Chapter Text
Buffy
Buffy wasn’t ready before, but she was now.
Nothing much had changed since Sunnydale cratered. She was still finding and helping train young girls – only now they were full-fledged, badge-wearing, handbook-toting Slayers and not just potential, maybe-they-might-one-day-be Slayers. Many were still scared and confused, and dealing with the magnitude of the consequences of the spell to make all potential Slayers into actual Slayers was another weight on Buffy’s heart.
Her heart had borne enough weights to last a lifetime. . . or three.
In other words, she was still exhausted – her mind and body stretched to their limits. Even now, her eyes burned and head throbbed from lack of sleep, and her muscles ached for the soft cushion of her pillow top mattress and the slip of the cotton sheets over her dry skin. She really needed to remember to drink water and eat more than snacks throughout the day. What had she eaten today? She had no idea.
All she knew was that her brain and heart went into twin tailspins when she got the news from Angel. L.A. was decimated, Spike had been there for the past year, and now he was dust. Again.
Her first feeling was raw, unfiltered anger that surged through her body until all her muscles were tightly coiled and ready to burst into action.
So, her cheeks burning from the heat of her tumbling emotions, she’d let Angel (and the poor telephone) have it.
She was pissed at Angel for not telling her that Spike was alive, pissed at Spike for not telling her he was alive, and pissed at herself for not making sure Spike knew how much she cared about him. She knew she’d confused things by kissing Angel that last night in Sunnydale. She was such an idiot to not consider how much it had impacted Spike. Their relationship wasn’t established but was understood – or so she thought.
At the end of the call with her ex, she’d somehow managed to set the broken cordless phone back into its cradle. Somehow, she had turned away from the tumult of emotions in a way only Buffy Summers could do – sometimes had to do. Somehow, she had gone about the day. The only person who had sensed something was off was Vi. The redhead was the only person who sort of knew her at the temporary training building.
Willow, Xander, Giles, Faith, Robin, and even Andrew were off gallivanting across all the parts of the world, finding Slayers and organizing resources. Dawn was taking her last finals in a Cleveland high school that Buffy couldn’t remember the name of.
She’d brushed aside Vi’s concern, picked up her stake, and taken the new Slayers on patrol. Buffy was nothing if not efficient at the shove-aside-your-emotions-and-be-a-soldier part of her life. The girls had been impressed by how she’d dispatched the (too small) nest of vampires, and they’d missed the tear that she’d wiped away before jumping to her feet.
Now she was home – if she could call their rental house a home.
Now her heart was filled to the brim with unacknowledged and unexpressed emotion. She showered. Her face was freshly scrubbed and made up, and her hair was in two long braids. The preparations had allowed her to solidify her thoughts. She bit her lip. Was she ready for this? Her heart was telling her she was. She was ready to do what her sister had offered to do six months ago.
Six months ago, he had been alive, and she had had no idea. What did that mean about her? About how he felt about her? It meant he hadn’t believed her, and if he had. . .
A second tear trailed over her cheek, streaking her foundation and meandering down her neck as she gazed at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her green eyes were steady in their determination, and she pressed her lips together. This had to work. It had to. She couldn’t live with herself if it didn’t.
Heading with purpose to Dawn’s bedroom, Buffy didn’t bother knocking (as was a big sister’s prerogative). Instead, she turned the knob and pushed open the door to the dark room. An arc of light from the hallway fanned across the matted carpet, and almost immediately, her sister was awake. She was as used to sudden interruptions as Buffy by this point.
“Buffy? W-what’s going on?” The sheets rustled as her sister pushed up in the twin bed. Buffy could see her raking her hand through her long hair.
“Let’s do it.” Buffy declared and then paused before clarifying, “I’m ready to do it.”
“Wait. What? Do what?” Dawn turned on the lamp next to her bed. She blinked confused eyes at her sister. “Buffy, what happened?”
In the bright lamp light, words come tumbling out of Buffy’s mouth in a rush. “Spike was alive. Or undead – whatever. All this time. And now, he’s gone. Dawn – Dawnie, he didn’t b-believe me, a-and now, he’s dead again.” Tears came hard and hot now, and Buffy managed to somehow stay standing up as the barrage of everything she’d tried to brush aside rushed forth.
In a moment, Dawn’s arms were wrapped around her, bearing her up for what seemed like forever. When Buffy felt like she could breathe again and maybe even have a coherent thought, Dawn took her by the shoulders and pushed her back. Buffy saw that tears of regret stained her sister’s cheeks, too. As Buffy watched, her sister set her jaw.
“Buffy, we’re going to do this. He’s going to believe us.” Dawn’s mouth went briefly to one side as if she was realizing something. “But it can’t exactly be tonight.”
“Oh? Why not?” Buffy couldn’t help the disappointment peeking through her question. She was prepared. Damn it.
“I need to get some fresh supplies.”
* * *
Dawn
Two days later, Dawn laid out all the ingredients that she’d carefully gathered, her hands shaking almost imperceptibly. She couldn’t pronounce the names of half of them, but they were familiar from the Magic Box and from Anya’s once annoying and now strangely endearing lectures when she had looped Dawn into helping stock the shelves. In any case, Dawn knew exactly what they were all for. Even when Buffy had rejected Dawn’s initial proposal, Dawn believed she’d come back around.
Hence the need for keeping some of the ingredients on hand and hence the need for practice. Buffy didn’t realize how much Dawn had practiced. No one knew.
She’d just done little short jumps at first. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. Always by herself but usually when her sister was nearby and asleep.
It was a little thrilling and surreal to recognize that she went back, her body making the same movements, emotions echoing in her chest despite her different thoughts – a bizarre backward déjà vu until she regrouped in the past and could command her own body again.
