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Cordelia Chase, the queen of a kingdom that no longer existed, had survived. Again.
No normal person would or should have, Giles had said. He dressed the wound on her neck with gentle hands, fatherly in an unfamiliarly soft way that made her flinch. You’re a very lucky young woman, he had said.
She didn’t feel lucky as she walked through the empty halls of Sunnydale High. The floors were dirty, layers of dust and crunched-up autumn leaves lying still on the linoleum. If the rich people were too scared and stressed to dress well, she supposed the poor people must have neglected their duties as well. That, or the janitor was bat food. She sighed, and hoped wistfully that he wasn’t just chewed up; that his life was more glamorous as a vampire. That Juan or Jose or whatever the hell the fat old loser’s name was didn’t sweep floors for no man.
Being faint, newly iron deficient, and in a state she would reluctantly label as depressed - so last season, but a girl must forebear - she did not notice the change of texture underfoot, or the wind whistling in her ears, when she stepped outside.
Why had Giles let her wander, again? Stupid decision, she thought vacantly as she gazed up at the pitch black sky.
Oh, that’s right. He didn’t let her do anything. She did what she wanted, and could annoy just about anyone enough to give up arguing with her. Did she like that about herself? The casual cruelty, the uncaring shut-off-ness that shaped her artfully worded jabs and selfish actions? It occurred to her then that she didn’t know.
And now, there was no one to tell her - because self-centred didn’t mean self-governed, and she needed to be told. Nope. No one at all to help shove down the self-hatred with pathetic grovelling compliments or sloppy teenage kisses. Xander was dead. Willow, too. And Buffy…
She squinted at the horizon. It wasn’t really a horizon, just the edge of the school parking lot, but in the town’s vamp-wary darkness, it was as far as she could see.
There was a figure, a woman, power-walking past. What little blood she had left ran cold as ice, picturing that awful fanged caricature of Willow coming back for seconds. But she, whoever she was, wasn’t gunning for the school. This stranger had somewhere to be.
Cordelia fidgeted in place. When had she stopped walking? It was cold, and her arms and legs were exposed. The heavy doors to the school were shut behind her, but all she needed to do was turn and push them open to be back in the safe and the warm. Back with Giles. Back with a grief-stricken parent who didn’t even know he had lost his child.
Everything made her sick in this world; to her stomach, to her bones. She couldn’t face him again, not now, lest she puke up her pretty pink guts. So she ran across the parking lot, yelling loutishly to the figure.
“Hey! Hey, you shouldn’t be out here!” Unless you’re a vampire, in which case, fair enough, goodbye world; curiosity killed the Cordy. “It’s not…” After a longish stretch of sidewalk, the mystery girl, still shrouded in darkness, finally stopped in her tracks with a powerful and visibly irritated stance. Cordelia bent over, one hand pressed daintily to her chest as she caught her breath. “It’s not… safe…”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
She snapped her head up so fast that her hair fell haphazardly about her shoulders. She knew that voice as well as she knew the face it belonged to, which now stared back at her with narrowed green eyes caked in black eyeliner.
“Buffy?”
Without warning, she was winded by a swift punch to the gut; very helpful, considering recent events. Sweet Sandra Bullock, this friend group would be the death of her.
The pain blossomed through her abdomen slowly, thanks to her Xander-and-Willow-induced numbness, but when it finally hit her she cried out terribly. Stumbling backwards, she gasped in shock when her head made contact with something hard behind her - a wall? No… a wall with bars, and much less bricks; one which echoed and reverberated against her skull. The metal fence, it must’ve been, always towering tauntingly over the juniors out back of the school. Jesus, she had chased this girl (Buffy, Buffy, Buffy, oh god, it’s Buffy) halfway around the world.
The dark spots obscuring her vision had just begun to fade when her breath was cut off once again, this time by a muscular forearm pressed up against her neck. It almost dislodged the bandage taped to her bite wound, and “Ngurh!” was all she managed to say as Buffy scowled at her, taking one of her wrists in her free hand and squeezing it tight.
“Alright princess,” she seethed. “You’re not a vampire, that much is pretty damn clear.”
Okay, rude. Or… well. Vampires were tacky, in Cordelia’s experience, except for Angel, who made up for his inherent oafishness by being totally dreamy. So, a compliment, then. Good thing she was already blushing, as all the oxygen was being expelled from her freaking lungs.
“But you know my name. So, I’m thinking, either you’re some other creepy-crawler, or we knew each other in kindergarten. And I highly-“ She pressed her arm down harder, and Cordy felt her cheeks redden (or maybe purple, at this point, because holy hell). “-doubt it’s the latter.”
