Chapter Text
Disclaimer. I do not own. I do not claim to own. I do not want to own…. Seriously, I wouldn’t want the responsibility.
Seeing the Glass Half Full
Chapter One.
The last thing Buffy expected to do when she died, was to wake up.
To be fair she wasn’t actually certain she had died, but she had been so convinced that she would. The whole swan dive through a magic portal thing, seemed like a sure-fire exit strategy. Not to mention Glory’s portal itself, entering that thing, had definitely felt like dying to her.
Which was why it was so surprising for her to wake up. Not only that, but to find herself staring up at the blue sky above her. She felt herself frown in confusion, only to force herself to stop when her head throbbed in pain. But that didn’t stop the confusion. It was as if the night had suddenly turned into day…and she was still alive.
It was quiet where she lay, the ground beneath her back felt like dirt and grass and not the concrete she had been falling towards.
Wind blew through the surrounding trees, causing the long branches to sway into her line of sight. Dirt? She wondered. Her thoughts a dizzy faint thing, Trees? Where am I? She wondered dimly if she was in the woodlands outside Sunnydale. It wasn’t an area she knew well, save for the occasional patrol. People tended to avoid it at night and because of that, so did the vampires.
She tried to look around to see if anything familiar stood out, but she couldn’t seem to move her head. She might not be dead, but it still felt as if someone had stuffed her into a blender and hit puree.
She marvelled for a moment how it was physically possible for her hair to hurt.
A soft groan of exhaustion and annoyance came before she gave up trying to move. Flopping back onto the cold ground she promised herself, she would never again dive into a magic portal from a tower made by crazy people.
You know… just in case something like that ever happened again.
#SC#
She finally managed to will herself to her feet. After staggering slightly to right herself, she got her balance. Then with a sigh and no real idea what direction to travel in mind, save for a strong gut feeling, she started walking through the trees.
The woodland of large shading trees finally cleared enough for Buffy to see she was heading toward large rolling grass fields. It looked like something out of a country painting.
Pausing at the tree line, Buffy scanned the horizon. Seemingly endless grass fields were leading towards a darkening horizon. This whole magic portal travel thing is freaky, Buffy thought. What time is it anyway? With one last glance back the way she’d came, into the darkening woodland behind her. It seemed like a completely unexpected landing place for magical travel… unwanted magical travel at that.
Shifting her head, that despite some of the lingering stiffness didn’t seem to hurt as much as it had before thankfully. Make that… unwanted, painful, magical travel.
Another thing to talk to Willow and Giles about, Buffy thought as she pushed herself to start walking into the fields.
The grassy plains would have been a picturesque scene, had Buffy not spent the last few hours trudging across them. However, just when it seemed that Buffy had decided green was fast becoming her most hated colour, she came across her first sign of life.
An old dirt road. Buffy paused at the edge, looking down at the worn earth. Before looking left then right. Again, picking with the same gut instinct she’d used in the woods. She started down the road with as much enthusiasm than she’d had crossing the fields. Which was none.
However, she was infinitely thankful that she had been wearing her ass-kicking heels pre-portal, as opposed to say any other kind of heel. Grassy fields where not friendly on heels, and the frustration of having to dig her heel out of the soft dirt would have taken its toll. But now everything else was taking its toll instead.
Her forest-stained sweater, one of her favourites she unhappily noted, for one thing. Though a comfortable wear for night-time Sunnydale, wasn’t really keeping out the building chill of …. wherever she was.
She turned to watch the horizon, noticing the sun was close to setting. The night-time would only be colder. She could handle the cold, better than a regular person could. But she was still a modern girl, and a Californian one at that.
Used to warmer weather and air-conditioning.
The sun was pretty much set by the time Buffy found her next sign of life. A faint glow was all that remained of the sun, as more of the stars were starting to show. She slowed her determined march as she moved past a row of burnt-out houses. Not much left of them but rubble and deep gorges in the ground. The were no bodies and no other signs that people had once been here, but there was something about the rubble that sent a shiver down Buffy’s spine. It might have had something to do with the faint glow she could see in the distance. Completely different look from the sunset. Ominous and imposing, this glow looked like something was a on fire.
