And here are the last two chapters... I hope you enjoy, and more than ever, i hope you can spare a minute to tell me what you thought of the story.

Cordelia’s car came to an abrupt stop in a driveway indistinguishable from the other driveways around it. The street of aligned houses and manicured lawns was so plain and normal that Buffy couldn’t help but feel that it was creepy. Surely, as soon as the sun finished setting, the entire neighborhood would show its true nature and demons would start crawling out of the flowerbeds.

“We’re here!” Cordelia exclaimed in that overly perky tone that had been hers since they had arrived in this place. “This is where you live.”

Unable to shake off the feeling of strangeness, Buffy stepped out of the car and observed the house for a few moments. It was completely and utterly non-descript. She slowly followed Cordelia to the front door, her mind running through the places she had lived in over the past few years. This looked as though it would be a definite improvement over the dilapidated buildings where she had slept while she had been on the run, that cold efficiency apartment in Cleveland, the motel when she had first arrived in Sunnydale, even Giles’ apartment. Or Spike’s.

A flash of pain at the memory of the apartment blackened by fire transformed into steel determination, and Buffy closed her fists tightly for a second before opening them again. She had been in this new world for less than an hour, and of course she hadn’t seen Spike yet, but she knew he was alive, somewhere, and it was only a question of time before they met. Until then, she had to learn how to live here, in shoes that fit her perfectly but weren’t exactly hers.

On Cordelia’s prompt, Buffy pushed the door open and stepped inside. The ordinary exterior was matched by an ordinary interior, with photographs on the walls, artwork here and there, and the smell of something cooking drifting from what appeared to be the kitchen.

“Oh Buffy, there you are. Weren’t you supposed to be home two hours ago? It’s too late to go to the mall now.”

Her eyes widening, Buffy looked at the woman who was walking out of the living room. She had known Joyce would be there, of course, but she still found it difficult not to pull back, or even run away.

“I’m…sorry?” she tried, diffident.

“It’s my fault, Mrs. Summers,” Cordelia jumped in. “I asked Buffy to study with me and we lost track of time.”

Joyce seemed mollified by the lie – or maybe it was Cordelia’s beaming smile. She hadn’t stopped smiling ever since they had found themselves standing on the deserted Sunnydale High campus, almost an hour earlier. She had even seemed close to shedding a tear when she had found her car in the parking lot, and she had insisted on driving around town just to show Buffy how much better this world was. So far, the main difference as far as Buffy was concerned was that Cordelia wasn’t whining anymore.

“Well, I guess we can go to the mall tomorrow,” Joyce sighed, though she was smiling. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Would you like to stay and eat with us, Cordelia?”

“Thank you but I can’t, I’ve got to get home. As soon as Buffy shows me that book in her room, that is.”

Blinking dumbly at her, Buffy wondered what she was talking about. Cordelia’s pointed look seemed to indicate she ought to get up the stairs so she did just that, tensing despite herself as she walked by Joyce. When she reached the landing, she let Cordelia walk in front of her and followed her through a door and into a bedroom.

It was only when she saw the stuffed pig by the bed, a memento from her childhood, that it dawned on her that this was her bedroom. She looked at the butterflies on the wall, at the slightly messy desk, at the clothes peeking out of the half-open closet, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

“There. Look at that.”

Cordelia had closed the door, then picked up a framed photograph from the desk. She handed it to Buffy.

“That’s Willow and Xander,” she said, pointing to the oddly familiar girl and boy on each side of Buffy on the picture. All three of them looked…happy. “They’re your friends in this world. Like, you’re inseparable.” There might have been a hint of jealousy in those last words, though it was hard to imagine Cordelia jealous of anything.

Out of the blue, Buffy understood why they looked so familiar, just as she remembered them dissolving into dust.

“They’re the vampires Spike killed in the library.”

Cordelia nodded. “Except, they’re not vampires here. They kinda help you patrol.”

Shaking her head lightly, Buffy tried to wrap her mind around that. It had been one thing to accept Spike’s help on patrol; he was a born fighter. She could hardly imagine these two grinning kids with stakes in their hands.

“Anything else you need to know right now?”

Cordelia looked in a hurry to leave and so Buffy let her go despite the dozen questions that were cluttering her mind. She would figure things out as she went. She had survived Master vampires, demons, two Hellmouths and an asylum. This couldn’t possibly be any more difficult.


“Buffy? The science room is this way.”

Pushing a smile to her lips, Buffy nodded to Willow. “Silly me. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Willow looked truly worried. Buffy was fast learning that worrying was part of Willow’s nature, just like being goofy was part of Xander’s. “Are you sure you’re OK? Maybe that blow to the head was even worse than you said. I think you should see a doctor.”

“I’m fine,” Buffy assured her, rubbing the non-existent bump at the back of her head. “I promise. Just bear with me.”

That bump to the head was Buffy’s excuse for many things, in the weeks that followed. She blamed it for the inside jokes she wasn’t getting, for the places and people she didn’t recognize, for her blank looks at the allusions to a past she hadn’t lived, and for being more distant from her friends than they were apparently used to. Yet, slow step after slow step, she began finding her place in this new world.

