Archive of Our Own

Nikki.

Nikki.

Nikki.

It’s time to wake up.

It’s time to change everything

and nothing.

In the movies she remembers from when her skin was thick upon her bones and her blood pumped in clever lines through muscle and sinew and fat, the future was dark and dirty and a hodgepodge of broken things pieced together through sheer fucking luck. The future they saw then, in the thick of so many wars, so many terrible wars, was corrupted from the start. Hope was a luxury then, something they couldn’t even piece into the background of fictional futures. Dirt and sweat and blood were just too commonplace to be rid of. Too intrinsic to the building blocks of pain to imagine a world without them. She hasn't decided whether or not this fact is remarkable or just another curiosity that won’t matter to her in a matter of minutes or days. She’s still struggling to hold on to the things that made her her.

The window, completely devoid of residue from rain or elements, crystal clear as lakes she remembers from a lifetime no longer within her grasp that they say are long gone, looks out on a city of chrome and glass. Everything as far as her eyes can see - which feels too far and dizzying, they tell her this will pass - is blue and silver and grey.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” a soft voice says at her elbow. The single sound in what feels like a lifetime of silence coming from the girl with dark, curling hair they tell her is named Askefise in a tone that suggests a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. She smells like earth and growing things and ashes, this tiny girl they made her from. It isn't a true smell, possibly something wrong with a line of programming somewhere that they would fix if she mentioned it (but won't), but it feels like life, this scent swirling on her tongue - in such contrast to the nothingness of sterile metal and chemically-enriched air that makes up this chrome world.

"It is very difficult to construct the correct familial bond necessary in order to counter so many generations of distillation," they told her when the world was still dark and there was no sensation in anything but her right pinky toe, "but rest assured that Askefise Woodwose is the purest donor in the history of this program. We are completely confident that you will suffer very little ill-effects during the mind-body meld."

Askefise says very little, or says a great deal but never when it seems to count. Nikki can’t quite decide. Time is still not on her side. (Was it ever?) Her name one who blows on ashes to bring them to flame something in her mind tells her quietly through static and beeps she should not understand, seems to say everything about her that is necessary to know. Askefishe was one of only two voices in the void before feeling, one of only a few voices in the blinding, headache, rushing nausea of life.

Except that there’s something in the crease between her eyes, something in her gait, something in the frown she makes when Nikki’s body responds in the wrong way, that reminds her of something fundamentally part of her own self. She wishes she had a mirror - wishes they’d give her some indication that she was real and solid - so that she could watch herself frown, watch herself think, watch herself walk and see if what she recognizes in Askefishe is in this new vessel - or if it is a memory of something or someone else she can no longer reach - or if it is only hope tricking her into being a memory.

“Grandmother,” Askefise whispers to the skyline of blue and grey, a lightning storm too many miles away sparking energy deep in Nikki’s brain of signals and wires, not daring to make eye contact. “You will be tested soon.”

Nikki doesn't ask how many with my face and your blood have you had to watch die? she doesn’t ask will I survive? and she can’t face the idea swirling around, is this your end or mine, daughter my grand-daughter my ancestor and my child my blood in my mechanical veins.

“There’s a storm coming,” she says instead, her gaze steady on the horizon until long after Nikki turns away.

Askefise wipes a tear from her face turned away from the cameras that line the room, tracking their every movement and interaction. They’ll know, anyway. Her reflection on the glass will be enough to summon her for an ‘interview’ with corporate. She’s been reprimanded for emotional attachment before. She’s seen the others - the girl with thick black hair and genetically impossible single-eyelids; the old man with a gap-toothed smile; the sullen, over-sized, silent girl with thin hair and thinner lips - disappear quietly between one sunset and one sunrise; disappear screaming and kicking and fighting every step between their ancestor and their deaths. It’s impossible for Them to accept that DNA can only go so far.

Isn’t the whole point of this entire project an acknowledgement that emotions are an intrinsic part of scientific magick?

She’s seen the warehouse where They store the old models. In the beginning, they were all the same - a small woman with a pert nose and long blonde hair. The first one - the whispers say (and the only thing Askefise trusts anymore are the whispers - burned herself into a hunk of charred metal and wires within five hours of Waking. She’s seen it, everyone has seen it, the shell still housed in a seat of honor at the entrance to the main Corporate building in New Los Angelus. The Corporate byline, engraved in the stone platform beneath the shards of a broken dream, claims Science above Faith, Magick above Physical, Love above Loss, as if a lie told a thousand times will somehow become Truth.

The first model, the purpose and proof that someday this project could work, Askefise has read the official report, dug through physical archives that shouldn’t exist and read a dozen first-hand accounts of a Shell walking right through a window three hundred stories above ground, falling to the earth in one piece and screaming for the sake of a pain that They made sure wasn’t physical.

“She ripped into her own skin and pulled out the wires until she figured out a way to set herself on fire,” Askefise told Strahl that night in bed, whispering as low as she could, tears flowing down her cheeks because there was just something so tragic, so lovely, so beautiful, so wrong with this fact that she couldn’t know, fingers tangling up in her lover’s hair as if she could force the world to be as pure as it once was by inflicting pain on something she loved.

(She never said she was perfect.
She never said she didn’t love her job.
She never said she wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.
She never said she didn’t belong in this fucked up world.)

Strahl hummed deep in her throat and dragged her long nails across Askefise’s warm skin, but didn’t respond. She couldn’t. They fucked that night like they knew it was the last one they’d ever have. Corporate had a small chat with Askefise about Security and Safety and moved her, Strahl, and all their things into suite 7542. It could have been worse. She could have gone to Strahl’s funeral instead of comforting her girlfriend as their entire lives were ripped away from them. She could have lost Strahl, instead they let her lose everything else.

There were trades in this world that weren’t fair and weren’t worth it, but Life was something at least.

Askefise hears Nikki tapping her fingers restlessly against her legs behind her. Nikki - in every version Askefise had ever known - was never restless, never moved unless it was completely calculated and necessary. It was why They were able to pour so many resources into getting this particular Shell/Soul correct, why They were so sure it would work this time (this time this time this time this time).

One long, two short. Two short. One short. One long, two short. Two short. One short.

