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

This story is a remix, done for the 2020 Circle of Friends Remix, of “After the Fall” by LindaGable.

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Now

He’s stopped screaming at them, because it accomplishes nothing. He can’t fight them, securely bound as he is … and the strength the girl already demonstrated means that any potential combat would have to follow an entirely different set of rules. (He knew that, he has hard experience with exactly that kind of thing, he just hadn’t realized quickly enough that he needed to change gears NOW, not in clear daylight, and she immobilized him before he had time to adjust.) There’s nothing he can do but wait, and so he waits, banking the fury that — paradoxically — turns him completely cold, an icy calculating machine poised to launch into total destructive violence at the first instant of opportunity.

They’ve withdrawn a distance to speak with each other in low voices: about him, he’s pretty sure, given the occasional quick glances they shoot his way. Even now, they don’t look particularly impressive, and their very ordinariness was what lulled him into underestimating them for the unforgivable half-second that cost him any chance of victory or escape. He’s still alive, so whatever they’re planning for him has to be even worse than immediate killing; a sacrifice, maybe, or delivery as tribute to some local master.

In the first moments he’d focused on the older man, vest and glasses and a kind of harried air that made him look like some kind of flustered academic; still, the man stood straight and moved smoothly, which made him appear the more formidable of the two. Which is how the blonde caught him so totally off-guard, though it actually might not have made any difference in the end. She’s shockingly strong: maybe vampire-strong, maybe more, even though she’s definitely not a vamp. (She breathes differently, for one thing, even the ones that try to imitate human respiration never really get it right. For another, the blood in the small cut he opened on her cheek — the only damage he managed to inflict — had trickled out in the rhythm of a pulse.) Whatever she is, she’s maybe fifty times as dangerous as she looks.

So yes, she’s definitely the one he’ll have to kill first.

Earlier.

They studied the town ahead through the fringe of trees that (hopefully) kept them from view of any lookout there. The air was still and heavy inside the van — A/C conked out long ago — but they barely noticed such things now. Beside him, Callie was even more intent than he was, weighing what she could see against magical senses that, while vague, went well beyond the total nothing he could bring to bear. She wore the repurposed photographer’s vest she’d rigged to carry various ingredients she could combine for useful minor spells, which vest only partially concealed the enormous Bowie knife belted at her waist. Just a few days ago she’d hacked her hair short again, utility mattering more to her than appearance, and his eyes kept being drawn back to the missing earlobe (his fault) that he always forgot when it was covered.

Her jeans were fraying badly, they’d have to be replaced soon. It had been ages since either of them had a semblance of a bath. She was grim, focused, pared down to ruthless practicality. All of that, everything about her, went to make her all the more striking, unforgettable. Beautiful.

He turned his gaze back to the town ahead. “Trap?” he wondered.

She sighed. “I can’t tell. So we’ll have to assume it is.”

There were a lot of things that didn’t need to be said. They were low on gas again, and they had enough food only for the next few days (or a week on emergency rations). However risky, the place ahead of them might be the last good chance they’d get for longer than they could guess. Unless she came up with something she hadn’t said yet, they’d have to go on in, there were just too few choices still open to them.

“If the place has a local master,” he ventured, “even one just a few months old —”

“Right,” she agreed. “Better to do it now, more time for us to finish and leave before sunset.”

(Good. Going in and getting out in daylight meant the … other thing … was that much less likely to be part of the proceedings ahead.)

Daylight or not, a local master might have thralls or quislings watching out on his behalf, plus even ‘normal’ people were getting desperate enough to be dangerous lately. He still hated to do anything that put her in danger, even though he should have been long used to it by now, but then he wasn’t the one in charge here. Never had been, never gonna be.

“All right, then,” he said.

They opened the van, stepped out the doors, and walked around to change places. She took the driver’s seat; he reached into the back and started strapping on weapons.

He’d take the 9-mil, just in case, but he expected to get more use out of the khukri. That was usually the way things worked out these days.

