hung unspoken in the air.
“I love him.” The tears were coming hard and fast, she couldn’t see. “I love him and he didn’t believe me…and…and…if only I could go back and make that better. I wouldn’t be scared of my own heart. And, like you said, it probably wouldn’t fix what’s happened, but it would fix my world.”
Xander hugged her tightly. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I can’t even remember what it felt like to think that the worst thing that could happen was that your friend finds happiness with someone you didn’t like much. I think I must have something broken inside me, some darkness I can never shake. Too often I’ve seen someone else’s happiness and been unable to share in it. I’m sorry I failed you. I should have been your cheerleader, not angry because I didn’t understand.” He took a deep breath.
“I forgive you,” Buffy said quietly. “I would have been lost without you as a comrade all these years, but I should have been a better friend to all of you back then, especially Anya. I got so busy riding around on my high horse and believing I was special because of my calling that I forgot how to give someone else a helping hand.” She laughed ruefully.
Xander took a step back and held her at arm’s length. “I forgive you. And, please, listen to me, because I knew the guy far better than I would have liked to, Spike loved you.”
The tears she’d almost dried started again.
“He loved you so much. I don’t know exactly why he didn’t run to you when he came back, and no one made it out of L.A. to be able to tell us, but knowing him, he was probably trying to make a big splash, stop the apocalypse so that when he did come for you it’d be as the proverbial conquering hero. He wanted to deserve you, he probably had no idea you would take him however you could get him.”
“How did everything get so messed up?” Buffy asked. The hell-drums were getting louder. The sun must nearly be below the horizon.
Xander shook his head. “I have no idea. Shall we go pretend we’re going to win?”
Nodding her head, Buffy wiped the tears from her cheeks and squished Spike, along with the rest of the distant past, from her consciousness. Or she tried to.
As she opened the pandora’s box of her mind to put away her thoughts, a memory leaked out.
The last night, the one before the battle with the First.
It was like she was there on the tiny cot in her basement. Spike’s cold arms wrapped around her and his mouth greedily devoured hers. They were both starved for the other. His body was a demanding presence between her thighs, his rigid cock stretching her to the limit and beyond as he thrust eagerly into her slick channel. “I love you,” his deep voice rumbled in her ear. She hardly knew they were separate beings.
Every sensation was so clear that for a moment Buffy forgot where she was. She stumbled over her own feet and cried out, even as her pussy clamped down, fighting to keep him buried inside her.
“Are you okay?” Xander asked, grabbing her elbow to keep her steady.
Reality returned and she slammed the doors of her memory closed and shook off the phantom feel of a man who’d been dust for the better part of a quarter-century. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
Neither she nor Xander said good-bye.
****
The battle was chaos. They were going to lose. No matter how many demons she killed, more just kept coming. Buffy was exhausted, but still she fought on. The booming of the great guns had ceased, either because they were out of ammo or because the emplacements had been overrun.
She wasn’t going to see Xander again.
Another slobbering hell-beast was sundered by her blade. She spun and caught a vampire that’d been rushing at her back, not sparing the time to watch its dust hit the ground.
She raised her Scythe for another blow and the world stopped. Everything froze except her. Her harsh breathing was loud in the utter silence. No drums, no screams, no moans of the dying.
“You would never have even seen it,” a voice said.
“Seen what?” she said irritably. What was happening?
A man in an ugly suit was picking his way through the carnage to reach her. He had a hat on his head and looked vaguely familiar. “That.” He was pointing to her left.
Buffy turned and her eyes went wide. A crossbow bolt was hanging midair. A split second later and it would have pierced the base of her skull, effectively decapitating her.
It wasn’t a bad way to go. “Why stop it?” she snapped. She would have been at peace, no more worries or pain. She would have been with her loved ones again and her heart stuttered with the hope that their number would include the man she had never stopped loving.
“Buffy?” the guy in a suit asked from behind her.