Both of Buffy’s hands were occupied, but when Cordelia glimpsed down at her waist, she saw the shaved tip of a stake peaking out of a satchel, and whined somewhat pathetically. Yeah, she’d tried impalement - not a fan. Not a creepy-crawler, NOT a creepy-crawler!
With a strength fuelled by terror and adrenaline alone, she managed to wiggle her wrist out of Buffy’s stone grip, and tapped her forearm frantically like they were wrestling. Why she didn’t just use her free hand, she didn’t know. In such a compromising position, one has to prove to one’s attacker that one has at least a little bit of dignity left. The slayer rolled her eyes dramatically, and let up, pinning both of Cordy’s hands back to the bars with superhuman speed.
Cordy coughed, and hung her head low, before blinking up at the other girl incredulously. “God! What is your childhood trauma?!” She got the strangest sense of deja vu, then, but she had said a lot of mean things to a lot of weird people, and brushed off the feeling. “And, hello, what is your stupid nerdy friend group’s obsession with my jugular?! Is it my perfume, because, heh, I know you’ve never touched any, but you can just buy the cheap crappy stuff fro-“
“Shut up!” Buffy barked. “And answer the question.”
Cordelia gulped as she braced for impact. “Wh… what question?”
“How do you know me?!” She was shaken against the bars, and whined again.
“You won’t believe me!” she squeaked plaintively.
“In my line of work you learn to believe most things. And, hey. If I don’t, I’ll just torture the truth outta you.” Cordelia felt childish tears prick in her eyes. This girl… she was Buffy, yes - no one could fake weirdness this intrinsic - but she was just… off. Her proposal wasn’t a quip, or a pop culture reference, or a play on words; there was no musical lilt in that voice. She meant it, and it brought her no joy or sadness or any feeling at all to threaten her fellow valley girl. “You decide.”
Cordy analysed her attacker, lips parted in uncharacteristic reverence, and decided.
Alongside the makeup that looked more like low budget panda face paint, and the frown lines etching themselves into the skin between her eyebrows, her face was decorated with a long, thin scar. It tracked up from her chin to just below her nose, slightly off centre, and was sort of halfway between new and old: still reddish, but raised and mostly healed. The thought that flashed through Cordy’s head made her triple-blink in surprise, fluttering her lashes…
It would probably hurt if I touched it.
The concept came to her all at once without anything so constrictive as words, and with it the explicit knowledge that that would feel good. She triple-blinked again. Okay, touching Buffy’s lips wasn’t exactly something that crossed her mind. Like, ever. But it would feel like… revenge. Like power over her. Like payback. Yeah.
She didn’t know who she was trying to convince, but it wasn’t working.
“Suddenly not so chatty?” Buffy asked, and Cordy winced when she was pushed harder up against the bars. Buffy was more careful with her hold, this time, wrapping slender and calloused fingers tight around Cordelia’s whole wrists as well as the bars behind them, zip-tying her in place.
“I… I-I’m from another… world? Timeline, dimension, I don’t - I don’t watch geek stuff, okay? I don’t know what happened, but I… knew you, and your friends, who… I guess aren’t your friends, not here. Which actually puts you in my good books, for once.” When Buffy made a face that both scared her and made her hips rock unconsciously forward, she talked faster. “I-I made a wish. Just a stupid, stupid wish, m-more of a passing fancy, really, to my new friend who I’m now thinking, heh, not so friendly!”
“What’d you wish?”
She opened her mouth, and found it was suddenly dry. This wasn’t her Buffy. She hadn’t stood in the alleyway out back of the Bronze and checked in on her, when she didn’t have to, when she hadn’t done anything wrong besides Cordelia’s own serial crime of choosing lousy friends. This Buffy hadn’t pouted and held back tears at Cordelia’s words, time and time again. So she shouldn’t feel so guilty for telling the terrible truth to her face.
“I wished Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale.”
Buffy’s eyes scanned her. Up, down. Predator, prey. Cordelia supposed for such a hardened hunter, those words meant the exact same thing. But she was something else entirely, something strange and undefined.
Well. It could probably be defined, from Buffy’s perspective, as crazy weird girl I’m about to punch in the face.
She gulped. Luckily, she wasn’t exactly the best at putting herself in others’ shoes, and easily pushed Buffy’s perspective to the back of her head.
“Guess the wishing worked,” was what the slayer said, in the end, slow and careful like she was muddling over what to do next.
Cordelia felt her bottom lip quiver. “It did,” she said. “Too well.”