For a moment, Askefise stops to consider how many things she had missed or dismissed and then shook herself slightly. She’d never survive if she did that. None of them would: Nikki, Strahl, Askefise - they were all bound whether they wanted to admit it or not.

Turning from the window, Askefise launches into a long dictation of Nikki’s Mind-Body meld, her reaction time, her cognitive functions, just as she did at the end of every session. She keeps her eyes fixed carefully on Nikki’s face, calm and solid, while her finger taps slowly on the underside of her tablet.

Humans could hide betrayal better than any other species - made, constructed, or birthed. She had no doubts that it wouldn’t do any good. She threw herself to the wolves because it had been ten years of living knowing it would end the same way anyway.

Three short. Three long. Two long. One short. Three long. One long, one short. One short.

Nikki’s eyebrows rose up in confusion and Askefise was struck by how quantifiably beautiful they all were, each of the Line bringing something new and fresh that their Shells alone couldn’t quite capture until it was too late. A spark. The old, crumbling photos they had found and sifted through in order to rebuild her didn’t do her justice. Do any of them justice.

Maybe that was the point.

Nikki blinks slowly, rapidly. She was so new, so ancient, so unaware, so unprepared.

One long, two short. Two short. One short. One long, two short. Two short. One short.

Askefise nearly laughs aloud. She coughs instead, putting her tablet away as slowly as she dares, aware of the red blinking lights covering every inch of her laboratory.

Three short. Three long. Two long. One short. Three long. One long, one short. One short.
One short, one long. One short, one long, two short. One short, two long. One short, one long. One long, one short, two long. Three short.
Three short. Three long. Two long. One short. Three long. One long, one short. One short.

And then she walks away. For the last time, maybe. Or maybe not. Every day was the last or the first in this place. The middle seemed as inconsistent as a dream. She suspects there is more in the air than the nutrients the Corporation boasted about.

(Five weeks later, long after it all went to hell and everyone from the janitor in the morgue to Them knew that there was nothing that she could have done, after she was commended and prized, after the gunshot wound in her side was healed by the Medical Department. Long after a new Shell found it’s way into her lab, her own blood swirling through its veins, and she rolled up her sleeves and went back to work. Long after that short conversation even mattered, she came home to find Strahl swinging from a makeshift rope braided from a dozen silk scarves above their bed.

She didn’t even find the strength to cry.)

Die?

Someone.

Die?

Always.
Someone, always.

Creanceor Zitella rolled her eyes and drummed her fingers on the long, brass table. She hated staff meetings, she hated budget memos, she hated this brand new world, and she hated the name they called her by, the way they all laughed when she came back with another fresh tattoo painting her ageless skin, with a hidden C embedded deep within.

Five hundred years after she should have been a rotting corpse, the Great Purge hit the world from her blind side. Even if they said, with calm eyes and flies buzzing around their feet as they trod through mountains of dead, that she was the great Creanceor Zitella, the eldest PTB to be saved, the youngest PTB to defend and protect the Slayer line. She hadn’t realized that this was a divide until the bloody remains of creatures she didn’t know still had blood to spill were littered at her feet like an offering.

They gave her a new name and seat of honor and it felt - for a time - that everything she had been fighting for since the last Slayer fell had finally come to pass.

Burying Buffy had been the hardest thing, the strangest thing, in all her years as an Immortal, all-seeing Power. It felt like something she should have experienced while still human, the first in a long line of moments that made her realize how much she had lost by ascending too soon. She cried. She cried and cried until a representative came to tell her that if she didn’t stop, the entire island of Honolulu was going to be lost to the tempest she had been creating.

That part wasn’t in the brochure. The whole being an actual fucking god part. The whole your emotions control the Earth part.

She spent a lifetime or two on a distant star, burning but never burning, re-living her own life over and over until it stopped feeling real and started feeling like a story that someone had told her once. But even after, she clung to the name she had been born into - her first birth, her physical flesh-and-bone birth.

Cordy.

Men and monsters had fallen in love with that girl.

She was magickal and impossible.

Five hundred years after she should have been a rotting corpse, long after the pain of her unlived life dissipated into an ache in her bones like a war wound, long after every creature she had ever known turned to dust, and she had just about (finally) (maybe) adjusted to the facts of her reality, when everything got turned around and the world ended.

”Jasmine wasn’t the first and she sure as fucking hell wasn’t the last,” Cordy stood in the void and screamed at the top of her lungs. “Someone fucking listen to me.”

The last Slayer drew in her last, shuddering breath, and somewhere far away on the edge of the dimension that held Heaven and Hell in a tenuous balance snapped shut.

Cordelia Chase fell to her knees in an alley in a city too small for its population and too large for its outdated infrastructure. There had been less and less demonic activity over the past three generations, but still Slayers came - strong and beautiful as the girls Cordelia still clung to in memory. The boundaries between dimensions ebbed and flowed like a river undergoing a spring thaw and autumn freezing; somewhere a woman with green eyes and pale skin and dark hair (a woman who was no more a woman than Cordelia was anymore), struggled to maintain a hold on lines that the Universe insisted it no longer needed. Cordelia Chase fell to her knees in an alley over the body of a teenage girl and screamed to the others like her, to the girl-woman holding the universe together with just will and hope, to a world that sacrificed its light, and received no response - aside from a hot, moist breeze on her cheek from the only other soul in the universe mourning as much as she.

She screamed until she was dragged back to the empty void and then she screamed some more.

On an Earth where vampires have labor unions and children are born with human souls and green demonic skin and creatures with tails and wings are informing the populace of the weather and nightly news, where did a Slayer belong? The world no longer needs Her.

Cordelia screamed against the whispers coming at her from the thousands of Beings like her and yet, so unlike her.

You are so young, they whispered to her. Zitella, you must grow, you must become. It has been too long. You are so old, they scolded her. You should not be like this.

And still she screamed, until the throat she no longer possessed was raw and she curled up into a ball, waiting for the day that the truth would come out.

Slayers.

Without them, who will keep TPTB in check? Who will stop the next Jasmine, and the next, and the next, and the next….