Preparations complete, another moment for centering, and then they started up the van and eased down the road toward the town ahead.

Now.

Though unable to hear them — they’ve kept their voices low — he’s managed to get a sense of the tenor of things just from body language. It started out confusion and adjustment, as if the brief, violent encounter had been as big a surprise to them as to him; then, once they got him, bound and semiconscious, to whosever place this is, it settled into So what are we gonna do now? In the last few minutes, that’s transitioned into what really seems to be argument. Now the blonde turns away in apparent decision, and the two of them approach him, the man hanging back a step and coming in from an angle that puts him into a flanking position. She stops in front of him (God, there’s no way she could fight effectively in those shoes!, but somehow she did), and fixes him with a glare. “You don’t have any idea who we are, do you?”

Even knowing nothing about the situation, he knows not to give away anything without some equivalent gain. Keeping his voice and eyes level, he answers, “Am I supposed to?”

She holds his gaze, searching, then looks back to the man. “He’s not pretending. He doesn’t know us.”

The man gives a hmph! of reply, and says, “As I’ve been pointing out. Appearance notwithstanding, this … individual … is a stranger to us. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

She brushes it away. “I know, I know. But he’s not a vamp, and I get no demon-y vibes from him —”

“I would remind you,” the man goes on, “of your friend Ford. Or of my own, er, recurring annoyance, Ethan. As we’ve seen, one needn’t be intrinsically supernatural to be dangerous.” The man looks him over with a steady, determined detachment. “And, though you might have allowed yourself momentarily to forget it, he launched an unprovoked attack against us before we had any inkling of what we were facing. It would, would be deeply unwise to let down your guard.”

“Yeah, got it,” she returns absently. She’s still watching him, giving the older man only a fraction of her concentration. “All right, you: if you really don’t know who we are, I’ll make with the introduce-y. I’m Buffy. Him, he’s Giles. Not ringing any bells, I take it?”

Both names are improbable enough to be aliases, but why would they bother? For the moment he’s helpless. “Sorry, no clue. Were you in Teen Vogue or something?”

For some reason that brings a smile. “And there he is,” she murmurs. “So, okay, clearly you’re … not from around here. How’d you wind up in Sunnydale?”

The single word is like being stabbed with an icicle. Sunnydale? God, the last place on earth he wants to be! (Except, maybe …) He hides that, likewise brutally clamping down on that last memory: Callie, frantic to save him, calling down the thunder while he screamed his desperate protest … “No idea,” he answers. “Sunnyvale, you say?”

Her smile widens into a grin. “Whoa, cool,” she observes. “That was totally convincing, you’d have me if I didn’t already know better. So, okay, you’re this total major bad-ass now. We’re not big on the whole torture deal —” She breaks off suddenly, mutters, “I mean, it’s not like dropping a cross in your mouth would actually mean anything.” Then she shakes her head, and goes on, “So you’re not gonna tell us diddly unless we give you good reason to. I guess that means it’s time to make with the reason.”

The older man — Giles — sighs disapproval. “This is highly unlikely to produce a useful result.”

She shrugs. “C’mon, look at him: he hasn’t shaved in a while, he almost has the goatee and everything already.” She grins again. “So brace yourself, mirror-Spock, ’cause this is gonna be classic.”

She crosses to the nearest door, while Giles shakes his head resignedly, and opens it, calling, “C’mon in, Mary Kate, say hello to Ashley.” She steps back, someone else comes through the door, and —

— and the world suddenly becomes

very

much

stranger.

Earlier yet.

They didn’t travel at night, but they didn’t sleep then, either; they stood guard, then took turns sleeping during the first part of the day before embarking on other activities. Today they were in an empty house: no bodies, no damage, so probably voluntarily deserted rather than the occupants having been wiped out. Probably. The cupboards were empty and the utilities disconnected, but the toilet tank still held some water, which Callie used to sponge herself off. She didn’t seek out any privacy for that — they were always together, so that each always had someone to keep watch — and now she stretched luxuriously, naked and refreshed and relaxed, and said, “I left some for you.”

