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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part II

Slayers needed very little sleep (useful, when you had to work nights and act normal by day), but Cordelia was barely sleeping at all now. Part of that derived from guilt and frustration, and part from new purpose, but mostly it was because those heinous dreams kept coming. Every. Single. Night.

Individually, they were no biggie. In the aggregate, they were becoming intolerable. She’d heard Buffy mention Slayer dreams — annoying, sometimes useful, but blessedly infrequent — before Cordelia had succeeded her as Slayer. She’d never had any such, though, not in that entire first year after somehow drawing Buffy’s power into herself. Not, in fact, until Buffy had been claimed by the coma that still held her.

Actually, not until Cordelia’s return from the alternate universe ‘future’ where she’d had to fight alongside (and sometimes against) three other Slayers. One of whom had been a different version of Buffy.

In many ways, that had been a welcome break. Getting away from her own problems for awhile, battling things that were simply enemies, and not former lovers or reminders of past failures … Three things, however, had kept her from enjoying the respite.

First was the nagging question of whether or not she would be able to return home. She had obligations, things she had to do, and she couldn’t meet them or even try to do so if she was stuck in a whole different Star Trek “Mirror, Mirror” universe.

Second, the alternate Buffy … and, even more, the equally alternate Joyce, but they were both part of the same thing. Seeing Buffy (even a different one) walking around again, awake and active but also scarred and cold, had underscored Cordelia’s sense of failure where All Things Buffy were concerned. Likewise, Joyce the Slayer hadn’t been remotely like the grieving woman Cordelia did her best to avoid (while despising herself for her cowardice), but she had visibly been just as shattered as the ‘real’ Joyce by the loss of her daughter, even if she had hammered that bereavement into a killing resolve. It had taken ghastly effort to keep from breaking down in the woman’s presence … or for that matter, to deal with her at all. In reaction, she’d been snarkier to both of them than was truly justified, just to maintain any kind of control.

Third, Spike.

Even the memory was enough to make her hands itch for a stake and a clear shot at the bastard. It wouldn’t have made any difference, she still would have been faced with the task of dusting the Bleached Wonder of her own reality, but where was the downside in getting to kill him twice? Instead, she’d been forced to let him go … and, if the stuttering blonde witch had been telling the truth about him being one of the ‘good guys’ in that timeline, that only made it more galling somehow. Spike the killer she would happily kill in his turn; Spike the hero (assuming such a thing to be possible) was an obscenity that could never be erased.

No, it hadn’t been a vacation. Now she was back, and that was worse.

Cordelia stood in the yard outside Buffy’s house, looking up at the window to the former Slayer’s room. Buffy had been home from the hospital for weeks now; she needed no special equipment, no ventilator or IV or remote monitors to track her vital signs. She wasn’t even brain-dead, medically speaking, EEG scans had shown activity in excess of what would be considered subnormal. She just wouldn’t wake up. Her body had healed, but the rest of her had gone away somewhere, and apparently wasn’t coming back.

Not by itself, anyhow. Cordelia would find a way. She would. She would.

She was the queen. The queen did not tolerate failure. Especially her own.

Joyce Summers had set up in-home care for her daughter while she struggled to keep the gallery going. Buffy’s father paid for most of it, even though he didn’t visit; he had come only once, and left early. Cordelia knew the Slay Friends (and probably Joyce as well) thought less of him for it, but she herself could readily understand someone not being able to deal with such a dreadful loss. Maybe he cared so much that he simply couldn’t stand to see her that way: there, but gone.

Everyone else, with Joyce’s blessing, visited the comatose girl at least once a week. Not Tucker, he had meant it when he shouted his resignation from active membership, but all the others, with the likely exception of Marcie. Xander, Cordelia knew, went nearly every day. Oz and Willow had shown up together at first, but lately they had been taking separate shifts. Giles was there least frequently; wheelchair-bound, he had to have someone (usually Owen) carry him up the stairs, and while his affection for Buffy was far greater than his pride, Cordelia privately believed that he, too, saw her only as often as he could bear to look at her.

Cordelia hadn’t joined the rotation. Though nobody had said anything, she knew both that they felt she wasn’t entitled to any such privilege, and that they counted it to her discredit that she didn’t make herself part of it. (Well, except for Owen, but even Owen was a little withdrawn from her these days. Not distant, just … cautious, where he hadn’t been before.)