“Creanceor Zitella,” a soft voice insisted, snapping Cordelia’s attention back to the board room. Wolf and Hart smirked at her from across the long, bronze table, while Ram tried to catch someone’s eye on the other end of the room. Little Maelid smiled shyly at her, “I’m sorry, Creanceor, but I know that you - above all of the rest - are the most invested in the Slayer Shell Program, and we have very good news on that front.”

Cordy blinked for a moment, as though the body she currently inhabited had not yet learned how to process stimuli. Which was a bit ridiculous, because it was an old model, at least two, if not nearly three hundred years old. Many others had encouraged her to upgrade, but the slow process of teaching herself to walk and talk again was something she avoided whenever possible.

She also found her fellow Creaceors to be despicably wasteful.

Cronus most feared his children killing him. What he should have feared was how much more humankind would love his children over him. Cronus was a father and a giant, but Zeus was a God.

In the aftermath of the third, sweeping war in a post-Slayer world, the youngest PTB gathered their resources - the sciences, the people, the Faith that the world needed a channel for after so many years after the boundaries between dimensions fell into complete disarray - and began a Civil War in the void. When you kill a god, you change the fabric of reality, you create a hole of energy that had to be filled.

It wasn’t the first time she had been labelled a Queen. And this time, the world was truly hers to shape and change.

“We’ll bring back the Slayers, we’ll find a way,” the young told her, eyes shining with Revolution. “We’ll fix it.”

No one was left who knew what the world had been like before everything had broken in two. No one except Cordelia - whose real name was a secret myth after so long in the void - and a sickly old woman green-eyed girl-woman that flitted between the edges of the dimensions and could not be caught for so much as a cup of coffee, let alone a philosophical discussion of how to rewrite the world.

Funny when you break all the rules, how much magick and science were never at odds at all. Funny when you break the whole world into a million pieces, putting it together is less like a practical puzzle and more like blind fucking luck.

The PTB - ageless and terrifyingly young - became the sorts of gods that Jasmine would have killed the world to become. And all they had to do was kill their elders to do it. Cordelia was the only one left to find the sick, sad irony in this. She watched an army set up roots in skyscrapers and create a religion around the perfect blending of magick and science; old enemies becoming allies, it was a brand-new world.

“We’ll bring back the Slayers, we’ll find a way,” the young gods told her, eyes shining with their own importance. “We’ll fix it.”

Spoilers: They didn’t.

Nikki watches Cordelia from under hooded eyes. She seems familiar, in an aching and haunting way that only very few things feel familiar. She’s pretending to sleep, they both are. Lying too far away from each other for comfort, too close for this desperate Trust they aren’t quite sure how to function around to fit between them.

She may be with a literal, honest-to-fuck god, but they’re still on the run, and so the novelty of that wears away as quickly as anything else. Some things remain the most beautiful mystery, that Nikki sometimes feels the need to pinch her manufactured skin to see if she’s still real.

As if that will tell her fucking anything.

She wishes she had paid more attention when her Watcher mused at length about demonic philosophies of the soul. She didn’t know much about the Watcher’s Council, but probably in the 1970’s a pregnant Black girl called to Slayerhood in the middle of a Chicago slum doesn’t require the top of the Watcher’s class. Send out the idiot more obsessed with the cultural and religious functionality of demons than the weapons that kill them with the most speed. Seeing her son’s first birthday was a special kind of triumph for the both of them.

There’s just some facts of life that you cannot escape, Slayer or no.

“One girl, in all the world, chosen,” Cordelia reaches out with her soft, warm hand and clasps Nikki’s rough ones with tears glittering on her eyelashes.

Nikki squeezed her companion’s hand back, staring into those mechanical brown eyes until they closed, a long sigh of contentment filling the air around them with hope and other unquantifiable terms.

They didn’t need to sleep, that’s one of the first things Askefise told her in the beginning, just a few weeks ago. It didn’t seem necessary to program that function into a body that otherwise was nearly impossible to destroy or weaken. Sleep was nice, though. It broke up the monotony of hiding, broke up the monotony of running and escaping through narrow alleyways with a bright blue sky overhead and bright blue chrome reflecting the atmosphere back at them at a blinding rate. It broke up the absence, the absence of pain, the absence of purpose other than survival.

Survival to what end, she’d nearly asked once - but then glanced over at Cordelia’s bright eyes and snapped her mouth shut. Whatever journey they were on, it was like a rollercoaster - there was no end until someone small and far away pulled a lever and they came careening to a hault.

In the morning, Cordelia yawns and stretches with a feline satisfaction, and Nikki watches her with raw curiosity and awe.

“So you’re…. A thousand years old?”

Cordy grimaces, “Something like that.”

Nikki shrugs into the vintage leather jacket Askefise kept in her lab on Research’s recommendation. Some of the Shells responded positively to the prop, others did not. Cordy isn’t sure what the correlation is between these reactions and the effectiveness of the Shells.

She wants to ask, longs to ask the one question that has haunted her fragmented dreams since the first Shell pulled out the wires that strung her own body together until a spark was finally set free and Cordelia realized that she had put her faith in the wrong thing…. Catastrophically so. She wants to ask, but can’t.

“So,” Nikki waves at her impatiently, “Goddess or whatever. What would you like to do now that we’ve survived our first night?”

Cordy feels a smile spread across her face for the first time in a long time and her heart leaps in her chest when Nikki’s eyes brighten in response.

Oh.

Cordelia shot out of her chair when They lead the Shell into the boardroom.

Nikki Wood.

They did a magnificent job.
(They always did a magnificent job.)

Her natural hair, her full lips, her dark eyes taking in the room with a smug look of disdain and lingering apprehension. Yeah, that was a Slayer, all right.

The first and last Shell they brought her had had long dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes and a pert nose and Cordelia hadn’t been able to stop crying for three cycles around the sun. They asked her kindly if she preferred to have her tear ducts removed. Crying was such a useless, mortal response.

There had been pure hatred in the Shell’s eyes. Later, They - the scientists and priestesses and PTB - would insist that something had gone wrong, that the magick had not been able to forcibly put the soul of Buffy Summers into their mostly-mechanical body.

It was a problem of manufacturing, They told her soothingly as she gulped down tea and tried to hide the fact that she had scalded her tongue.

Even in the void Cordelia had some modicum of control over her own senses.