“Right,” he said. “Thanks.” He checked the exterior view again through the windows, then turned back to her. “Is … is all this actually getting us anywhere?” She shot him a quick look, eyebrow lifted, and he went on. “We just keep circling the outer perimeter, scouting, taking on minions now and then … Are we accomplishing anything, or do we need to spend some time in clear territory, see if we can find something there that can help us?”

They’d been doing this together for long enough that she didn’t take his inquiry as criticism or doubt; she frowned a bit, giving the question real consideration, then answered, “No, I don’t think so. This area has more mystical artifacts and intersections of mystical forces than any other place outside Carpathia; if there’s something we can use, we’ll more likely find it here than elsewhere. And we need to —” She flashed a smile. “— to keep our fingers on the pulse of whatever the Three Queens are doing.”

“All right,” he said, nodding. “Okay, if that’s what you think. But sooner or later …”

“Sooner or later,” she agreed, “we have to go back. Just not now. We can’t win now. We need more.”

He sighed. “Yeah. That bites. And never stops biting.”

She didn’t bother to answer that, because he was just describing reality. After a moment, though, she noted, “We have a little time before we need to be moving on.”

He looked up. There hadn’t been anything in her voice, and there wasn’t anything now in how she was standing (still hadn’t put on any clothes, but that wouldn’t carry meaning by itself). All the same, even though it had been some while since the last time, he could feel the sudden current between them. And they had already determined that the bedroom was in a secure inner section of the house, and the bed itself wonderfully soft. “A little time … yeah, that sounds okay.”

“Wash first,” she told him. “I’ll stage the weapons while you’re doing that.” And she moved to her task while he turned to his, advance preparation for an activity they would be carrying out together toward a mutual goal.

Now.

He and his surprise doppelgänger can’t stop looking at each other, and he keeps catching the other two watching them do that. (‘Buffy’ and ‘Giles’, he’ll never get used to those names, and if he’s lucky — stupendously lucky, miraculously lucky, God-please-let-it-happen! lucky — he won’t have to.) Being confronted by a not-quite-twin actually isn’t the weirdest part of all this, though.

Weirdest is that his other-universe softer double is taking his side.

The other two seem to find that just as unexpected as he has, and aren’t really dealing with it as well. “We can’t simply leap ahead on this,” Giles is insisting. “I’m not without sympathy, but —”

“I know this guy, Giles,” mirror-him interrupts. “Jeez, can’t you see it? He’s going out of his mind here, the woman he loves is in danger and he’ll do anything, anything at all, to save her. You think I wouldn’t do exactly the same?”

“Yeah,” Buffy mutters. “Kinda what’s worrying me here.” She shakes her head. “Look, I remember dealing with HyenaYou, and I’m not about to forget …” She falters, her eyes shifting almost furtively. “… uh, Miss Bustier-Wearing-Leather-Ho. So we know that ‘familiar face’ doesn’t always mean ‘on our side’. And if you’d do anything, that means he would, too … including lie to us, use us, throw us away if it means getting what he wants.”

“Buf —” mirror-him tries to break in.

“I know,” she says. “You wouldn’t do that, you’d never do that. But, bottom line, he’s not you. To you we matter, but to him we’re strangers, maybe useful but not really part of him.” She glances back toward the subject of discussion. “I mean, nothing personal, not-exactly-Xander —”

“Alex,” he interrupts.

It brings her up short. “Huh?” she says. “That’s, I mean, huh?”

“I’m Alex,” he insists. He left ‘Xander’ behind long ago, and it makes sense that the wuss in the clown shirt is still using that name, but he isn’t about to answer to it himself even if it means giving away a possible advantage. “Alex.”

The other three trade glances, and ‘Xander’ shrugs. “Saves some confusion,” he says. “Convenient, if you come right down to it.”

“Alex,” Buffy says, trying it on. “Okay, sure, why not?”

