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(This is original creative material copyright Chris Kenworthy, based on characters that he has no right to owned by someone else blah blah biddy blah...) Author's note: The scooby gang is trapped in Limbo, a Hellish copy of Sunnydale in a pocket dimension of the Hellmouth. Angel is there, and apparently, somehow, pregnant. Buffy and Xander are an item, and Cordelia has been through a lot since finding out about them and is still not totally okay with it. For more detail, see the earlier eps. |
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"Oh, yeah," a young man said from the front bench. "Sandwich?"
"Uh, okay."
Her boating partner turned around a bit, and it was Xander! He picked up something from beside him and tossed it back to her. It was a split roll wrapped in thin plastic, apparently sliced with some kind of meat inside. "Uh, great."
Suddenly a big dark shape swooped out of the night air, right at Buffy. She felt a slight sharp pain in her neck, batted at the dark whatever-it-was, and it flapped away. Buffy's hand flew up to her neck by reflex, and a trickle of blood came off on it. She stared at her bloody finger in shock for a second.
"What the..." Buffy looked up and scanned around. Xander was still paddling from the front, oblivious to what had just happened. And someone, Cordelia no less, was walking towards them... on the choppy water!
"You didn't keep your guard up," Cordelia said, "did you, Slayer?" Buffy's mouth dropped open.
"Hey, Buffy?" Willow said. Buffy did a double-take and looked around the dark lake again. Where was Willow?
"C'mon, Buffy, wake up!" And suddenly Buffy was in bed, in the room she had taken over in the Chase house. Willow was sitting at the edge of the bed, and her face broke into a smile. "Oh, man," Buffy moaned, "did I miss the alarm again?"
"No, I think the alarm missed you," Willow said. "This one's running slow. But it's about to start." One of the weirdest things about the dimensional limbo the Slayerettes had found themselves in was that clocks didn't seem to run at the same rate. It had taken a while, filled with some unfortunate misunderstandings, before they had even figured that out, and longer for Willow to try to sort out an unambiguous way of keeping time... which Xander had immediately nicknamed "Willow time," of course.
"How much time do I have?" Buffy replied, charging out of the bed.
"Five or ten minutes," Willow said. "Plus the time to walk back there, and give or take a Willow-minute, of course."
"Gotcha."
* * * *
Buffy and Willow swept into the Rosenberg living room. "Hey," Oz said to Buffy. "Nice outfit." Buffy was wearing a sheer off-white blouse over a pale grey skimpy halter top, and a tight short skirt, light blue. "You'd better stay away from Angel dressed like that," Oz added.
"Thanks," Buffy said icily. The whole 'keeping her and Angel apart' thing had turned into this big running joke, and she wasn't happy about it. "He's not the one I'm wearing it for," she told him.
"Where do we stand?" Willow asked Oz, with a meaningful glance upwards.
"He's moving around up there," Oz reported simply. "We think he'll be coming down here in a few minutes."
"Is everything ready?" Buffy asked.
"Almost," Oz told her. "We'll be done when the time comes, probably."
"Probably?" Buffy repeated disbelievingly. "There's no room for probably. Everything has got to be right by the time he gets here," she told Oz. "This isn't a game, understand?"
"Uh, sure," Oz replied.
Suddenly Buffy's keen hearing picked up heavy footsteps on the stairs. "So much for that. He's coming!" she called out. Quickly the lights were all turned out and everyone got into their assigned concealment positions.
The footsteps made their way down the rest of the steps and into the darkened living room. "SURPRISE!"
"Whoa!" a very surprised Xander muttered as someone flicked the lights on.
* * * *
"Awake," a voice muttered.
Darla stretched in pleasant relief. Her legs banged into some kind of wooden wall when she tried to shift them too much, though. That was odd - the human legends might describe vampires sleeping in ornate coffins, but like most of her kind that she knew of, Darla preferred a more open space to take her rest. A hard surface, if possible, but that was a matter of taste from one vampire to another.
Wait a second... how was it that she had woken up at all? The last thing that Darla remembered was the fight with the Slayer, her miserable little friends, and Angel. She had been about to cripple the foolish little girl, Buffy, when Angel had staked her. The strike had taken her by surprise, yes, but in that last moment she had known the strike was true. Darla had been doomed.
So why, then, was she seemingly perfectly alright? Darla's eyes snapped open in frustration. She was lying in an wooden box, open at the top, but remarkably coffin-like. A blonde lady, probably a vampire, had been looking down at her, but turned away as soon as she saw that Darla was awake. Her clothes, thin white robes, billowed as she swirled away.
Who was that? Darla could swear that she had seen the woman before, but couldn't immediately match the name with the face - she had over four hundred years of memories stored up, after all. Still, the flash of unfufilled recognition puzzled Darla all the more. She hitched herself up on her elbows to take a better look. She was in a squarish gray room, several pieces of richly designed furniture contrasting with the sparseness of the rest of the space.
There were four other boxes like hers scattered nearby, each with a similarly confused vamp looking around. One was her old and trusted compatriot Luke. (Well, not too trusted... but never mind that.) Luke had definitely been slain - well, no sense worrying about the unexplainable. The other vamps... one had been a minor sergeant in the Master's army, the next was another of those faces she could remember but didn't know from where, and the last she wasn't even sure if she knew.
Just then, someone came into the room Darla definitely knew... the older man who had always been running around somewhere nearby when Summers was around, the one they said was a Watcher.
Darla didn't even think - she just leapt from the coffin at the Watcher, striking him to the ground with a single fist just as she landed. "What," she growled angrily at the watcher as he began to scramble back up, "the hell is going on here??"
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