Thankfully her path led her away from the glow, and straight to her next sign of life. This time however seemed so much more promising. Houses, small and quaint started appearing before a village that was almost big enough to be called a small town appeared. Buffy swallowed the urge to laugh or cry, or maybe even burst into song, and doubled her speed.
Dirt roads gave way to cobblestones and larger houses. And the sound of voices started drifting through the air. There were a few people around on the cobbled paths, making their way through their tiny town. Buffy so joyful at the sight of other people almost ran towards them but found after a couple of steps forward, she didn’t need to.
A little old lady hobbled her way past Buffy. Her back bowed and cane tapping with each step. Buffy stepped forward to ask where they were? And could she have a phone? Or a shower maybe. When the elderly lady froze at the sight of her. Ducking down to hide her face behind the shawl she had tied over her head and fled away from Buffy as fast as she could.
Which considering her age and need of a walking stick, was pretty damn fast.
The woman cried out something almost fearfully, something in another language. Something that sounded almost…
“…French?” Buffy questioned herself as she worked to identify the language from her limited sample collection. “Is that…. French?”
She may have taken French in high school and may have even somehow passed it. She might still have reoccurring nightmares about the exam that were scarier than some monsters she’d faced. But all she could remember now was how to say Hello. Yes and no, and where’s the toilet.
“Heeyy…uh …huh?” Buffy was left blinking after the quickly fleeing woman, watching as she turned a corner some distance away and disappeared. Buffy arched her eyebrows after her, though annoyed at the brushoff she couldn’t help being vaguely surprised by the speed the old lady had moved at. She huffed a huge sigh in frustration. “Great! Nice start.”
“Okay…. okay.” She muttered to herself trying to work out what was happening to her, or rather what had already happened. “Swirling hell god portal takes me to…. France?”
She turned her attention to the stars. “Is this the universes way of sending me on a vacation? Because I know I’m due one! but I would have preferred Hawaii!”
#SC#
She could have knocked on a door and maybe found someone that spoke English. Got her hands on a phone and called home. But she didn’t. There was something going on in this town, a good number of houses looked abandoned. The whole place was putting her on edge. A feeling of unease that caused the fine hairs on the back of her neck to raise up.
Something weird was going on here.
Not to mention the reaction the old lady had had. It wasn’t annoyance that had sent her scurrying away, Buffy knew fear when she saw it. There was something wrong here, she could almost taste it.
It tasted vaguely like ashes. But that might have been the smell of smoke in the air.
She found a small alley way between two houses. It was more a little passageway, then the alleys she’d hunted in back home. Plus, it was a lot cleaner. She settled down just out of sight, near the mouth of the alley. Back against the wall, knees drawn up against her chest, eyes staring into nothing.
Instead, her day played again inside her mind. The blue swirling portal that tore open the sky. The teared streaked face of her little sister. So scared, yet so brave. Willing to jump to save the world before Buffy had.
Dawnie, she thought. Her voice calling after her as Buffy ran to what she’d thought to be her death. She had been so sure she was going to die. She had accepted it. She had even been willing to if it meant her little sister had gotten to live.
Maybe she had let Spike’s annoying ‘Deathwish’ talks, and the whole ‘Death is your gift’ thing, get to her. Because of her readiness to jump. How quickly she had accepted it, as if she had expected it.
But now here she was sitting in some alley, in what she thought was rural France. Wondering what she was going to say when she saw Dawnie again. She found herself thankful that she had survived. Glad she had lived.
I’m sorry I scared you Dawnie, Willow, Xander, Giles. She thought, But I’m okay, I’m so so happy that I’m alive and I’m coming home.
Emotional exhaustion more than physical finally caught up with her, as her head dropped forward. Maybe things will be clearer in the day, she thought fuzzily, and she dropped off to sleep.
#SC#
She knew she was dreaming even if she hadn’t been sitting in the theatre of Sunnydale high. As if the whole school hadn’t been reduced to rubble by Buffy and her friends during their graduation. There was no one else in the audience, the seemingly endless rows of seats were dark and empty.