But it was a brave new world. Bodies for the gods being made of wires and hardware. Easy to manipulate, easy to control. Easy to take away.

Cordelia had never been less than a survivalist, and she was not about to be banished to a bodiless existence, dissipating into the boundlessness of the Universe, like the elders of her kind.

Sometimes, she felt like she could feel them in the air around her, struggling to gather their scattered remains back into something resembling consciousness.

“This isn’t what I wanted, you know,” she would whisper to the cool night sky. “But damn if you didn’t do this to yourself.”

She had never felt apologies did much good. And now, she’d lived through all of human history from the very beginning and back again, a thousand times - now, she knew how worthless her words were against pain.

Nikki Wood planted her feet - in heavy combat boots - and clasped her hands behind her back, eyes fixed steadily on Cordelia and no one else.

“Creanceor Zitella,” Maelid whispered breathlessly. Poor thing was always whispering, probably a modification in her vocal chords that went wrong. “It is as the scientists had hoped, Askefise Woodwose is as we suspected, a perfect genetic match for Slayer Wood - the purest decedent we have been able to find after so many years. And alive.” Maelid’s eyes shone with something darker than Cordelia truly wanted to understand or acknowledge.

Emotional cellular memory was what They were referring to it - Them and the brightest scientific minds. The Shells didn’t work, no matter what Slayer the witches tried to pull back from the Heavenly dimensions, because a Slayer Soul required the emotional DNA attachment to a Shell. They had attempted - at first - just the purest human DNA They could find. Not easy in a world where demons and humans had for so many generations been intermingling, but there were still pockets of powerful human sects that prided racial purity.

(Get rid of one problem and find it will crop up under a new name before you’ve stopped to consider a job well done.)

Even these, pure human-machine hybrids, were rejected- the Slayer Souls preferring death (over and over) to life encased in empty Shells.

It had been little Maelid - at that time an Apprentice in Cordelia’s entourage, a young Ascended only having joined the ranks after the Great Purge - who had first theorized an Emotional connection between the soul and the cell.

For all Their posturing over the melding of Science with Magick, it had taken an infant to point out the obvious: a soul could not inhabit any body - flesh or mechanical or both - unless there was an Emotional bond to hold it in.

And so began a decades-long search to find proof of her theory, and then a desperate scavenger hunt for the genetic descendants of the Slayers.

(The last Shell with Buffy’s sad smile whispered to her, Come, too. Please. Come, too in the seconds before slitting her own throat in a mad attempt to die. They all died. Every Buffy. Hundreds woke, cried, and bled. Cordelia held the hand of each one. The interns and receptionists tell rumors of a sad warehouse where all of the original Shell models rested in mountainous piles - to them, just a randomly constructed body used in multiple for the sake of ease.

There was no Summers blood left on the planet. Thanks in great part to the Great War that ripped the fabric of Reality for good and left humans and demons alike at the mercy of a Universe without order. Summers blood had always been too dangerous by half, and in the wake of the End of the World - just a mere three hundred years after Cordelia should have been rotting in the ground beside the ashes of the only monster man she ever loved - it was eradicated for good, as well as all recorded history of what Summers blood could do.

Three hundred years - after thousands lived - is the smallest measurement. She had been an infant, really.

In some ways, she still was.)

Several descendents were found, but Cordelia washed her hands of the project then, retreating to her meditation practices and libraries full of ancient books with (gasp!) actual pages and glue in the bindings. She had never been much more than a figurehead paraded out on holidays, anyway.

Once a generation, a team got close to the real thing, a true melding of Slayer Soul and Shell. But it never stuck for long, every Slayer that came through Cordelia’s boardroom was fragmented, detached, lacking the fire that she knew made up the soul of a Slayer the way she knew the difference between joy and pain; between laughter and love; between hurt and apathy.

She stopped arguing long ago that there was a pure magick solution - a new Slayer spell like that at the turn of the second century, waking up the magick that was already there.

It’s hard to stop a movement when it feeds an Empire. Especially a corporate one.

And then, ten years ago, they’d found Askefise. Four generations back on both sides of her family tree, two distant descendents of Nikki Wood had married and given birth to triplet girls. Females held a stronger DNA Emotionality. The one male Slayer-descendent that was used as a blood and bone marrow donor for a Shell had created an empty, though powerful, Slayer-Shell. She’d burned out within a month and the poor boy had gone mad with grief over the whole affair. Askefise was what would have once been called a godsend. And her wife - Strahl - was one of the most powerful wiccan-practitioners born in the last hundred years. It was an impossible combination - an emotional connection from all three angles: science, magick, and the physical.

And then four Shells had gone through Askefise’s laboratory, with mediocre results. Her perfectionism They complained, was slowing down progress.

At that point, it had been so long - at least eight hundred years without a True Slayer and over five since the Great Purge - that Cordelia was no longer sure why They were still holding onto the possibility of a Slayer Shell.

What purpose could a Slayer hold in a world firmly held under the thumb of the PTB?

(If they’d only listened to her.)
(If she’d only listened to her own warnings.)

Nikki Wood stood in a wide, easy stance across the room from Cordelia, and for the first time in over a eight hundred years, Cordy found herself in the presence of a True Slayer.

She can’t really be blamed for grabbing the woman by the hand and hurling the two of them out the window of the largest skyscraper in the world.

Nikki looked up from where they came, landing on the sidewalk on their feet as solidly as a pair of nonchalant cats, “Think that’s over a mile?”

“Who cares?” Cordelia spit, blood pumping in her ears.

Nikki wishes she could say that she was struggling with this city; with children on the street with skin various shades of peach, brown, violet, and green; with shrines to Slayer-Saints covered in candles and incense and bottles of fizzing drinks; with shops that sell live beetles and Cheeze-Itz and bottles of Slime Maintenance product next to the shampoo; with vampires lurking in the shadows, reprimanding children for littering. Nikki wishes that there was something so fundamentally foreign about this ripped-to-shreds, that she could disappear within herself the way that Askefise warned her had happened during previous soul-shell attempts.

Wasn’t it always me? was something she never thinks to ask. There were too many other questions. And Askefise - with her strange name and her beautiful wife and her strong gaze - did not brook with unnecessary questions.