Willow, Xander, and even Oz in his quiet way didn’t give her much of a choice. They were around her more often than not, accepting her quirks, including her in their banter even when she would have felt safer remaining on the outside. She started opening toward them, and thinking of them as – maybe not friends yet, but friends-to-be. Finding herself nearly burned at the stake next to Willow after a month or so definitely helped strengthen their bond. Strangely enough, it also strengthened Buffy’s relationship with Joyce.

Day after day, it was hard to call her ‘Mom’, hard not to flinch when Joyce was displeased for whatever reason, and even harder not to fling in her face that Buffy wasn’t crazy, and that she would run away rather than return to the asylum. This Joyce hadn’t locked up her daughter. This Joyce knew about the Slayer gig, and she accepted the patrols and ashes-stained clothes. It was unfair to punish her for what someone else had done. And so Buffy tried to forget, and to remember the love she had felt for her mother before she had been called to be the Slayer. When Joyce was possessed by demon spirits and directed the witch hunt that caught Buffy and Willow, Buffy could have fallen back into the old patterns and withdrawn from her; instead, the experience made her realize that the only way Joyce would hurt her was if she was under a spell of some sort. It became easier to trust her after that.

Things with Giles weren’t as simple. Of all of them, he seemed to be the one who noticed the most changes about Buffy, especially in her fighting styles and strategies. He commented about it a few times in the first couple of weeks, but accepted Buffy’s explanation that she felt like changing her slaying habits lest she became too predictable. Buffy still remembered how he had helped her in her world, first sheltering her and giving her a taste of normal life, then giving her the means to change her life for the better, and because of that he was the one she trusted most – until her birthday. She would have expected being betrayed by the Council; after all, they had betrayed her before. But to have Giles rob her of her Slayer strength was a blow to the trust she had in him, and even after he rebelled against the Council, even after he helped her and apologized, she couldn’t help seeing him through the eyes of betrayal. It would take time before she could trust him again.

The strangest thing to adjust to, however, was Angel.


From her first nights in this world, and especially with what had happened at Christmas, Buffy had made it clear to Angel that whatever she might have felt for him before, it was over. He had easily accepted her words – too easily, she sometimes thought – and still he kept joining her on patrol, every few nights, to fight by her side in a brooding silence that rubbed her nerves raw.

It was so different, having Angel there when she was used to Spike. Painful, too. Every one of his visits made her miss Spike even more. Months had passed, and there was still no sign of him. Sometimes, she wanted to just get out of town and hunt him down. From the bits of information she had gathered, on his last visit to Sunnydale he had hinted at having a place in South America. That was a beginning if she were ever to go look for him, but hardly enough to find him fast.

“Do you think Spike will ever show up again?” she asked Angel one night.

Angel looked at her with surprise and incomprehension. “Spike? Let’s hope not! What made you think of him?”

The color of the moon. The leather of your jacket. The scent of cigarette smoke in the air. Just about anything and everything.

“Nothing. It’s just been a while since he showed up. I wonder what he’s up to.”

Angel snorted, and his voice shaded to a bitter tint. “Nothing good. And he’ll be back. He always comes back. I should have staked him when he first came to Sunnydale.”

Buffy stopped walking abruptly, and glared at Angel’s back as he took a few more steps. She had to bite her tongue not to tell him exactly what she thought of him. So often, he had alluded to how they couldn’t be together, how it was too dangerous, and still he kept coming to her, kept looking at her as though expecting that she’d declare her undying love for him and join his ‘Woe is us’ chorus. If it had been Spike in front of her, if something as silly as a curse or a soul or the lack of one had stood in his way, she wanted to believe he would have found a solution.

When Angel looked back at her, she turned on her heel and walked away, throwing behind her some excuse about needing to be home early.

Rather than going home however, she kept walking through Sunnydale long after the curfew imposed on her by her mother. She let her thoughts wander, looking for a bleached-blond vampire even if she didn’t truly expect to find him tonight. Something inside her claimed that she would know when he would return, and that she would find him at once. All she had to do was wait for him to come back, and as Angel had said, as she knew deep in her bones and soul, he always came back. Then the dance would start again.

She didn’t expect him to be exactly the same. Their history was different in this world, and the least of the differences was that she hadn’t killed Drusilla. Sometimes, when she looked at herself in a mirror, she touched her lips where they should have been slashed by a scar, or scratched at the two sets of bite marks that weren’t a reminder to how close he had come to killing her. But despite the bubble of fear in the pit of her stomach that Anyanka’s laugh had been a warning of bad things to come rather than an exclamation of joy at getting her pendant back, despite everything, she had hope – and for her, after years of darkness, it meant more than anything else. She was the same woman Spike had fallen for, and she wouldn’t relent until he fell again, and until they had a proper chance at being happy together.

Until then, she needed to deal with an evil mayor, a rogue Slayer, and a souled vampire who made pitiful puppy eyes at her. It didn’t matter, though. If it meant having Spike in her life again, she was ready to take on the world and change it.

In fact, she had already done just that.