The biggest jump she’d made so far while mingling the spell and her own powers was four-and-a-half hours. That was how she knew that the time jump really worked; she’d ended up in the car, driving home from Slayer training with her exhausted sister. Dawn had no idea if she could make the kind of jump in time that Buffy was expecting – the kind of jump she’d promised.
Dawn bit her bottom lip, her hand lingering on the tattered, aged leather cover of the most important volume she’d found on the subject. She knew the magic was inside her; she felt it, holding it back before, keeping it tempered. She hadn’t wanted to do something crazy and end up back in the 1800s or attract a whole bunch of unwanted supernatural-type guests who might want to use her for their own ends.
But that was then. Now. Now Buffy was ready, and Dawn was more than ready – she hoped.
Buffy brushed Dawn’s hair over her shoulder and then took her hand. “You sure you’re up for this? You’re shaking.”
Dawn swallowed her fear. “Yes. I’m sure. We’re going to do this.” They were going to travel back in time before Buffy changed her mind – before she changed her mind.
“Okay.” Buffy moved her hand away and crossed her arms, her serious Slayer face sliding into place. “What do we do?”
“Mix the ingredients and spread them in a circle around us. I’ll say the spell and access my. . . key-ness.” And pray to God above that she didn’t accidentally kill either of them. “And then, whoever is in the circle will go back to Sunnydale.”
“As easy as ABC.” Buffy’s voice was soft and laden with emotion, and her finger traced over a small pile of herbs.
Dawn shrugged. “Kinda. I honestly don’t know how it’ll work with two people, but all the materials I’ve read said that with more distant time periods, there might be skip-age.”
“Skip-age?” Something in her sister’s eyes shifted, and Dawn saw the certainty change.
She rushed to explain, a metaphor she’d thought about a few months ago sliding into place in her brain. “Like how a rock skips over the surface of the water. Say the surface of the water is like the timeline in the past. Well, the pull is for the person to be back in his or her own time. So, under the water is the present – when we are now. The rock skips so many time across the surface of the water before it sinks.”
Buffy tilted her head, her brow furrowing. “What you’re saying is that we’ll jump through the past before slipping back into our present? How will that help anything at all?”
Dawn nodded. “That’s the way this particular spell works. But I don’t know how me being the key affects that. . . how the magic I harness within me changes the spell. My guess is that my power tempers the skipping so that we’ll stay in one space and time longer before jumping ahead.”
“How do you know?”
Dawn’s heart sped up because now, Buffy had refolded her arms and was giving her that big sisterly stare that said she knew something was up. Dawn drew in a deep breath. “Truth?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve practiced a lot.” She scrunched up her face and squinted at her older sister, waiting for the reprimand.
“Dawnie!” Buffy’s expression relaxed. “And?”
Dawn smiled. “I never did any skipping of any sort. Granted, the farthest back I went was four or five hours, and I went through the time again until I was back where I started. But the people who did this spell in all the books? They were bouncing through time with even the smallest rewind. Hence, not many people doing this sort of spell. Not very useful.”
“So, you’re saying that no one else has found a way to make it more ‘useful’ until you.”
“Yes. Exactly. I’m the key. I’m special.” Dawn emulated Buffy’s crossed-arms stance and smirked.
Buffy finger-thumped her. “You’re pretty special, all right.”
“Ow!” Dawn thwacked her sister back, her index finger barely hitting her sister’s forearm as she danced away. Dawn sobered. “You still want to do this? Because I want to.” She needed to; she felt so much sorrow about the way things had ended with Spike. The gulf between them had never been crossed.
Several unnamable emotions flitted across Buffy’s face. “I do. What else should I know?” She gestured at her body. “Should I change clothes? Bring something with us?”
Dawn laughed. “You can’t. You’re going back in time into your own body – the body you had at that time; you’re not physically going back. There won’t be two of each of us running amok.”
“Oh. That makes it easier.” Her sister twisted a strand of hair, looking younger than she had in a long time. “I wouldn’t be able to decide what, if anything, to bring.” She gestured at the bag she’d brought into Dawn’s room earlier and just left there. “I mean, it looks like I packed a bag, but really I just threw a whole bunch of stuff into it without thinking too hard.”
Dawn laughed and then sobered. “There’s one other thing you should know.” She wasn’t absolutely one hundred percent sure on this next part, but it was an inference she made from the texts she’d read and the stories that had been passed down. It was the bit that she was most anxious about.
“What’s that?” Buffy put a hand on the table.
“You and I might jump through time at different rates and/or spend longer at one stop than the others.” Butterflies took up residence in Dawn’s stomach. She hadn’t exactly been chill with every trip she’d made back in time, but this was the real thing. The anxiety butterflies were extra big and flapping their wings with extra energy.
Her sister’s eyebrows drew together. “Uh oh. That’s not good, right? I thought we’d be going together.”
“It’s not clear. We should think of some way to communicate with one another that won’t be picked up by our other selves between jumps.”
“You’re not sure about the different paths though.”
She was clear. “I’m not.”
“Or the implications for repercussions when we change things.”
“Nope.”
Buffy mirrored her clarity. “We’ll think of a plan and go.”
“Now?” Dawn was ready to plan and go. Since she’d been waiting for Buffy to decide, she felt like she’d been holding her breath. Just a little longer now.
“Now.”
“We’re going to convince Spike that we love him.” Dawn’s vision blurred with tears.
Buffy pulled her into another bear hug. “We are. Even if we destroy the space-time continuum.”
Dawn giggled nervously. “We’ll try not to change anything big.”
Buffy’s voice was muffled a bit by the perch of her chin on Dawn’s shoulder. “Yep. All with the timeline preservation.”