by Various
Here, she had no sister. She had a mother.
I could take her to the hospital, Buffy thought. It’s so early. If they caught it now, caught the tumor now, they could fight it maybe, cut it out of her. There’d be no fatal hemorrhage. Maybe it wasn’t over after all. Maybe the last three years were best forgotten, discarded. But Dawn—How do you weigh a sister against a mother?
The phone rang. Phones rang for a lot of reasons. It could be anyone on the other end of that line. But what were the chances . . . what were the chances that it was Giles calling, or Willow? Someone who would make her do the “right” thing? Someone who would say, You can’t do this. Can’t step out of time this way, accept the mistake, take back the three years.
Buffy ran from the bathroom, back into her bedroom. She picked up the receiver and immediately dropped it down onto the cradle again, severing the connection. Then she reached under and behind the bed, groped for the phone cord, where it snaked into the jack. With a violent wrenching pull, she unplugged the phone from the wall. She’d have to disconnect them all, all the extensions. But that was easy. And it was the right thing to do. She needed time to think. Time to spend with her mother.
Buffy stepped out onto the landing. Joyce was in the doorway, hand on the knob. Heading out. She looked up the stairs toward Buffy.
“Buffy? Did you get the phone?”
“Yeah. Wrong number.”
“Oh, all right. You want me to drop you at school, or—” “Mom?”
Joyce paused and looked at her daughter. Buffy continued, “I think I’m sick. I suddenly feel terrible.”
Joyce frowned, concerned. “Terrible how?”
Buffy looked away as she answered. “Kinda hot. You know, fevery. And my skin hurts. Not serious sick but still . . .”
“Oh, Buffy. Well, I suppose you can stay home, if you—”
“No. Mom. I really . . . do you think you could stay with me? For a while?”
Joyce hesitated.
* * *
The something dark was curled around the bottom post of the banister at the bottom of the stairs, a round black shadow that listened and waited. It was content to wait now. Now that she was in sight. It needed to be done, but it needed to be done neatly. If the other one stayed, that would be all right for now. Because at some point the Violator would be alone and then she could be taken away. And the others would be gone too. It could be clean again. Everything could be put right.
* * *
Willow waved her hand and pointed. She knew without even looking that nothing had happened. When you did magick, really did it, there was a kind of surge. It started as a kind of surfacy thing, a crackle in the fingertips and a sort of carbonated feeling that sizzled up your arm. And then, right after, as the magick took hold, you could feel something deeper in your chest and belly—a feeling, just for a moment, that felt a little like panic and a little like joy and little like anger. And it felt as good and clean and strong the hundredth time you felt it as it did the first time. There was no feeling like that now.
Xander leaned over and asked, “What did you try to do?”
They were sitting together at the central table in the library. Willow inclined her head toward where Giles was standing in the stacks, looking for texts that might help them understand what was happening. She spoke softly to Xander, respecting Giles’s desire to be kept uninformed about their current lives. She figured that included her improved magickal abilities. “If it worked, all the books that mention time travel would have turned red. Then we could only worry about the red ones.” She glared absently at her hand as if the lack of magick was somehow its fault.
Giles returned to the table, carrying a book. He handed it to Xander. “I think this one may be helpful.” The book was red. Xander looked Willow, his eyes wide.
“Hey! Maybe it worked!”
Willow glanced at the book. “I’ve looked at that one before. It was always red.”
“Oh.” Xander sounded defeated.
Willow had a sudden thought. She looked to Giles. “Xander and I, we need to go to class.”
Giles was surprised. “Surely you—we have research to do.”
Willow realized that this Giles wasn’t used to her being so forceful. She explained: “We’re not getting anywhere here. I think we should go try to figure out if we’re on the right time line or not, by, you know, living here . . . just till we can tell.”
Giles hesitated. Xander didn’t look that certain either. “Exactly how can we tell that?”
Willow closed the book on her lap. “We want to know if we’ve lived this day before, right?”