She was staring at the bolt. “Why did you do this?” Her voice was cold. “Have I not given you everything? Am I to be denied my rest one more time?” Spinning, she fixed the man with a glare. Recognition hit her. “Whistler,” she sputtered.
“Um, well, you could just pick death. Gamble that your fellow would be waiting there for you.”
Buffy winced. Of course he would be. Demon or not, Spike had redeemed himself. He’d be there. Unless he doesn’t want to see you, a little voice in the back of her mind whispered. Unless you hurt him so badly that he didn’t believe you and an eternity with you sounds like hell, not heaven. Old fears raised their ugly heads. Especially the one that the reason Spike hadn’t come looking for her was that he’d fallen in love with someone else in L.A. Her empty stomach lurched. The thought of him making love to someone else, whispering words of praise and love in their ear…
Oh god, she was going to be sick.
She fell to her knees and dry heaved. When the worst of the nausea had passed, she looked back up at Whistler. The little man appeared quite distressed. He had his hat off and was twisting the brim in his hands. “What’s my other option?” she asked.
“Well, your sister and the others have been working on this for some time. It’s not easy to bargain with the Powers. However, the PTB don’t care for Earth turning out like this.” He waved a hand at the battle. “They like balance.”
“Dawn?” Buffy breathed. “She’s still alive?”
Whistler nodded. “She’s quite stubborn.”
Buffy smiled and rose to her feet. “You have no idea. Now what’s the deal?”
“You go back in time to change things, but–“ He held up a hand just as she was about to interrupt. “Hang on, it’s complicated. You only get seven days, more or less one day a year, starting with when you arrive in Sunnydale. So you’ll have to consider your options carefully. What you change will carry forward. Don’t kill a vampire one day and Sunnydale might be his playground when you return. The world will change based on your actions. Every time you start a new day the changes will integrate into your memory, but you’ll still be able to remember the original events if you try hard enough. There’s no do overs.”
“Seven days to change the world?” She knitted her brows together. How could that be enough time?
“You’re lucky to get that much,” Whistler grumbled. He stuck his hands into his pockets. “But it means you better choose wisely, think things through.”
“Duh,” she said absently. Trying to remember what had happened in Sunnydale almost thirty years ago wasn’t going to be easy. A few things stuck out at her. Nice work, luv. But for the most part it was a big blank. “Do I get any help? Human memory isn’t exactly infallible. I don’t want to get stuck going back to a moment when I fell down the stairs in front of a guy I had a crush on, or whatever, because that’s all I can remember.”
Whistler screwed up his face for a moment, like he tasted something sour, then spit out a sigh. “Yeah, you can get some help. Try this.”
A shimmering light appeared in the air. The light expanded and shaped itself into a rough rectangle. When the glow died a glass table, waist high to Buffy, was left behind. Confused, she walked over and touched it. ‘Year One’ appeared in glowing letters at the top. Pictures and short, soundless videos blossomed just under the surface of the clear tabletop.
“How very Mission Impossible of you,” Buffy muttered, not looking up from the images. It was like looking at a museum of her life. She had both remembered and forgotten so much. It was all of her first spring semester at Sunnydale High.
There was Giles thumping the ‘Vampyr’ book down in front of her. How she’d wanted to run.
Buffy’s eyes shifted to a picture of her in vamp-face from when they’d lived their nightmares. She wondered what Spike would have thought of that. Would he have found her cute?
There were lots of pictures of Xander, Willow, and her at the Bronze. She scrunched up her nose. Had she really worn that shirt with those pants?
She reached out and touched a video of the Master grabbing her, draining her, and letting her fall into a puddle to drown. It centered itself on the desk and played over and over.
“Is that the moment you want to fix?” Whistler asked from beside her.
It was tempting. To never have died that first time. The Master wouldn’t be able to take her by surprise now, she wouldn’t be walking in blind.
“Maybe?” she hedged.
She looked around at her past life and found herself jealous of the girl who could run to the corner drug store to buy vanilla scented shampoo.
How worldly she’d thought herself and how innocent she’d been.