“Very well,” Giles says. “At any rate, I’ve had …” He breaks off, starts up again. “… um, had a colleague testing the sub-aethera in this area.” (He’s hiding something, just as Buffy did a minute ago, and Alex can tell the other two know what it is. Important? watch and decide later.) “The rift that must have brought him here has mostly closed, for the present, but is still accessible for the next several days.” He looks to Alex. “We can get you back to your own reality. We can provide you with supplies, with weapons, with … whatever we can provide. As for accompanying you, however —”

“I’m going,” Xander announces flatly.

Which, Alex sees in the next few seconds — though neither of them actually says so — means the other two will be coming as well.

Yes.

*               *               *

They’re driving him crazy.

Much as he hates to admit it, they’re actually good at this, launching into plans and preparations the moment a decision is made (or, in this case, forced on them). The problem with that is, plans take time that he (that Callie) can’t spare.

Alex is a fan of planning; when the odds are always against you, you learn to do everything you can to tilt them more in your direction. Sometimes, though, you don’t get the luxury of planning, you just have to dive in with whatever you have. This is one of those times, for him … but not for them, and they’re united in how they intend to go about this, and he needs them. It’s agony to wait even another minute, and he fights it every way he can, but ultimately he doesn’t have any choice.

“I don’t know,” he tells them yet again. “Nobody we’ve found, nobody alive anyway, has ever seen the Three Queens. And the vamps we’ve managed to catch —” (and that was always the worst kind of no-fun-at-all, and wouldn’t have even been possible without the ‘little extra’ Callie had incorporated into herself) “— have been so low-level that they couldn’t tell us anything.” (Despite every form of persuasion that Callie’s terrifying imagination and Alex’s own pitiless hatred could bring to bear.) He clenches his hands so hard the nails pierce his palms, the pain a welcome distraction from the desperate helplessness that grips him. “What we know is, they’re smart, and they’re vicious, and they’re ruthless, and when the minions aren’t laughing about the things the Queens do to whoever they catch, they’re scared shitless that their leaders will decide to start playing with them.”

Giles purses his lips. “And they’ve made their home, their headquarters, in your reality’s Sunnydale.”

Alex’s lips twist in a snarl. “Yeah. If the world ever needs an enema, that’s where you’ll stick the nozzle. Now more than ever.”

Buffy looks blank for a moment, then says, “Eww. Thank you so much for that imagery.”

“But you’re still not getting it,” Alex breaks in, again trying to move them by sheer determination. “The vamps that caught us, that took Callie, they didn’t just take her; they took her for the Queens. For … for the kind of torture that other vamps will dust themselves to get away from.” (Not Callie, though, she’d used her last energies to send him to safety.) He’s an inch from beating on the table with both fists, just to keep from losing control and attacking the only people who can help him now. “We can’t keep putting this off, we have to get there, save her NOW!”

Buffy looks to the older man. “Giles?”

For some reason he glances down at his fingers, moves them in a manner that seems oddly meaningful. “The type of programme that a self-styled artist will bring to bear,” he says, thinking out each word as he speaks it, “will, will build and escalate. It will begin with an almost playful foundation, and then grow and grow, adding layers and excrescences of sadism and torment …” He stops, shakes his head slightly. “There will be time,” he says. “Something such as this will go on and on, stretching out beyond any possible horizon of endurance. Horrible, for the person being subjected to it … but still, it allows us to make such preparations as will give us the best possible chance of rescuing her.”

Alex fights down the wild impulse to scream at them. Will there be anything left to save, by the time they finally get there?

Xander pushes through the doors of the cluttered apartment that this world’s vamp-fighting crew seems to use as their own headquarters. “Got the talismans,” he says, passing them out. “According to …” He shoots Alex a look, goes on, “… to our two Witch Fridays, these will key us to pass through the breach. Oh, and they’re also supposed to mix his phase signature with ours to keep him and us just a little out of sync back in his world. Not exactly an invisibility cloak, but, W–… uh, our spell-gals say it should take longer for the tanless crowd over in Spookydale to pay us any attention till we do something to make them notice.”