Giles, clearly picking up on the idea, answered, “You’ll want to look for independent events, things that aren’t influenced by the different ways you’re going to interact with them—a science exam, a lecture or class project, or a fire drill . . . something.”
Xander nodded, thinking that it was a pretty impossible job. Who remembered a fire drill from three years ago? But it was better than sitting here feeling helpless. He nodded and said, “Giles, while we’re doing that, maybe you should try to find Buffy. I think we’ve let this go too long without her.”
Giles nodded. Xander was right. This Xander and this Willow both seemed more confident, less likely to be led. Stronger. A part of him felt very proud.
* * *
Buffy was propped on the living room sofa, a blanket draped over her. She smiled as Mom handed her a bowl of Chicken and Stars soup, then adjusted the blanket as she sat down by Buffy’s feet. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Oh, honey. You’re welcome. I know how it is to suddenly feel yucky.”
Buffy felt a shiver of alarm. “Do you? I mean, have you been feeling sick?”
“What? No, of course not! I just mean that when you feel sick, it’s just such a helpless feeling, like you’re young again and you just want your mother to take care of you.”
Buffy looked into the soup, moving stars with the tip of her spoon, hiding her emotion. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly how I feel.”
* * *
Willow slipped into History class, late. It had taken her some minutes of walking the halls, peeking into classrooms, for her to recall her senior schedule. But this was right—Mr. Harten at the front of the class, Oz in a desk to her left.
“Miss Rosenberg, nice of you to join us.” Willow remembered that Mr. Harten had never been an original guy. He’d decided, years ago, on an appropriate quip to address tardiness, and he saw no reason to change that habit.
“Sorry Mr. Harten. Couldn’t be helped,” she said back to him as she took her seat. She noticed a few heads turning toward her in surprise, including Oz. It took her a moment to realize what they were reacting to. She was out of character. High school Willow didn’t have that confident off-hand voice. She wouldn’t ever have shown up late for class, and certainly not without a notebook, and if for some reason she did, she would have been blushing like a radish from having the eyes of all the students on her.
After a moment Mr. Harten started talking again. Willow listened hard, trying to remember if she’d heard this lecture before, a discussion of the role of accident in history. It was interesting, and some of the facts sounded familiar, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe this part—
“Pssssst!”
Willow looked around to see who was hissing. Oz, in that desk to her left. Probably worried about her after her strangeness this morning, and now . . . He probably thinks I’m ignoring him. Which I kind of am.
She looked at him, met his eyes. He smiled at her, one of the little smiles he reserved just for her, the faintest twitch of his lips. To her surprise she felt that smile, felt the warmth that it caused. She smiled back at him, almost involuntarily. A connection. She felt her pulse speed up, blood rush to her face. She looked away, fast.
Whoo. She was one confused little kitty. At first this world had felt terribly foreign. But there were parts of it that were beyond familiar. She had just been patting herself on the back
for having moved beyond the scared, radishy teenager that she had been, and suddenly here she was, scared and red-faced—radish deluxe.
And desperately homesick. She didn’t want to be here any longer. Her world in 2001 was kinda screwed up, with Tara getting so strange on her, moving out . . .
And now with this reaction to Oz . . .
What do I want?
Tara.
She knew she’d rather be there with Tara, even an angry Tara, than anywhere in this old landscape where she felt herself losing ground, slipping back into what she used to be. She still loved Oz, and she’d never lied to herself about that, but not like how she loved Tara. And she didn’t want to be back in the life that Oz-love belonged to.
She slumped a little lower in her seat and tried to concentrate on the lecture. Maybe she’d remember this section on scientific accidents. She didn’t look toward Oz again. She didn’t notice his confused frown. Or the dark dark shadow that his desk made—darker than the other shadows.