Fight, train, test.

Until a goddess took her hand and threw them out a window.

Nikki wishes she could say that she was struggling, because she remembers struggling, and that had been easier in some ways. Wanting so desperately to go back into her own body, her own flesh-and-blood brain, her own time and space. Wanting so desperately to clutch her child to her chest and give up on the Mission for fucking good.

There should never have been a Mission.

Only now, now her mission has brown doe-eyes and a heart of iron and a smile like a sunset over the ocean. Only now, now her mission curls up like a toddler in sleep and all Nikki wants to do is find a way to capture that smile with her own lips and suck it into her mixed bag of metal and borrowed blood and mechanical synapsis and what they told her was a soul. Only now, her mission and her heart beat the same rhythm and there’s a part of her - a restless, desperate, tired part - that is so relieved to have finally found it.

“If you are a spy,” Cordelia tells her the first night, “I’ll make eternity hell for you.”

“I thought there wasn’t a hell in this brand new world,” Nikki quipped.

If she was honest, the whole “dimensional breakdown” thing wasn’t that difficult to understand. She hadn’t exactly been raised with any religion, and her Watcher was the leading scholar in demon myths and religions, so she’d always known that hell was a rather relative term. But it was more interesting to watch a goddess roll her eyes in annoyance than be understanding.

There’ll probably be hell to pay once Cordelia figures out that Nikki is ninety-percent sarcasm, but until then….

After three days holed up in a cramped closet housing cleaning supplies in an abandoned corporate building under the streets of New Los Angelus, with not much to amuse themselves but Cordy’s inside jokes about a kid with a scar on his face that Nikki is seriously glad she never had to deal with as either a mother or a teenager and Nikki’s sullen silences, Cordelia finally makes the decision to just go for it.

“It’s time to go,” she says defiantly one morning, just as the sun starts to rise far above their heads. Nikki isn’t sure how she knows that the sun is rising, probably can thank her brand-new computer-brain for that insight. She’s also not sure why Cordelia is standing in front of her so defiantly, as if expecting her to fight.

Nikki shrugs into her not hers leather duster and nods, “Okay goddess, where to?”

She may have a desperate desire to slide her fingers over the delicate body in front of her and learn once and for all if goddesses moan or scream, but Nikki is a rationalist. She knows she’s just the hired kidnapped muscle of this coup. She’s not here to say yes or no, she’s here to follow orders.

She’s always been a good soldier.

Cordelia deflates a little and Nikki tries to hold back a smile. The goddess, the figurehead of a terrifyingly powerful religion and corporation, wants a fight. Nikki wonders where that fire comes from. Wonders what it can ….

“To visit an old friend,” Cordelia says slowly, as if the words don’t fit in her mouth the way they should, sliding around her tongue uncomfortably. “We’ll need supplies or…” she frowns. “We have to go home, is the thing.”

Nikki edges a bit closer, “This … friend? Will they be happy to see us?” The goddess shifts on her feet and that’s…. A bad sign. “Okay. Home. Is it in LA?”

Cordelia closes her eyes, “Sunnydale.”

A shiver caresses it’s way up Nikki’s spine.
She’s pretty sure no one programmed that to be a possibility.

After Jasmine, the PTB encouraged each other to have relationships. Physical or emotional. Just something. Involve themselves more concretely with humanity, watch over them more carefully. Get a bit more hands-on.

And also, fuck from time to time.

Being bodiless and immortal and omniscient didn’t stop Desire, it was clear. And somewhere along the way, Power and Sex got a bit muddled. Aside from missing movie-night-cuddles with Angel from time to time, being a formless being in a void kinda killed Cordelia’s sexual appetite.

Hugging, she came to think after a few decades floating above Reality, was sometimes the most emotionally satisfying motion.

After Jasmine, the PTB got handsy - in multiple ways.

It was a good time for it. Buffy woke up a hundred thousand Slayers, there were a lot of girls in need of a bit more guidance and it had been a bit too long since TPTB had deigned to act as guardian angels. Cordelia stayed in her void, she was too young - too fresh - too connected to the Earth still, she couldn’t separate. And her family deserved some space in order to mourn her and push along.

There was a lot that she wished she had fought harder for.
There was too much that she wished she had fought at all for.

After Jasmine, there was Peter & Paul, and then Cassandra, and then Lilith.

She rather liked Lilith, but by that point she would have gleefully drowned the majority of the PTB.

After the Great Purge, her body took some getting used to. Before, the power of the Powers That Be had been enough to materialize a physical body out of thin air. Magick when you are all-powerful is less a trick and more like breathing.

But the New Way relied on a melding of minds - relied on science and magick being used in equal measure. It was good politics, the new gods relying on human and demon scientists to create physical Shells for them to inhabit.

It was also profitable.

Immortality could now be bought at a high enough price to be unattainable for most, but a dream for all.

Cordelia had always resided inside her makeshift Shell like a visitor. She didn’t notice much about it. It didn’t need to be cared for the same way a real body did - sleep and food were perks more than necessities. Pain, pleasure - senses - were optional.

It was a whole new world.

She’d had several Shells over the years. TPTB adapted to manufactured Shells in much the same way they had previously inhabited temporary physical forms in order to visit humanity. It was a choice, an active and easy transition. No one sat behind a computer and watched a witch force an unknowing PTB into a Shell unequipped for the transition. That was impossible.

There were perks to seeing everything.

She’d had several Shells over the years - always the same model, built exactly as she had been in her Prime Life. Some others - especially the younger ones - sought out modifications and perks that their Prime Life had not afforded them. To them, her continuous desire for subtle flaws and the memory of who she had once been, was a certain kind of selfishness that they couldn’t understand, but coveted in her.

Flaws in our gods are too necessary to be dismissed.

She’d had several Shells and they all were serviceable enough. In them, though, she had rarely taken a paramour. Much to the disappointment to the many interns, apprentices, priestesses, and others that rotated through her life. Becoming the favorite pet of a PTB was a high honor for a mortal - and to be invited to share the bed of the Creanceor Zitella was the most coveted position of PTB and mortal alike.

Much later, she will tease Nikki about this in her soft, sparkling way.