“Excellent,” Giles says. “And the breaching spell itself?”

“All set,” Xander answers. “They’ll take turns keeping up the chant, we trigger it to go in and then to come back once we’re done.”

Finally, Alex thinks. As if to echo that, Giles says, “Very well. Secure the weapons and supplies we’ve chosen; once we’re all set, we go.”

Alex is already at the table, snatching up the backpack set aside for him, along with his till-now-confiscated khukri and the standard complement of stakes. For all his hurry, his hands go through the familiar routine with characteristic deliberation; he’s geared up so many times by now, this is muscle memory. Beside him, Xander is doing the same, less methodically but somehow getting there at the same rate. “What Buf said before,” Xander murmurs without looking at Alex. “About you throwing them away if that’s what it takes? You don’t get to do that.”

Alex cinches the backpack, checks that the khukri is secure, all the while studying his duplicate with lip-curled disbelief. Does this goofball think he can threaten him? “They’re putting it on the line for you,” Xander continues evenly. “Risking their lives, to help you in a world that isn’t even theirs and to save someone they don’t even know. And I’m with them on that.” He raises his eyes at last to meet Alex’s, and his expression is as amiable as ever. “You need to respect what they’re giving you here. Anything else … non-negotiable.”

A staring contest should be no contest at all, Alex has spent years facing down death every other week. Somehow, though, Xander isn’t backing down, and at last Alex acknowledges that with a little nod. “Okay,” he says. “As long as we get it done.”

Xander returns the nod. “All right, guys,” he calls to the others. “Let’s do this.”

Clear back at the beginning.

The still nameless woman almost hit the road sign that proclaimed NOW LEAVING SUNNYDALE. With the damage her coupe had already taken, even that negligible impact might have been enough to knock the vehicle out entirely. She jerked the wheel, though, fighting the wallowing suspension, and skimmed by the sign without quite touching it. Xander noted the near-miss but was too numb to react; tears still ran down his face, even though he was no longer actively crying.

“It doesn’t look like anybody is following us,” she told him, eyeing both the rearview mirror and the road ahead. “But what we saw, back at the Bronze, and what started after … it’s probably going to spread. We need to get some distance between us and that.” She gave him a quick look. “If that’s what you want, I mean. I’m leaving, but I won’t force you to come along. If there are people back there that you still care about … I’d advise against it, but it’s your decision.”

People he cared about? He supposed that should mean his parents; but he’d watched Willow die, and Jesse — and pretty sure Cordelia hadn’t survived, either, for however much that counted — and somehow what passed for his family just didn’t rate against that. “No, nobody,” he said to her, through a throat that rasped from the screaming that had accomplished exactly nothing.

Back at the growing massacre, the woman had been quick, decisive, seizing the only narrow opportunity of escape and dragging him through it. Whatever the world had just turned into, she seemed to understand it, or at least had adjusted quicker than anyone should have been able to do.

Maybe he could learn from her.

“Running away is okay for now,” he told her with sudden decision, as he felt a slow, molten hate begin to well up underneath the crushing pain. “But only for now. We can’t let those, those things get away with this. They have to pay.”

The glance she gave him now held something that hadn’t been there before. Maybe approval, or maybe something more like recognition. “We won’t,” she said. “And they will.”

After another mile, she asked, “What should I call you?”

He closed his eyes, letting go of the last of his old life, and said, “Alex.”

Now.

It’s going too well, Alex keeps watching for the whole thing to fall apart into disaster, but the truth is that his new companions are really good at this. Better than he and Callie were, better than it should be possible for humans to be. Of course, it’s obvious that Buffy is more than human, and she’s the spearhead, but Xander and Giles backstop her the same way he did with Callie — plus the two men are clearly accustomed to working with each other — and even Alex himself seems to slot in with this crew better than he would have believed he could. Giles wields a sword, which Alex long ago learned is next to useless against vampire speed, but the man seems to have perfected some kind of disjointed broken-rhythm style that throws off the vamps’ timing so that he keeps striking true (and Buffy promptly kills any that he misses or fails to finish off), and Xander stumbles and jokes and fumbles in a way that should have got him killed a dozen times over but somehow not only leaves him alive but renders him sorta-semi-quasi-(how? how? how?) effective.

