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Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

This idea came to me a while ago, and I really wanted to work with it-- but I'm hating how it's going so far. This is all I have written and if you guys have any critiques, please share-- I won't get hurt feelings. I hope you enjoy and take the time to give this fic a chance, and any feedback is loved!
Elysium.





It must have been forever that passed in that single second before I fell into the light. I could hardly recall those last words I spoke to my broken sister as the air rushed around my body, my mind was so full of everything. Literally, everything. I felt so in touch with everyone, not only those who were there, who I had been close to before—but those I’d never even tried to understand.

One in particular, really—a dead body crushed beneath the personified weight of failure as he took the same dive I did, only to a more pointless end.

I never would have believed that my mind would take the path that it’s so calmly walking upon right now—in life, that is. But death gives one perspective, to the degree where one no longer feels the need to care for trivial matters such as one’s unwarranted prejudices and fears. So now I stand at the gates of heaven, for the second time—and yet, I know, in some part of myself, that this will not be the last.

~*~

“Buffy! Buffy! Please wake up! It’s rude to remain asleep when your company is conscious!” I open my eyes slowly and let out a breath I felt that I was holding for the entire time I was alive.

“Finally!” the voice exclaims again, and it’s familiar—and suddenly I realize just who is here in this warm, soft sanctuary with me.

“Anya?” The voice I speak with seems much too weak to be mine, but I really can’t hold myself accountable. Really, I can’t believe I’m actually able to talk at all, considering the major ass-kicking the ground was about to deliver me in my last memory. “Where are we?”

“Buffy,” the currently-blonde begins carefully, as I sit up and look around. We’re sitting together on a sort of divan with fluffy pallid cushions, in a room painted an unnaturally pristine shade of white. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Anya’s looking at me intently, but I’m scanning the room. It’s at first devoid of any characterizing objects, but as I begin to look more closely, I start to notice things I didn’t see before—ice skates lying in a corner, a bright white refrigerator against the wall, and, oddly enough, a stack of board games on a low coffee table. “What?” Anya’s question had fallen on deaf ears, but when she repeats it I begin to develop a vague memory. “The tower,” I murmur, looking down at my hands before meeting Anya’s measured gaze. “I jumped, to save Dawn.”

Suddenly, the cautious look on the blonde becomes stricken and she lets out a sob of anguish. “Oh, no,” she moans, visibly crumbling before my eyes as tears cascade down the planes of her face. “Oh, Xander, why now?”

“What?” I ask dumbly, too shocked by her reaction to really think of anything right to say at that moment. “What is it, Anya?” I ask again, with more desperation. I’ve never seen her fall apart like this—not during the Mayor’s Ascension, not during our hurried escape from Sunnydale—never has the ex-demon shown anything except cheerful resolution and determined pessimism. “Anya, what is going on?”

“Buffy,” she gasps, clutching my arms as if she’ll fall through the gaudy sofa otherwise. “We’re… We’re dead!”

Suddenly, everything that had happened comes flying back together. “Oh,” I say, looking around the room again at the increasing number of personal objects scattered about. “That makes sense.”

~*~

It was a while before I was able to get Anya calmed down. I never would have considered that she would have been the one to fall apart in a situation like this, but when she managed to tell me that she and Xander had gotten engaged right before the final battle—and were to be married “if they made it”—I couldn’t find anything in me to protest her devastation.

After she’s hiccupping instead of wailing, she manages to tell me what had happened to her. The portal opened, and the building started falling down—and a huge pile of bricks happened to aim at Xander. “I couldn’t let him die,” Anya sobs, holding her face in her hands. “I couldn’t—and all I thought about was him being smooshed, and I pushed him out of the way, and then…”

“And then you were here.”

“Right.” She lets out a sort of sob-laugh and looks at the board games sitting on the table near our shins. “They have ‘The Game of Life’ in here. That’s distasteful and ironic.”

“It is,” I agree softly, reaching out without thinking to take Anya’s hand. “It’ll be okay,” I absently say, my heart hurting deeply for the destruction of this woman’s new dreams.

Anya shakes her head sadly, leaning against the back of the sofa wearily and closing her eyes. “I can’t believe I might never see Xander again.” Her tone is more frank than usual, and I can hear the true fear in her voice.

“No,” I protest, softly yet vehemently. “You will see him again, Anya—there’s no way the Powers will keep you two apart.”

“And,” a curt, female voice breaks in from behind us, “there are other ways to manage that before another’s ascension to this plane of existence.” Anya and I both stand quickly to face this new individual, who’s striding down a staircase I never noticed before and wearing a light gray pinstriped pantsuit. Her honey-colored hair is pulled back into a severe bun, and her face is adorned only with a pair of wire-framed glasses. “Now, let’s get down to business, shall we?” She’s the stereotypic image of a Council member, right down to the British accent, and I’m suspicious.

“Who are you?” I blurt out, with a bit less finesse than I hoped for.