* * *
Xander looked at the parallelogram on the blackboard. Geometry. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps this wasn’t time travel, perhaps it was one of those hell dimensions, and he was going to be enrolled in remedial ninth grade geometry forever. But it didn’t matter, he supposed, if he understood anything now. He was just here to play “Do I remember this?”
Mrs. Holland was drawing a rectangle on the board. She labeled one vertical side A and the top B. “So who can tell me the area of the rectangle?”
Xander knew that. A times B. He nodded to himself, a little self-satisfied. A person didn’t take geometry twice without learning something. Someone else in the class gave the answer and Mrs. Holland continued. She pointed at the parallelogram. Its top was Y units long and it was X units tall. And the length of its oh-so-slanty side was Z. What was its area?
Xander started looking around the room at the other students, no sense in even listening to this. Then he looked back. Something had suddenly struck him. What if that parallelogram was made of wood? What if it was part of a carpentry project? He imagined sawing off triangles from both sides, leaving a square. Then you could put those triangles together . . . another square, put them next to the first square. He could see it in his mind. It was a rectangle. A Y-by-X rectangle. And he knew how to do that.
“The area is X times Y!” He stood up and shouted it. Everyone turned to stare at him.
He sat back down, smiling sheepishly, while the teacher, obviously startled, explained to the class why Xander’s answer was right.
They went on, discussing areas of circles, volumes of pyramids . . . Xander wielded a mental saw, rearranging the shapes, building huge structures in his mind. It was simple. Could it really have been this easy all along? All the torture, all the years of feeling stupid . . . unnecessary. Well, that was just terrific.
Xander was having a breakthrough about cutting the area under a curve into infinitely small rectangular slices when he saw a shadow flit across the floor, but he barely noticed it. He was moments away from understanding the basic principle behind all of calculus.
* * *
Willow and Xander sat, heads together, at lunch. They discussed the total absence of any progress, except that Xander was now convinced he was a misunderstood geometrical genius.
There weren’t two shadows following them anymore. They had merged into one. It lay, spread like a manta ray, under their table. It didn’t care who they were or what they were talking about. It just needed to clean them. They didn’t belong there.
Willow was talking over the babble and rumble of the cafeteria. “But, Xander, I told you all that! Every time I tutored you I talked about cutting up that parallelogram!”
“But you didn’t say it was made of wood!”
“Wood? For God’s sake, Xander, how does that make any diff—”
She broke off and Xander stared at her.
Then she screamed.
She slumped in her chair, silent now, and started to slide to the ground. Xander, scared and confused, jumped up and hurried to grab her. He picked her up in his arms, ignoring the stares from the students in the crowded lunchroom.
There was something on her leg. It was clinging to her shin. A dark film. Xander had never seen anything like it. And whatever it was, it was clearly hurting Willow. She whimpered, semiconscious.
Xander carried her out of the lunchroom, toward the library. Giles would know what to do. He has to.
* * *
Giles stood on Buffy’s front stoop. He knocked again, getting impatient. Finally Joyce opened the door.
“Oh! Mr. Giles . . . Rupert.”
“Um . . . Joyce. Hello.”
The two of them had been awkward with each other ever since a candy-addled encounter on the hood of a police car the previous year. He cleared his throat, willing himself to soldier through the tense moment.
“Is, um . . . is Buffy here?”
“Well, she is, but the thing is, I’m afraid she’s not feeling very well today. Unless the world is at stake, I think it would be best if you waited to see her tomorrow, or, you know, whenever she feels better.”
Giles met Joyce’s eye and set his jaw. “I’m afraid the world might be at stake, at least a bit.”
Startled by his determination, Joyce took a step backward and Giles brushed past her, turning left into the living room.
Buffy was on the sofa, feet up, blanket to her chin. A can of soda with a bendy-straw protruding from it sat on the floor next to a celebrity tabloid. She blinked up at Giles.
“Giles? What’s going on? Is it Faith and the Mayor?”