After so long without someone’s hand to hold, she had gotten woefully out of practice - and more than that, had forgotten that she was worth it.

This will eventually break Nikki’s heart. But not until much later.
Or much too soon, depending on how you think about.

Getting out of the city is easier said than done. And since Nikki knows shit all about this brand new world, she was expecting a good share more than nothing and a maybe a little bit less than a lot.

“Why are there so many goddamn walls?” Nikki mutters as they ducked into their third dank alley of the day, just barely missing a troop of gun-toting priestesses.

Cordelia stopped fighting the urge to roll her eyes about three weeks ago, somewhere between explaining to Nikki about global warming and that little (300 year-long) period of time when North America was colonized by The New Republic of Rwanda. Neither of these facts had much to do with each other, at the time, but melting ice caps forced most of LA to rise or sink and when it became not only the largest city on the West Coast that hadn’t collapsed into the ocean, it became a natural military base.

“In hindsight, putting all of those resources into maintaining LA at that point is one of the reasons why Rwanda didn’t keep their foothold in North America for very long, but they had a good run of it. And they’re the ones that gave us this,” Cordelia waves her hand in the vague direction of what had first appeared to be an obnoxiously minimalist skyscraper but was actually an impressively distracting wall that circled the entire city, keeping it (relatively) safe from the ocean that surrounded New Los Angelus on every side when the solar ice caps melted down to their lowest point.

The shiny, perfectly reflective towers of chrome and glass that she saw from Askefise’s lab was a parody of the real city. Thousands of feet below, at the surface - or what passed as a “surface” in this place, Nikki thought of it just as Ground Zero (a term that caused a brief shadow to pass over Cordelia’s face the first time she spoke it aloud) the only place where you were sure the blue light overhead and the breeze on your skin was coming from something Natural - there was a fundamental breakdown between chrome and everything else. She learned quickly that Ground Zero was a relative term and had very little to do with any actual resemblance to the world outside of the city - you could be standing in a square with the sun shining on your face and the wind in your hair one day and the next be a mile above or below that point and experience the same elements.

Topsy-turvy didn’t cover it. It was maddening.

But the city itself? Oh, it was glorious. Once she got beneath the layers of Corporate perfection, everything was dirt and smells and jumbling voices and colors - so many colors. More colors than Nikki had ever experienced when she was alive.

And around everything was that damn wall.
(Or that dam wall.)

According to a very small, owlish looking child on the subway - who clearly had been studying the wall’s construction in their class that week and was delighted to eavesdrop on two unsuspecting adults discussing the very thing they were desperate to talk about - the wall operated more like a dam, creating and storing energy from the rolicking waves, than a traditional medieval moat would have.

“Teacher says that the first generation of people born in the city after the wall was finished suffered from the highest rate of deafness than in any city before or since,” their tawny feathers trembling with importance and excitement to be teaching an adult, their eyes glazing over slightly as they struggled to repeat words they had clearly only recently heard from the mouth of a teacher or parent. They smile shyly up at Nikki, a little breathless, “Wow, right?!”

Nikki cocks her head to one side, “I can’t hear anything.”

Wings and tails and all manner of appendages rustle, amused, around them in the crowded train, Nikki catching the faintest trace of a smile on Cordelia’s lips.

“Well….” the child’s face squishes up in a frown of concentration, “The water’s not there anymore.”

Children have the most distracting way of making you feel like a fool.

“She was testing you kiddo,” a bespectacled, greying demon with antlers and bright blue eyes says with a smile from behind Nikki. He winks at her from behind his newspaper and then turns back to it.

At this point, Nikki is more surprised to see an actual paper newspaper in someone’s hand, then she is by the sappy-goo rolling off the old demon’s fuzzy antlers.

The child breathes a sigh of relief and then looks back at Nikki, her eyes searching, wanting to regain trust with this strange human who tried to trick her with a question that everyone knows the answer to. “Daddy says the water will come back,” they whisper in confidence. “The icecaps have to melt sometime and when they do - we’ll be safe.”

Several dozen languages pipe through speakers simultaneously as doors chime open and close, Nikki loses the child immediately in the rush of bodies and limbs.

After trudging up a few dozen flights of steps - all of the places within this labyrinth posing as a city - Nikki raises one eyebrow at Cordelia, “People’s Republic of Rwanda?”

Cordelia shrugs, “It wasn’t that surprising at the time. Took over pretty much everything for about …. Oh? Three hundred years or so. Did a pretty decent job not being dicks about it, too.”

Something in Nikki’s heart - wires and plastic veins and borrowed flesh and all - pulls delightfully and a huge smile spreads over her face, “Hot damn. That is fucking cool.”

She can’t help it - even after watching the bloodshed and toil that was Peter & Paul’s Great War, the mad scramble for resources that came after as it seemed that every volcano was spilling itself wide open, the rise of the smallest most fragmented nation into a world power within the space of just one generation - Cordelia looks over at Nikki’s awed expression and something of her humanity clicks back into place… and she laughs.

Because yeah. Hot damn. It was fucking cool.

They searched for an exit for a little over two months. In that time, jokes grew a little stale - particularly the strangely bitter ones about their bodies.

“Lucky we don’t get tired.”

“Lucky we don’t get hungry.”

“Lucky that didn’t hurt.”

The thing was, they couldn’t just climb over the side - even though, as Nikki pointed out often, they totally could - because someone was always watching. And they couldn’t take any of the regular exists because those were monitored and while they could have easily dispatched with the guards between the two of them and their nearly-indestructible bodies, Nikki refused to fight civilians.

“Guards are in uniform, they are not civilians. They break like…. Every rule of that definition!” Cordelia spluttered over a bowl of spicy noodles while Nikki dug into a particularly potent demon curry.

“Do they have superpowers?”

Cordelia considered for a moment, taking a long swig of a thick, greenish milk she’d grown addicted to in the past few weeks, “Do wings count as superpowers?”

“Nope,” Nikki stole some of Cordelia’s milk, her left side pressed against Cordelia’s right thigh as she leaned over to pluck a bit of garlic off of the noodles. There were several hundred street bars in the city, on every level, usually run by doe-eyed demons with downy black hair covering every inch of their skin except their palms and the soles of their feet. It had been explained to Cordelia at one point in the past that these demons - with faces a bit in the vein of a badger or marten - were culinary savants and now that she was amongst the people she had been ruling over for so long, it finally was clear how much that was intoxicatingly true.