Alex just covers his lane, kills what he can reach, moves in to fill any gap that opens, and advances with them through the multi-floor condo complex that the Three Queens have chosen as their main lair.

Their first approach was in daylight, which kept them from being spotted right away. The vamps they’ve been running into are sloppy, undisciplined, unused to competent opposition, and almost universally fall prey to their instinct to attack rather than sound the alarm. (Four humans? why should they be afraid of four humans?) So far everything has been working in favor of the ‘Scoobies’ — Alex gets the reference but can’t begin to fathom what it’s supposed to mean — but that’s sure to change once they run into the leadership. No avoiding that, because it’s also where they’re surest to find Callie, and Alex can only hope they’ve thinned out the minions enough by then to make the difference they’ll need.

The latest wave of attackers (and they’d do better to focus on defense, but just can’t seem to make their minds work that way) showers into dust around Buffy, and she looks back at Xander for a moment. “Hey, Xan, that vamp you just chased off with holy water burns? You think that maybe was Percy? I mean, this world’s Percy?”

Xander readjusts his backpack and his grip on the stake he holds. “Could be, I guess, it looked like he was wearing a letter jacket. Hard to tell faces with the bumpy foreheads, though.”

“Sure made me think of Percy,” she mutters as they continue ahead.

They break into the central area that, going by the lobby floor plans, they figured to be the most likely gathering place, and so it proves to be: a large enclosed courtyard, skylights blacked out, sparkly lights entwined through artificial trees (how could real ones survive without any sun?), and two raised stages, one to either side of a frothing fountain. On one are a trio of ornate chairs, three women lounging in them with at least two dozen minions spread out behind them, and Alex notes them without sparing a moment to actually look because Callie is on the other stage: suspended from some kind of tripod framework, naked, striped with blood, bite-marks splotching her arms and thighs, and for some reason Alex’s shriek is echoed by a matching bellow of fury from Giles, and both men are dashing for her as a hysterical voice cries out in the background, “No, you can’t be here, you don’t belong, you can’t be here!”

If Buffy was a terror before, she’s a whirlwind now, tearing through the charging minions with parahuman speed and lethality, vamps are coming at them from all directions and a part of Alex that doesn’t require thought tells him that this has to be met before any rescue is possible. He turns to face them, there’s a gap and he can see the vampire women who must be the Three Queens: one is dark-haired, pale and pale-eyed, pulling at her hair while she wails, “Why are they here, they don’t belong, why are they here?”, one stands suddenly with a movement and stance that strikes instant recognition and Cordelia Chase’s voice cuts through the battle-sounds like chalk on a board, “You’ve got to be kidding, is that Dork-Boy there? SERIOUSLY?”, and someone else steps up next to her and

Oh God.

Oh God.

Oh God.

The Third Queen is Willow.

*               *               *

He has to kill Xander. He doesn’t know why, he doesn’t have time to think, but there’s no need to think, there is only OBEY. She cradled his face in her hands, the nameless Queen, her eyes piercing through to his soul, and spoke the words he can’t remember but which rule him now. She wills it. He carries it out. Everything else is else.

Xander can’t hope to meet his driving assault, Xander’s face is stunned and slack-jawed, but Xander is still alive, Alex is going at him with everything he has and Xander leaps and rolls and trips over himself and keeps on not-being-dead. Alex, snarling, cuts down a minion that gets between him and his commanded prey as Xander darts between a pair of ornamental pillars, and he dives to follow. Their next movements bring them into unsought collision, too close for Alex to use the khukri, and their foreheads smash together — accident, has to be, it sends them both reeling — and the elbow that catches him in the face also seems to be unintended and incidental, and their legs tangle together and they go sprawling. The impact drives air from Alex’s lungs but the compulsion forces him up again, only somehow Xander is above him in some crazy position of leverage and “Sorry, pal,” Xander says and seems to mean it, and the fist that catches Alex isn’t remotely the hardest punch Alex has ever taken but it lands just right, and if it isn’t exactly lights-out, he still falls back like he just had his brain unplugged from his muscles.