The woman lets out a jovial chuckle and moves towards Anya and me, sitting down in a straight-backed armchair before gesturing for us to take our seats once more. “Ever the wordsmith, Miss Summers,” the woman says as she jots something down on a tiny notebook in her hand, all the while shaking her head good-naturedly. “I am quite sorry for failing to introduce myself right away,” she begins, smiling at Anya, and then me. “I felt that you two would require some time alone to compare stories, and hopefully come to some conclusions on your own.”

“I know you,” Anya abruptly says, and when I look over at her she’s peering at the woman’s face suspiciously. “Oh my god,” she gasps, her eyes wide. “Beatrice?”

The woman’s eyes squint in disbelief for a moment, before her mouth drops open wide and she jumps out of her chair, along with the blonde beside me. “Anyanka, it’s so good to see you!” she yells, in fashion that I would deem uncharacteristic based on her stuffiness of prior meetings. “A human now, I never would have guessed.”

“Yeah, well, D’Hoffryn and I had a fight, you know how those things go sometimes,” Anya said, tossing her hair and appraising her apparent friend easily. “So how are things with you?”

“Rather good,” Beatrice answers, nonchalantly smiling. “I may be looking at a promotion in another century or two, so cross your fingers!”

“Oh, how I miss the demon world,” Anya sighed, sitting back down next to me and looking much more at ease than she had the entire weird time we’d spent here.

All of a sudden, what she said registers in my mind. “Wait, you’re a demon?” I ask Beatrice carefully, sitting up straighter and eyeing her warily.

“Oh, heavens no!” she laughs, waving a hand in the air casually. “Pun not intended, darlings, forgive me. No, I’m not a demon. I’m a guide for you, to help you adjust to existing in this new dimension.”

“And that would be?” I ask carefully. I’m really too overwhelmed by everything today, and all I want to do is collapse into a bed and sleep.

At my thoughts, I see a door appear in the wall out of the corner of my eye. Beatrice, however, is not done with me yet. “Miss Summers,” she says, a smile on her oddly beautiful face as she leans forward and surveys me with her bright green eyes. “You’re in Heaven.”

~*~

It takes a few more hours of talking before Anya and I are left alone—Beatrice assures us that if we need anything, she’s only a conjure away—and we’re able to explore the house that the Powers have given us for the time. The room we awakened in initially was very plain and lacked any sorts of decorations, but by the time Beatrice left, there were French doors and bay windows leading out to what appeared to be a private beach; the divan was no longer a single, lonely piece of furniture, but one of a lavishly comfortably set; there was a kitchen nestled into the corner, complete with foods of my liking and the weirder varieties enjoyed by Anya; and as we walked through the upstairs portion of the house, we found two bedrooms. Anya’s had a huge four-poster with canopies draping around the mattress, as well as antique furniture to match the wood in her bed. My own was decidedly more modern, the bed downplayed by the giant closet containing clothes, accessories, and more make-up than the local drug store in Sunnydale.

“Wow,” I say, impressed as I looked out the window to see the cloudless sky expanding over the deep blue ocean. The sun is quickly moving towards the horizon, and the water is turning a deep orange-white as it gets closer and closer. Beatrice had explained that our Heaven would conform to our own desires and that we would be able to have nearly anything that we wished for. But our conversation turned a bit darker when I asked something that had been pressing on my mind since we discovered where we were—why my mother wasn’t with us.

“There are different planes of reality in heavenly dimensions, just like those on Earth,” Beatrice had carefully explained, giving me a look of tactful regret. “Until your needs can no longer be fulfilled by this reality, you won’t ascend to another, and it may be… quite some time before you and your mother are at equal stages in your existence.”

I never imagined that Heaven would be like this. I mean, hello, Slayer—of course I imagined what my death would bring, where I would go, whether there was anything after life. But my expectations always included me being with my family—my grandparents that I never knew, Ms. Calendar, and of course, my mother…

Another thing I never expected was that there would be more after this. I guess I thought that all questions would be answered, and that everything would be whole, but… There are just as many questions here as I had back in Sunnydale.

Anya and I say good night and each head to our rooms; I can hear her through the wall crying, even though she held her tears in after her initial break down. It’s then that I start to think of Sunnydale—really think of it.

I know my friends are safe. I know that I did the right thing in jumping, in falling through the portal for Dawn—but I can’t imagine what they’re all feeling right now. The one thing that I truly regret about the battle isn’t my own death—it’s Anya’s. I told them that we were getting everyone out, that we would all make it, but somewhere near the end I realized that I was not going to survive.

Still, I thought my death would at least buy the lives of everyone else—so I still failed.

But now I remember my last real words to Spike, in those moments of calm before the frenzied last seconds of my life—and I remember who I expected to be here with me, in death.

“We’re not all gonna make it. You know that.”

The way he looks at me in that second resolves everything that had been wrong between the two of us the past four years, as he gives a resigned sigh. “Yeah… Hey. Always knew I’d go down fighting.”

When he smiles softly, I feel something twist in my stomach—regret that he and I have to end like this. Still… “I’m counting on you. To protect her.”