“THEY RECOGNIZE YOU,” Nikki nodded to the family behind the bar, their smiles and shy manners haunting something forgotten in Cordelia’s bones.

Cordelia just kept slurping her noodles from her perch on the barstool while Nikki stood next to her, bodies pressing closer and closer together as the area around them became more crowded.

This mad, delicious, bustling city.

She didn’t want to be proud of it - didn’t want to find satisfaction in every face that she saw - didn’t want to feel maternal and responsible for all of these terrifyingly beautiful people - but she did.

She had lived too long as a god, she had actually begun to see herself as one.

After a while, the bar clears of regulars, the youngest demon-girl slinks off with a group of friends, fingers twirled around a feline sort of girl with sharp teeth and long limbs, and they are nearly alone. And that was when it happened.

They were offered a mistake and it called itself an escape.

You can always find a Revolution if you look closely enough.

Trouble with Revolutions is that they are mostly made up of the youngest, the strongest, the most hopeful. The ones that haven’t learned - yet - that Revolution is just a pretty word for War and War is just a clever word that means Pain and Sorrow.

Trouble with Revolutions is that they are statistically broken before they begin.

Trouble with Ancient, Ageless, Immortal creatures is: they never had to learn any of these things first-hand.

Creatures that can’t die are closer to infants than to the aged. Makes them reckless, makes them stubborn, makes them … Cruel.

They were offered an escape and they took it without thinking - an Immortal Power that IS and a reincarnated Warrior. They took it without thinking because that’s what women of their kind do.

No one sings songs about the selfish ones.

She remembers the sensation of blood drying into cloth and onto skin like she remembers her name. It’s not something that you think about too carefully when you open your eyes for the first time and someone tells you it’s been a Milennia since you put one heel down carefully in front of the other. But it comes back to her, in the first spray of blood - it’s thick and green and smells a bit like mint and she feels as though she is still screaming, feels a bit like the mad old woman in a movie she saw once - hands bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. The white halter top They put her in is stained all the colors of the rainbow and she’ll never look at the sky the same way again, can’t abide even the thought of living through another rainfall.

“Who do you think has died so far?” Nikki muses aloud, more to the desert air than to anyone in particular. She wants to list them off by name, but they didn’t know enough of them. Too many nameless, determined faces. Too many beautiful souls determined to live a life not under Their thumb any longer.

Sometimes walking side by side with a goddess in the body of a machine you can hear buzzing when you are quiet for too long feels a bit more like walking alone than companionship.

“Enough,” Cordelia responds irritatedly. “Enough to make this worth it.”

Make you worth it, neither of them say aloud.

As if just getting these two people non-people out of the City will somehow… spark something.

Nikki wonders if this is strictly true - but then again, this is only her first real war and it is the goddess’s fourth… or fifth? Being a Slayer more often than not meant One Mission that broke down into a billion tiny little skirmishes of one-against-one until the Slayer at hand died and someone else took her place. That’s not a war.

That’s suicide.

“So is this… kinda,” Cordelia responded to the thought swirling in Nikki’s mind as if they had been speaking aloud to each other for the past six hours instead of trudging silently down ancient concrete roads deteriorating into the sand.

Turns out that the only thing on the other side of that giant wall was sand. No ocean, no people, nothing but sand as far as Nikki’s scarily-accurate eyes can see.

“Except we’re condemning others instead of ourselves,” Nikki kicked a bit of crumbling concrete into dust and a sinking feeling spread through her chest and down to her fingertips. “Being a Slayer is about sacrificing yourself, protecting the innocent.”

“Maybe being a goddess means sacrificing the few to protect the many,” the words sit heavy in her stomach, wounding her and making the breath of her constructed lungs come short and shallow.

Maybe being melodramatic assholes is enough to convince me to just come to you, a girl suddenly appears sitting crosslegged on the road behind them, long brown hair swirling around her though there was no breeze anywhere else. I don’t really want any of that doomsday shit reeking up my home.

Cordelia sniffs the air like a cat before turning back to acknowledge the girl, but Nikki had already whirled around and was brandishing a sword at her

“You mean your disgusting little cave with wackadoo equations scrawled across the walls because you don’t know stars from your ass anymore,” Cordelia shot out, annoyed at the girl in word, but a warm smile lighting up her face as she moves to sit down in front of her.

Nikki begrudgingly lowers her weapon, but kept a tight grip on it.

It had been given to her from a young boy with acne and scales in equal measure on his wide, open face. He was probably dead now, this thing in her hand that had once been a boyish hobby turned into a weapon after lifetimes spent as an art display the last lingering proof that he had ever lived. The demonic runes on the handle bit into the wound on her palm, reminding her of him and his grey-purple cat eyes.

I can’t let you in, you know.

It occurs to Nikki too late that the girl doesn’t move her lips as she talks.

Despite what sis says, I have to stick to the rules otherwise…. there’s a shift in the air, it tugs on Nikki’s thin, blood-stiff shirt uncomfortably. There’s a sadness to the girl, to this situation now that they are finally in it.

Months of scrambling through a labyrinth, one bloody week to get out, and weeks of walking and walking through endless desert. Death didn’t feel like this, Nikki is sure of it.

“You… Buff?” Cordelia’s voice carries in it so much pain, every fiber in Nikki’s being fights to run to her, cover her pain with … something, anything.

They’ve been too long with only each other for company, she thinks.

Cordelia glances back at her then, eyes searching for something she must find in Nikki’s defensive stance, her sword still poised, her muscles tense. When she turns back, Nikki sees her spine straighten just ever so slightly.

The girl shakes her head firmly, Nah. She’s… back where she was the first time. It’s soft and light and … nothingness. A bit like your void.

“So…”

You think I would have cheerfully sat back in my cave and let your idiot army do something that stupid if there was a lasting effect? the girl flips her hair with beautiful teenage disdain.

Cordelia sighs “So you mean that’s all you will give me. You and….?”