It didn’t matter. What other people thought of her, whether or not she was included, she was long past caring about such things. She hadn’t taken part in their visiting chain because it just wasn’t convenient to try and work around their schedules.

When Cordelia came to see Buffy, she did it at night. Well after Joyce’s bedtime.

Tree to gable was so easy that Cordelia didn’t even have to look for handholds anymore. Moving from there to Buffy’s window was merely a matter of being sure she didn’t make any scratching sounds on the roofing shingles. Buffy had waxed the tracks of the window, back when it had been her needing to get in and out quietly, so it made no sound when it was raised, and there was sufficient play in the turn-latch that Cordelia had no trouble pulling the lower frame out just far enough to slide it past the lock. To someone with Slayer agility, it might as well have not been closed at all.

In the room itself, as always, the hardest part to deal with was the normalcy of it.

Everything was carefully clean, Buffy’s hair regularly brushed and braided, even her nails kept trimmed neat. (Cordelia suspected that was Willow’s doing; she herself contributed the occasional touch-up, but on the whole the job was adequate.) Feeding was done through an NG tube — naso-gastric cannula, through the nose and over the soft palate and down the throat into the stomach, Cordelia had learned the lingo — but that had become so familiar as to not seem at all out of place. The room had been left unchanged, as much as was possible, and Buffy’s body remained stubbornly healthy. She really did look like she was asleep.

Cordelia sat in her accustomed spot on the edge of the bed, and in a voice pitched to carry no farther than the door, began speaking to her predecessor.

“You know, I really want to blame you for this. That would make it a lot easier. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to make that work. We came up with the plan together, we agreed on it, we worked out all the details … I made sure I got my way on everything that mattered, it was Plan Cordy clear down the line, so I can’t put any of that on you.

“And the factory, it sure doesn’t look like you did anything wrong there. I went back later, and counted six separate dust-piles leading to the room where I found you. I figure most of that was you — I don’t know if anybody has more all-out guts than Xander, but he’s not so much with the skill — which is a heckuva tally for someone non-powered in a running fight. You and Willow probably could have done even better, but Angel hosed us both when he switched her out with Xander.

“No, you did your part. You got hit with more than either of us expected — I still get the shakes, remembering how close Drusilla came to taking out all of us — but you dealt, kept going, almost made it.

“Everybody misses you. Everybody cares about you.”

She stopped. There was more, so much more, but she had no idea how to say it.

So she switched to more commonplace subjects. School gossip, celebrity gossip, some world events. She covered all the recent news about the Slay Friends (might as well find another name, none of them could really be called her friends anymore, though they continued to work with her pending some response from Giles’ report to the Council of Watchers), and concluded by noting that she’d seen Buffy’s dad when he came by and he was kind of a hunk, and how old was he exactly?

Buffy did not lurch upright in the bed, spluttering outrage. Ah, well. Worth a try.

She put earphones on Buffy, and turned on the minicassette player she’d brought for the purpose. At least once a week Cordelia brought a mix tape: anything new, anything kicky, anything with life and rhythm and a surging beat, anything that might trigger a glimmer of awareness. It never did. She kept it up anyway. While it played, she watched the girl in front of her, not moving or speaking till the player clicked off.

Cordelia removed the earphones and sat silent for several more minutes before continuing again. “The dreams … they’re not getting worse, but they never stop. I don’t know what it means, but I remember that every time you had one, it was connected to something important. Which makes sense — if you get a warning, it should be a warning about something, right? — but the overload I’m getting makes me wonder if there’s something mondo tremendous about to fall on us. Or maybe Giles is right, I’m not really the Slayer even though I got all your mystical juice, and the dreams are sparking off wrong in my head ’cause I don’t have the proper wiring.

“I’ve been back from my little time-travel trip for ten days. I’ve had one of those freaky dreams for ten nights running. And now it’s not just nights anymore.”

She could hear Buffy’s breathing: even, steady, never varying. There was no other response.

“I never liked you, you know. You and me, oil and water. Or more like, Nehi Grape and Perrier. The cosmic order made us natural competitors, and you just know I was always gonna come out ahead, right? You get snuffed by the Master, I take him out that same night. You get the Inca mummy girl, I get the Viking … total waste of Nordic brawniness, but it counts as a win anyhow. Even with Marcie running all her sabotage plans in the background, I still beat you out for May Queen, and that was before I got the Slayer power-boost. And if it was me in that bed instead of you, I’d look miles better than you do, count on it.