“’Til the end of the world. Even if that happens to be tonight.”

We both knew that the world wasn’t going to end—but each of us thought that he wasn’t going to make it that night.

I don’t know why I don’t think that he didn’t—I saw him fall from the tower. He was in bad shape. He would have needed blood, and fast, if he was going to live, in a matter of speaking, from that. And even if he did die, he wouldn’t be here with me and Anya; he would be in Hell, where soulless vampires belong—and where even some of the ensouled variety end up staying. Still… I know he’s not dead.

Not like me and Anya.

I know he’s keeping his promise.

And there’s something comforting about that, as I drift off to sleep on my first night in Heaven.

~*~

She’s crying. I open my eyes, as if that would help me hear her better, and I know that Anya’s in the next room sleeping alone for the first time in months. I open the door and slip down the hallway and into her room, and then make my way over to her bed, pushing aside the gauzy curtains to see her sitting up in bed, hugging her knees to her chest and whimpering Xander’s name.

“Anya.” We were never that close in Sunnydale—why do I keep referring to it as if I just moved away from the city?—but we’re both here, together, and for some reason that feels right. If I’d imagined this situation before, I probably would have thought she’d be the one comforting me, but I am the one who sits on the edge of her mattress and puts my arm around her thin shoulders, holding onto her as she sobs for abandoned lover. I can’t help but wonder whether I’m here, at this specific “point of existence,” as Beatrice put it, because she died too. Whether I would be somewhere else if I’d been the only one not to make it.

“I miss him so much!” Anya cried; her soul is bared as usual, and I know that she can’t think of anything but her would-be fiancé. “I was there, and now I’m not, and he’s alone. And I don’t want him to be alone, but I can’t stand thinking of someone else taking my place!”

“I know,” I say, with as much comfort as I can muster. I do, but I feel detached from her somehow—I was prepared for this, but 1000+ years of living do nothing for one’s mortality, and Anya can’t come to terms with it. I wonder, if I wasn’t the Slayer, how I would be coping. I wonder whether a new Slayer was called again, or whether the line stays with Faith only. I wonder whether my dad knows yet.

“What if he forgets about me?” Anya asks suddenly, her eyes desperate as she turns to face me. “What if he finds someone else to cook for him, and give him orgasms, and kiss him, and teach him about ancient rituals?”

“You’re irreplaceable,” I honestly and impulsively say, returning her sad smile and squeezing her shoulders before I stand. “Are you going to be okay now?”

After a minute, she nods and I pull her curtains closed again. I leave the room and make my way back to my bed, noticing as I walk through the door a figure standing by the open window.

“That was a good thing you did in there,” Beatrice says, turning to face me, her beautiful features sharpened by the light of the moon. “It’s rare, you know, for the Powers put two beings together right away, even when their lives are linked before ascending.”

“Really,” I say conversationally, crossing the space between us and leaning against the wall next to the window she’s staring out of pensively. “And why might they do that?”

“I can only guess,” she says, carefully, “but I would say that you need each other for something—one of their plans, maybe, or a prophecy.”

“And you can’t tell me what for?” Beatrice is being honest, but it feels like she’s not being entirely open with me—and I’ve grown to trust my instincts.

“I can’t be sure,” she clarifies, “but there’s a mark on you. They’re not done with you yet.” A true, unguarded smile appears on her face, and she begins to walk towards the door. “I sincerely look forward to our next meeting, Buffy Summers.”

There’s nothing more for me to say, and all I do is watch her slowly fade away into the shadows, her vibrant hair the last thing I see before she’s gone. I sit back down on the edge of the bed, but I can’t bring myself to lie down. There’s a strange empty feeling in my limbs that I can’t explain; it only intensifies when I try to think about Sunnydale, my friends, my sister… The Powers put me here with Anya because we need each other, because we can help each other somehow—but it feels wrong to me. I’m missing something, I’m not complete—and I have no idea what it will take for me to feel like I’m whole again.

I lie down finally, close my eyes, and try to drift off to sleep.

~*~

That first night, I dreamt of Earth.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was curious. I slipped off into sleep and suddenly was standing next to the wreckage of Glory’s factory. Everyone was there, staring at something in the distance; their backs were to me, but as I slowly moved forward I saw the stricken looks on their faces, and the weariness I could no longer feel with them. Finally, what they were looking at caught my eye, and I slowly realized that it was me.

No, not me. I was me, I knew that much for certain—but it was my body, cradled in a pile of debris and resting in the sunlight.

They stand there frozen for a few moments, and I notice Xander carrying the limp form of Anya’s body. All of a sudden, a figure clad solely in black and stiffly holding himself up in the shadows falls to the ground with a heart wrenching sob ringing clear in the unnatural silence, unnoticed to the others but not to me. I feel a sense of wonder, of awe that Spike is the one of my friends to break down, fall to pieces at the sight of my body—and I’m more amazed when he inches his way to the very edge of the shadows, dangerously close to the sunlight.





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