“Never set foot in this hellhole. Literal and metaphorical.” The grip on her wrists didn’t loosen, but she noticed Buffy’s tense shoulders droop a little. “Now I’m glad I didn’t. I’m obviously not wanted.”
This, for the first time in their strange, small interaction, was a joke, at least to a degree. She did not smile, but her mouth twitched a little around that beastly scar, and her eyes flicked over Cordy’s face with something that might have been curiosity.
She exhaled through her nose, and her mouth opened against her will to moan plaintively, “Oh, Buffy…”
She collapsed, then, the full force of her tiredness pushing her forward and smooshing her face of faded makeup against Buffy’s jacket-clad shoulder.
The perfume comment had been an off-handed one, just something you say, you know, if you’re a nasty raging bitch like Cordelia knew herself to be. But it wasn’t true. Buffy did wear scents, cheap woody-smelling ones that invoked the image of a sort of nasal transvestite - not girly enough to be perfume, not boyish enough to be aftershave. The girl was so desperate to be normal, to be pretty, to be feminine despite the rippling muscles she hid under her dainty cardigans, that it baffled her why she chose them.
But they smelled, Cordy thought, like freshly sharpened stakes with little saplings and flowers growing out of them, and secretly, she thought that was kind of perfect.
Even more secretly, she thought it was kind of beautiful.
This Buffy wasn’t wearing her weirdly poetic she-he musk. She smelled like something even more perfect, even more beautiful, and far, far more secret.
She smelled like Buffy.
Raw and real and pure Buffy Anne Summers, with every layer peeled back to reveal her squishy core. Quite literally, her blood sweat and tears.
This Buffy wasn’t trying to be anything. Maybe she was miserable and friendless, maybe she was battle-worn and scratched up and scarred, but she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she was.
Cordy wondered, then, if she could be the same.
It was only when Buffy flinched away that she realised she had turned her head, and was nuzzling melancholily into the other girl’s neck. Her lips were parted on account of all her dull tingly numbness, and had made contact with the sweat-soft skin of Buffy’s neck. She could still taste it when she passed an anxious tongue over the cracked lipstick shade, and pulled her head back.
“You sure you’re not a vampire?” That sounded more like Buffy. Her voice was animated, like a sitcom character, sort of flicking up cartoonishly at the end of her sentence.
Cordy shook her head briskly, a total deer in headlights.
“So, uh… how close were we in your… other world?” That was even more Buffy. Quiet, slow, soft. The very meaning of loneliness; a side of her Cordelia wasn’t sure she’d ever actually seen, but nonetheless knew disgustingly intimately. A strand of golden hair fell out of her messy braid, wafting a little in the night breeze, and Cordelia tact is just not saying true stuff Chase could think of no honest way to answer that question.
“Uuuh.”
Physically close, sure, though they had never been close like this. She squirmed a little just on principle, because at some point she had forgotten that she didn’t, in fact, like being pinned to a fence.
Emotionally close, never. But then… was anyone close to her? The queen of the school, the high-heeled horror story all the pimply kids told around the campfire in Sunnydale Middle? No. People were in her proximity - they laughed at her jokes and were wounded by her jibes - but looking at her and seeing her were not the same thing.
She had told Buffy that, once. How lonely it was, how demoralising, to be loved and hated by all, yet known by no one.
And she had understood.
Hmm. Spiritually close?
They had never sat criss-cross-applesauce in a sandbox together, but they had, still, that strange and unseemly connection you could only ever feel crackling in the air between two girls who can’t escape their past together. Too many feelings; good and bad, loud and completely unspoken. Too much history.
Cor, take a pill. You’ve known her for two years.
She replied to herself in her own head, a sure sign that the few marbles she had left were rapidly tumbling out of her ears: longer than any boyfriend you’ve ever had.
“Um.”
Her wish hadn’t been about Xander, or even Willow. It was about Buffy.
Why?
“We… we hated each other.”
Wrapped around her left wrist, she felt one finger break slowly from the rest and track slowly up and down an inch or so of skin. Buffy knew bodies. She knew how to bend them and break them and turn them into dust. She knew where all the veins and arteries were, how they weaved around sinew and bone, and Cordy tried as hard as she could to still the betraying thump of her heart as the other girl caressed the bluish bump.
All the feeling in her body was localised in that raised blue line, pulsating Buffy, Buffy, Buffy in rhythm with that finger; in harmony with her mind.
She found the truth in the total and complete obviousness of it all.
“You were my everything.”
If no one was gonna tell her who she was anymore, maybe she could use context clues.
Fig. 1; I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale.
If this whole world started from there, maybe she could too.
Maybe she could figure it out for herself.