He still has to obey, he has to, but no amount of determination will translate into motion, so he lies as he fell, and sees all that comes after.

He sees Cordelia the Vampire Queen easily sliding out of the way of a wild sword-swing from Giles, and the miss pulling the man off-balance into a tumble … except the fall somehow segues into an unimaginable full-body prone swivel with the continuation of the swing taking off Cordelia’s foot at the ankle. She goes down, swearing, and Giles manages to force himself up onto one knee, with his follow-up stroke — slower, less power behind it, but still superbly timed — going straight through her neck. Her head, toppling free, is ash before it strikes the ground

He sees She Who Commands being set on by Buffy, striking out haphazardly in her distress as she cries, “You don’t belong, I can’t see you, why are you here?” And Buffy, unlike the instant devastating slaughter she’s dispensed till now, is methodically beating the holy hell out of the pale-eyed Queen. “Why am I here?” Buffy repeats, savage-voiced, as a forward kick audibly snaps ribs. “Payback, bitch. You remember Kendra?” A brutal hooking punch breaks the vampire woman’s jaw. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Well, this is for her anyway.” Even taking her time, it’s over in seconds, and Alex feels something like a bubble break and disperse inside his mind as a final stake-thrust turns his mistress (but no longer) into shivering dust.

And — NO! — he sees the Red Queen Willow dart through the fleeing minions to stand by Callie where she hangs over the second stage. She grabs Callie by the throat, pulling her around as she herself turns toward the invaders, triumph twisting already twisted features into something even more grotesque. Planning to use the captive as a hostage? determined to kill her to thwart the rescue, even if it means her own death? No telling, and the other three are all going at her, Buffy the fastest but Giles and Xander ahead of her all the same —

— and Callie wrenches around, fighting the Queen’s grip, and drives her head forward to sink her teeth into the vampire woman’s wrist. Willow tries to jerk away with a yelp of surprise, then curses, then begins to scream. Callie’s mouth distorts in the way Alex has seen too many times, Willow is crumpling in on herself like a bag having air sucked out of it by a vacuum pump, she screams and dwindles and collapses as Callie seems to swell, and then the Red Queen is nothing except settling remnants of viscous slime.

The other-world trio have stopped, momentarily frozen with astonishment. Saturated with stolen energy, Callie wrenches at the bonds that hold her; the metal of the tripod groans, warping and giving way, and then the ropes themselves snap and she pulls them from her scored wrists as if they were paper braids. She looks around for any other threat, sees none (any minions that aren’t dead have decided that anywhere else is a better place to be), then spots Alex and starts toward him.

His body begins to respond just as hers is suddenly shaken by a series of jerks. The other three have moved out of her way — no surprise, she’s a little scary when this thing happens — and as he reaches her she drops to her knees, and he holds and braces her while she vomits violently, on and on, awful black ooze spattering the tiled floors. “Whoa,” he observes, cradling her in his arms. “That was … quick.”

“I was already weak,” she wheezes, holding him to pull herself upright. “I kept waiting, I never let them know I could do that, I didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance but I wanted to make it count if I did …” She stops, and another surge of nausea hits her but it passes without result. “And that one was much, much worse than the usual.”

“I can believe it,” Alex says. He looks to his new companions; all three are gawking at Callie, but Xander looks away quickly — right, the nudity thing — and Buffy quickly recovers and schools her expression to something neutral. Only Giles continues to stare.

Callie feels it, or through Alex’s embrace she feels him seeing it, and looks about for the source. Finding Giles, she gazes back levelly at him. “Have we met?” she asks, not quite a challenge but ready to be.