The stage however was lit up with lights. There was a large painted backdrop of a river, surrounded by large props of rocks and shattered bones. One skull was painted red with blood.
Xander was standing in the middle of the stage, dressed like Kevin Sorbo. Or rather his character from Hercules, the Legendary Journeys. He stepped forward, and with all the acting skill he had displayed during the school’s talent show. His one and only Snyder forced acting experience.
With completely zero acting skills. Xander proclaimed himself to be Heracles, on the second of his twelve labours.
Willow walked onto the stage next and with the same woefully wooden acting, held her sword prop up to the audience of just Buffy and introduced herself as Iolaus. She announced that they should use a firebrand on the multi headed serpent and cauterize the wounds. Preventing two more heads from taking the place of the severed one.
“Personally, I find the best way to kill something like that is to go for the heart,” Spike’s voice remarked next to her, and Buffy turned to look. He was leaning back in his chair, watching the performance as if he was watching the best play around.
“Either that,” Giles agreed from her other side, eating from a box of popcorn. “Or crush its body. No body, no heads to grow from.”
A sudden fierce flare of blue light came from the corner of her eye and Buffy turned around in her chair to look. But there was nothing there, literally nothing. Just an endless expanse of nothing. Faint flashes of colours came in the distance. Along with the blue came yellow, red, purple, green and orange.
She winced slightly, even in the dream state the lights made her head hurt. She turned back to the stage. Realising as she did so… Spike, and Giles were gone and there were other people in the audience with her now. The seats were full of people dressed in dated military gear. The stage was different too.
Gone was Xander and Willow and the river backdrop, in its place hung a large American flag. A short skinny blond man stood in front of it. He stepped forward casting a disproportionately large shadow across the stage. He gave her a salute, before turning around and punching what looked like Adolf Hitler in the face.
#SC#
There was a strange vibration in the air, almost a humming. It jerked her from sleep to wide awake, just before something nearby exploded in a fiery flash of flames and debris. The wall behind her lurched as smoke and rubble flew past the mouth of the alley.
She was on her feet and moving before the second explosion ripped apart the building, burying the alleyway behind her in fallen rubble.
All around her people were screaming, as they ran fleeing from the buildings. As more high-pitched sounds rang through the air, each followed by explosions that lit the night up with its fury. The little town that had look so quaint and picturesque was on fire, with explosions of debris and flames all around her.
Buffy watched with shocked wide eyes at the fallen bodies shattered on the ground. She came to the conclusion that she had been wrong all along. She had died from the portal. She had to be dead, because this was hell.
A nearby scream knocked her out of her stupor, and into action. Snatching up a fallen young boy and running him into the arms of his screaming reaching mother. The blasts had slowed thankfully, but it didn’t mean the attack was over. As the sound of a rifle came, almost unnaturally loud. Almost as if it had been fired right next to Buffy’s ear. Across the town square a man jerked and fell. Chaos ruled around her, and Buffy began shoving those near her into running. Loud grinding gears echoed, and the large shape of a metal vehicle came crashing through the destroyed houses.
A tank! Buffy recognised with numb disbelief. That’s a tank!
Buffy vs. a Tank was not a conflict that Buffy herself had ever really thought about. Now watching the hulking metal frame swivel its massive canon to fire its deadly shot at the town. The booming sound of it echoed as the ground itself seemed to shudder. She decided that right now was not the best time to come up with an answer to that confrontation. Especially as more armed men dressed in black combat gear, appeared through the rubble the tank had left.
Large bug like eyes, of the black gas masks, glinted with the flames around them. Staring ghoulishly as they fired into the fleeing people. Buffy didn’t think, as she moved through the people towards the soldiers. The tank conflict she’d avoid for now, but the men… she could deal with them.
Taking advantage of the smoke and chaos, Buffy closed in on one of the soldiers before he even registered the counterattack. Not that they had been expecting one obviously, they had attacked a defenceless town.
The thought made her blood boil.
They might have been humans. Amoral, probably evil humans. But they were still trained soldiers. The man reacted surprisingly fast despite his initial surprise. Didn’t help him much, considering he was up against a pissed off experienced Slayer. She knocked the rifle from his grasp and kicked him in the knee, dropping him to the ground. She followed it up with a stronger than necessary punch to the face.