Faith and the Mayor. Giles hesitated, thrown off balance. Was it possible that the time phenomenon affecting Willow and Xander had left Buffy untouched? But there was something about Buffy’s open, guiltless face. Strikingly unblinking. It wasn’t ringing true.
“When you’re really innocent, your eyes aren’t quite that wide. You’re not telling the truth. I know what’s happened, Buffy. I know where you’re from.”
Joyce was in the doorway. “What do you mean? Where she’s from?”
Buffy sat up and pushed the blanket aside. “Mom, I have to talk to Giles, if it’s okay.”
“Oh, well, all right, if it’s slaying business. I’ll be upstairs.” Joyce reluctantly turned toward the stairs.
Giles sat heavily on the sofa next to Buffy. He didn’t know how to begin this conversation. Directly, he supposed, was best.
“You have to go back to where you belong, Buffy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back where?”
“Buffy, please. This is serious. I know what’s happened.”
She looked at him sharply, genuinely curious. “How? Did it happen to you too?”
“No, but Xander and Willow were affected. They’re at the school, trying to figure out what happened. We were all quite concerned when we couldn’t reach you.”
Buffy tossed the blanket aside and walked to the fireplace. She leaned her forehead against the mantelpiece. She took a deep breath. With her head still down, she said, “I don’t want to go back.”
* * *
The shadow on the mantelpiece fluttered. She was so close.
* * *
Giles wanted to come closer, to stand near Buffy, but something told him not to get too close, that her composure couldn’t take it. He gave her a moment, then he asked softly, “I understand that your life in the future isn’t perfect, but it is your life, and you have to go—”
Her head snapped up and she fixed on him angrily. “It isn’t perfect?” she mocked. “What I’m dealing with is way beyond ‘isn’t perfect.’ You want to hear about it? The fabulous parade that is my future?”
“I can’t.” He hastened to stop her. “It’s important that I not know what’s going to happen.”
She took a step toward him and he backed up involuntarily. Buffy never used her superior strength to intimidate him, and he was alarmed and frightened, frighte
ned for her. What had happened to her to harden her this way? He was afraid he was about to find out.
“Here’s my life, Giles. My lovely, miraculous life. First, Angel leaves me. Then I meet a new man, Riley. But he leaves me too. Oh, and I get a little sister, did they tell you about that one? I get the little sister I’ve always had but who never existed. And then my mother dies.”
Giles took another step backward and steadied himself with a hand against the wall. Joyce was going to die?
“That’s right, Watcher. She dies. A brain tumor. It’s probably in there now, cooking away.”
“Buffy, please, don’t go on. I can’t—”
“Can’t what? Can’t hear it or can’t take it? Because it’s not over. We’re not even at the part where I die again to save the world. But I go to heaven, until Willow brings me back, pulls me out of paradise. Then you leave forever, which, by the way, thanks oh so much in advance. And I’m so alone, Giles. You can’t image how alone I am. I’m so alone I’m having sex with Spike just because it’s the only way I can feel anything.”
Giles’s face was a frozen mask, incapable of registering the amount of shock he was feeling. Could this really be the future? How could Xander and Willow have kept this to themselves? And how could Joyce be dead? How could Willow bring Buffy back from the dead? And could he leave Buffy alone in such a state? It didn’t make sense.
“I’m so sorry.” It was all he could manage, and he was deeply aware of how ridiculously inadequate it was.
“So that’s why I don’t want to go back. I know it’s wrong and selfish, but God help me, Giles, it’s what I want. I think . . .” “What? What do you think?”
“I think maybe someone gave me a do-over.”
Giles sat down, polished his glasses, and thought about that.
* * *
Xander burst into the library, Willow a slight weight in his arms. “Giles! Damn it, Giles, you have to be here!”
Willow was gasping for air, fighting obvious pain. “He’s not here, Xander. Put me down.”
On the verge of a screaming panic, Xander decided instead to listen to his friend. He set her gingerly onto a chair. “Maybe I should take you to the hospital.”