For a second she couldn’t figure out what was missing from the photos and videos, but then it hit her. Dawn. There was no Dawn. This was things as they had really happened, no magical monk-memories need apply. It was more terrifying than she cared to admit.
With an effort, Buffy forced herself to focus back on the images. She had to pick.
There was Willow thinking she had an internet boyfriend when it was really a demon, but Willow had met Oz and then Tara. That incident hadn’t stunted her any.
Next was Xander thinking he was going to get it on with his sexy biology teacher. Too bad she’d turned out to really be a giant demon-bug. That was probably a good lesson for Xander to learn. Buffy pursed her lips. It had needed a lot of repetition to sink in.
Buffy focused on a photo of her sitting with the demon hunter-turned-puppet. A lot of innocent lives could be saved if she acted quicker in that situation. It went on the maybe pile with The Master. She touched another video, this one of her disastrous cheerleader tryouts. Amy was worth saving, but Buffy didn’t know if intervening there would put her one step closer to saving the world or not.
It was almost impossible to pick. There was so much she could fix and Whistler hadn’t given her one hint about what to do. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was toeing something gooey on the ground. There was no help coming from that corner, so she returned to looking at the table.
There was a clip of her first kiss with Angel. It made her feel like hurling again. Maybe she could nip her romance with him in the bud and get rid of Angelus that way. Boy, she looked so…ridiculous. Angel just looked constipated. How had she ever fallen for him? Past-her was kind of dumb.
The picture of another vamp in gameface caught her attention. It took her a moment to place him. Jesse, who’d been Xander and Willow’s friend. If she saved him would that make Xander more open? She frowned at the picture. Something seemed off about it. There’d been so many lost friends over the years. Laying Xander’s anger and rigidness on the loss of a single person didn’t fit. Grief wasn’t the problem.
The pads of Buffy’s fingers ghosted over the glass and hovered over a myriad of photos, but she finally tapped on one of Xander, Willow, and her at the zoo. The hyenas. How could she have forgotten?
I think I must have something broken inside me, some darkness I can never shake.
Xander’s words from earlier blazed through her mind. Why had she never pieced it together before? He’d been possessed by a demon. That was an excellent way of getting broken. The incident had also been the first time–that she knew of–that her Watcher and one of her friends had agreed to lie to her, deciding for her that the falsehood was better than the truth. Seeds had been sown that day, ones that had yielded poisoned fruit. She could make it better.
“This one,” she said quietly, placing the pad of her finger on the picture.
“You sure?” Whistler asked. “No mulligans.”
“I’m sure.”
“Alright, you got it.”
“Uh, so what do I do?”
Whistler flushed. “You need to create a transition point,” he coughed.
“Less with the cryptic?” She wanted to hurry. The next year was when Spike had shown up in Sunnydale. It wouldn’t be her Spike, but the idea of being able to see him at all was making her head spin.
“You need to let the arrow hit you.”
“Goody,” she said dryly.
“When you’re done, after twenty-four hours, you’ll return to this moment and pick the next day.” He plopped his hat back on his head. “I should tell you there’s another choice.”
“Is it one where Spike rides in on a unicorn and whisks me off to happy-land?” Buffy asked, raising her eyebrow. Because in that case, screw the world.
Whistler looked heavenward. “Not quite. You could just sidestep the arrow and keep fighting.”
She looked around. The only members of her small army that she could see were dead. There was a good chance Xander was gone and the entrance to the enclave already breeched. There was nothing left for her to fight for. Even if she ran, all she would be able to do was live like a fugitive in the woods. With her immortality there was no end date on that. She would again be the one girl in all the world. No thank you.
“That sounds too much like option one,” she said. “Just with a delay.”
Whistler shrugged. “Places, then.”
Buffy walked through the blood-soaked dirt to stand in front of the arrow. Slowly, she raised her gaze to stare down the sharp point. She wasn’t going blindly into that good night. Second chances didn’t come along every day and she intended to make the most of the one she’d been given.
The world roared back to life for a brief instant. Then there was nothing.