One of his buddies noticed the attack, spinning around to aim his rifle at her. Buffy not having any weapons of her own, did what Buffy did best, and improvised. She grabbed hold of the unconscious man and threw him at the other man. The force knocked him back into a partially destroyed wall, both men tumbled to the ground out cold.
There was a shout. It was in another language, and it didn’t sound French to Buffy.
There was no time to dwell on the strangeness of foreign men with tanks attacking little French towns, when another creature in mans clothing turned his rifle towards Buffy. She closed the distance between the two of them before he’d even had a chance to aim at her. Grabbing hold of the barrel and much the same as she’d done the last time someone had stupidly pointed a rifle at her…bent the barrel away almost to a right angle.
The man dropped the rifle and to his credit didn’t even pause when he went for his backup piece. He barely even grazed the handle when Buffy punched him once, then twice and the third time…just because.
He was unconscious from the first punch probably, swaying on his feet about to drop when a bullet struck him in the chest and sent him jerking backwards. An had instinct had Buffy shifting, twisting to the side even before the crack of the gunshot sounded. She dived to the side, looking for a way to get out of the open.
Something hit her leg even as she rolled across the ground. A sharp cry of shock and pain escaped her as she reached for her leg. Watching as the red bloomed across the denim clad thigh.
She’d been shot. Well grazed, she realised pulling at the fabric of her bloody jeans to look. But still….
Instinct, hearing or lucky guess had her pushing herself to the side just as a bullet bit into the ground right where her head had been. She really couldn’t tell, but then again, she’d never been shot at by a sniper before.
The wound on her leg pulled and burned in a way she’d never experienced. But she was no stranger to pain. She’d been stabbed, clawed, and sliced. She had fought with master vampires and demons, not only that she had survived going toe to toe against a Hell god. On one occasion she had even fallen off a building. But she had never been shot…grazed…whatever before. She decided right then and there that she didn’t like it. She really, really didn’t like it.
She made her feelings on the matter known when she punched another soldier so hard, he flew backwards. By this time the men around her had rightly realised that there was something different about this tiny blond and that she might be a bigger threat then they had originally thought.
More shouts erupted in that foreign language, as the men all turned their attention and rifles on her alone. A loud whirling sound signalled the tank moving to aim itself at her as well.
It seemed that the Buffy vs. The tank question might be getting an answer sooner than expected.
More shouting came, and Buffy frowned in confusion. Is that? She thought looking from gas masked soldier to gas masked soldier.
Was that German?
#SC#
It took a few moments for them all to gather around her. All different distances and position, more ground than she could hope to cover before someone got another shot at her.
One gunman approached her with an almost smug walk, pulling his rifle back to slam the butt of it into her face. His smugness faded when she didn’t drop as expected. Instead rolling her head slightly with the blow before turning back to glare at him.
He faltered for a moment, before pulling back to hit her again. Only to have her catch the butt before it made contact. He tugged on the weapon, trying to pull it free with no luck. The men around her started shouting at her in German again. She noticed a couple of them had villages as hostages and let go of the rifle. Not even blinking as the soldier stumbled backward with the sudden loss of her grip.
He spun the rifle and aimed it right between her eyes. Even as another stepped forward, striking at her wounded leg. She went down to her knee, looking up just in time to see two rifle butts coming for her face. The world hazed out for a second, as she heard distant shouting and the sound of more people gathering around her.
Every Slayer instinct screamed at her to get up. Something landed on her wounded leg, and she cried out kicking. She was pretty sure she’d just sent someone flying. Something thin and sharp, was stabbed into her arm and she felt the heady flood of drugs clouding her head.
“No!” She muttered gasping, “No-no-no-no…” Spirit and body fighting the pull. Someone called out something and a second prick followed, and she felt her body slacken as her eyelids flickered. Her vision hazing in and out. She watched dazedly as gas masked soldiers leaned in over her. She mumbled one last word, before she was out.
“… Jerks.”
EDITED -13/09/2022 (09/13/2022)