Giles shakes himself, and gives a little embarrassed smile. “No,” he says, falling back into his usual reserve. “No, I’d have to admit we haven’t. But you … remind me a great deal of someone I used to know.”

And now Callie turns back to Alex, something else, almost thunderous, coming into her expression. “You came here,” she says to him, and there’s no question that it’s an accusation. “You came here. You dumb bastard!”

All of a sudden he’s laughing. How long has it been since the last time he really laughed? “Well, yeah,” he tells her, grinning and giddy and maybe something like the kid who existed the day before he had to flee Sunnydale … but a lot more than that, because he has so much more now. “But then we already knew that, didn’t we?”

After.

Giles exhibits a degree of academic curiosity as to just how (and how much, and why) this world differs from his own. Xander and Buffy, though, just want to get back home as quickly as they can, and Giles doesn’t really resist them on that. As they arrange themselves into the grouping from which they’ll make the jump back to other-here, Alex calls to them, “Willow is still alive, isn’t she? back in that Sunnydale?”

He can see confirmation in the faces of the other two, but Xander is the one who answers. “Yeah, she is. Sorry we kept her clear of you, but … well, the VampWillow we just saw wasn’t the first one we’ve ever run across, and we didn’t want to take any chances on how you might react.”

“Good call,” Alex says. Callie has found something to wear, various pieces from the Queens’ leftover wardrobes, and she stands next to him, letting him make his goodbyes but saying nothing. “Tell her … tell her she’s the only good memory I have from before all this.”

“We’ll do that,” Buffy promises. She looks from him to Xander, sighs a little. “Good luck. I’d say you’ve earned it.”

Maybe he would have made an answer, but Giles must have triggered the return, because they’re gone, just like that. He and Callie stand alone, in the abandoned dust-strewn inner courtyard, and after a moment he looks to her and says, “Well … now what?”

Her expression is startled, taken aback, completely caught at a loss. “I don’t know,” she tells him at last. “I never thought any farther than this.”

“Yeah,” he says. He knows exactly what she means. “Yeah.” He never really believed they’d make it to this point, so why speculate on what might come after? Now …

Now, they can do anything.

Somewhere between now and way-before.

Callie had found a patch of agrimony — not as potent as the European species, she claimed, but still useful in some protection spells — and was grinding it to preserve for future use. Right now, they were in one of the periodic lulls between planned activity and whatever they chose to plan next. Alex was fine with that, fine with anything she decided, actually, since all her decisions were for pushing forward in the fight. Mirroring her, he had found a stone flat and gritty enough (but also fine enough grit) to sharpen the knife Callie had scavenged for him, an elongated not-quite-machete with a curved blade: looked weird, but felt really good in his hand.

They were in a clearing in a patch of woods: secluded, bright sun, about as safe as it was possible to be right now, but they still automatically kept lookout. So he saw when the motion of her shoulders stopped, looked around for anything that might have alerted her, then back to her.

She sat where she was for another few seconds, still not moving. Without looking back at him, she said, “You probably already know this. If you don’t, though, I need to say it.” She paused, then continued. “If we keep on the way we are, we’re going to die. There’s not much chance of anything else.”

He nodded, even though she wasn’t looking his way. “Yeah, that one was pretty hard to miss. But thanks anyway.”

The silence went on. Neither of them moved. At last he said, “I don’t know if you already know this, and I probably shouldn’t be saying it either way, but … I love you.”

She still had her back to him, but he saw something go through her. A sigh, maybe. Finally, without looking around, she said, “I’m glad.”

She returned to grinding. He returned to sharpening. In that moment — if in no other anywhere — the world was good.

– end –

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Special acknowledgment: This story, even as a remix, was done as a conscious, loving tribute to the classic “Alternative Lifestyle”, by A.C. Chapin. Any effectiveness I may have achieved in theme, pacing, scene structure, or overall narrative owes an enormous debt to the source material, and any deficits would be my falling short of that which inspired me. If you haven’t read the story already, do so, and you’ll see why it remains one of my favorites.

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Questions? Comments? Any feedback is welcome!
 

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