“I … I just …

“I wish it was me instead of you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I miss you. I want you back. I’d give anything, anything at all, to bring you back.”

Nothing. Again, always, never-ending. Nothing.

It had to change. She had to change it. This was unbearable.

Cordelia left as undetectably as she had entered. Buffy’s house hadn’t been her first stop of the night. It wouldn’t be her last. She had things to do.

*                *               *

As before, she waited in the dark outside her intended target, watching and assessing. Learned caution was supplemented by a reluctance that was purely personal. This was not a place she had wanted to come, nor had she ever expected that she would need to do so. Though brief, the information from the other-universe witch Tara had been specific: the Kalderash re-ensoulment spell, finally translated by Jenny Calendar and backed up on a floppy disk in the computer lab, undiscovered there until months after Jenny’s death. It had been the work of a moment to ‘suggest’ to Willow that she look carefully through all the stuff Jenny had kept in the lab, in case any of it might be useful, and equally simple for Willow — now teaching the class — to make such an inventory.

Easy, but not fruitful. Willow had found nothing that sounded like Tara’s description, and Cordelia hadn’t been able to press the matter, because she hadn’t told anyone of her involuntary offworld jaunt. (Nor did she intend to; it had been hard enough to believe while she was going through it, she knew how crack-brained it would sound second-hand. Better to offer explanations after she had something to show them.)

Balked in that first attempt, Cordelia had returned to the school very late the following night, and spent four hours going over every inch of the computer lab, removing the drawers from Miss Calendar’s (now Willow’s) desk to look behind and under them, checking to see if there was any loose space behind the blackboard, even — remembering one of the techniques Marcie had used back in her revenge-seeking days — standing on the desk and pushing up one of the insulating tiles in the ceiling so she could peer into the crawl-space above it. There had been absolutely nothing to be found, and Cordelia had reluctantly concluded that, among the many differences between the two realities, in this one Jenny had never made any such disk, perhaps never even discovered the necessary translation.

Now she knew otherwise. Ten nights of sleep that brought no rest, but finally the damn dreams had given her something useful.

When she moved in with Giles, Jenny Calendar had brought some basic comfort items, a few pieces of favorite furniture, clothes and books and whatnot. Most of her possessions, though, she had placed in storage, for such time as she and Giles found more spacious quarters where they could make a common home … or perhaps, Cordelia had thought cattily at the time, keeping her stuff in reserve in case the Watcher had a long-overdue attack of conscience and tossed her out on her two-timing gypsy butt. After her death, an uncle had turned up to claim the stored items, and Giles had turned it all over without protest; none of those things held any meaning for him.

For the few possessions she’d kept in the apartment, different matter entirely. He couldn’t bear to let go of them, equally couldn’t bear to look at them: promises of a new life, devolving into tragedy. In the end, Buffy and Willow and Xander had gone in to pack it all away into a small upstairs room (previously Giles’ study) that now remained unused.

It wouldn’t seem possible that the police could have gone over a murder scene without discovering the floppy disk in the pocket of the dead woman’s sweater. If they had missed it, though — and Cordelia had found that you could do a lot worse than bet on the incompetence of the Sunnydale PD — then it had to be with the rest of Jenny’s things in that closed room.

The best time to look for it would have been during the day, while Giles was at the school. Cordelia’s waking dream had come on Friday afternoon, however, and on Fridays Giles only put in a half-day, going home right after lunch. (One of the few benefits, along with getting to use handicapped parking, of being stuck in a wheelchair.) More than that, Sunnydale High was scheduled for a faculty conference on Monday, classes suspended for that day: usually a good thing, this was precisely the wrong time for it, because Giles didn’t truly count as faculty, so he’d be home then, too. Now that there finally was something Cordelia could do about the massive cesspool that had overflowed into her life, it was impossible for her to wait out the remainder of a four-day weekend until the next opportunity for a daylight foray.

So. Here. Now. Dressed in dark, nondescript clothing that was fortunately as well-suited for burglary at oh-dark-thirty as for Slayer patrolling.

Let the games begin.
 

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