Lightning strikes a Joshua tree a few feet to the left of Nikki, but none of the women on the road flinch. The young girl - Nikki now notices is clad in only a thin green silk slip of a dress with translucent straps and no shoes - laughs a bitter, ageless laugh, but doesn’t answer.

Nikki doesn’t quite understand what is happening out here in the middle of the fucking desert, but she’s very, very glad that while this girl doesn’t appear to be an ally - exactly - she’s at least clearly not an enemy.

Not… exactly.

“I’m so….” Cordelia’s voice - in some instances too powerful, too intoxicating, Nikki can see how she remained on the throne even when the entire world didn’t want her there - but here, in the middle of the desert on the edge of something thick and heavy and ancient just behind them and the future she carved out in front of them - it breaks down into the most childish, weakest sound.

Nikki never, ever wants to hear that sound again. Damn the thing that tells her she can’t protect the Universe from that depth of sadness and loneliness.

It may have been this moment, seeing Cordelia broken and covered in the blood of a Revolution she sacrificed for a conversation with a girl older than time itself suddenly realizing that the battle was already lost, that Nikki fell in love.

But she’d always say it was what happened much, much later.

Thunder cracked overhead and the sparkling sun disappeared in an instant under a dark, forbidding cloud. The entire earth responding to Cordelia’s apology with anger.

“SORRY. YOU’RE SORRY. IS THAT WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO SAY?” the creature sitting in front of them suddenly raises on her haunches, green sparkling veins glowing under her pale skin.

Nikki collapses to the ground, the boy’s sword (whatwashisname?) clattering as she presses her hands to her ears in response to the sound of the girl’s true voice. Through half-closed eyes flooded with tears of pain, Nikki watches Cordelia smile ruefully.

Under the screaming echo of the girl’s anger, Cordelia’s voice rises, broken but still strong, cracked and tired but persistent, “Don’t we all get the chance to watch the world burn because of our mistakes?”

The scream dies down into a low chuckle that rattles every mechanical synapse in Nikki’s suddenly fragile Shell.

Only some of, I guess, she cocks her head to the side as if listening to something or someone she alone can here. Sis would say the Lucky Ones, to see the repercussions of our own Existence. She looks steadily at Nikki, who has rolled onto her side, hugging her knees to her chest, biting back a scream or a moan or both. Are you ready to see what you have truly wrought?

Cordelia doesn’t hesitate, “It can’t be worse than what I know, but…” she clears her throat. It’s so easy to be human after so many years of walking among them. “Can I … I mean… Can it be fixed. What’s happened? Is there….”

You want a war, the girl stands up and with a flick of her wrist, opens the flesh in the thick part of her palm where her thumb plants its roots, We rarely get what we want.

“No one ever wants war,” Nikki hisses out between clenched teeth.

The girl presses her palm to Cordelia’s mouth, a single drop of her rich, red blood touching the other’s woman’s lips.

A terribly long time passes in silence. The sun sets and rises, a rainstorm crosses the sky over their heads, momentarily drenching them, the bright desert sun beating down on them. If there is a silent conversation happening between these two Immortals, Nikki is very glad she doesn’t have to hear it. Being responsible for one vampire at a time is fine, being responsible for the entire world is a different matter.

At some point during the second night, Nikki suddenly realizes that there is once again only the two of them on the road, and Cordelia looks as though she has been through several wars in the span of only a few hours. They walk in silence a mile or two as the stars above sing a song Nikki is certain she shouldn’t be able to hear.

“It’s the fabric of space-time, it’s more fragile the closer you get to …. her,” Cordelia explains, suddenly turning off the road and tromping through the sand towards a small house Nikki is certain wasn’t there on their way into the desert. “She claims the stars always sang, but she’s always been able to see things we can’t.”

Nikki strides into the tiny but well-stocked kitchen and begins mindlessly throwing together a thick stew, “So she’s the one… the fabric of reality stuff?”

Her knowledge of the mortal coil’s history since her first death is a little murky, a lot of details that just can’t fit into what she understands of time and reality. A lot of details that weren’t passed on, because you only need a sword to know that it is a sword, everything else is just a waste of energy.

Cordelia sinks into a chair at the kitchen table set for two and nods. Nikki sets a glass of water in front of her before beginning to chop carrots and potatoes with a determination and single-mindedness of purpose that she hasn’t had the satisfaction of feeling since waking up in that cold lab.

“She’s not going to help us, is she?”

The silence doesn’t eat at her after several days of such strange, long stretches of it. When she puts the lid on the stew and turns to Cordelia to tell her proudly how they will have dinner within the hour, she finds her goddess slumped in a chair, tears pouring down her face.

A warrior should never see her queen falter in strength.
A believer should never see her goddess cry.

A woman should never have to see her lover break without the means to comfort her.

Nikki kneels in front of Cordelia, taking the other woman’s hands in her own, “What did she tell you?”

Share it. Share the pain share the burden share the truth tell me so that I can bear it FOR you, she wants to scream, but doesn’t.

They don’t scream, that’s not how this works.
(And oh - how she desperately wants it to work.)

“Sometimes,” Cordelia croaks out as if she has been shouting and screaming or singing for hours, instead barely moving for days, “Sometimes, war is preferable.”

In the songs, in the poems and stories, holding your god in your hands feels like power and safety and beautiful things. In reality, it’s the most dangerous thing the Universe can expect of you.

Because holding your shaking, crying, broken god in your hands can kill you if you aren’t careful.
Can break down everything you think you are and turn you inside out.

Luckily, Nikki still wasn’t sure exactly what she was. So this only really solidified what she could be.

There’s a buzzing, clicking, knowing in Nikki’s flesh-and-wires brain that keeps meticulous track of time. She wishes there was some way to get Askefise to turn the shit off, but that thought just makes the buzzing louder.

Her mind knows a lot that she wishes it didn’t.

For example: the statistical probability that her centuries-removed granddaughter is still alive, after the hubbub of Nikki flying out of a window and disappearing into the desert realm of a creature that even They are smart enough to steer clear of.

(The answer is 15.752% and Nikki knows that about 14% is only because Askefise is never going to go down fighting. They’re part of each other, after all; and she wouldn’t.)

Only sometimes she looks across the room at Cordelia, hair falling in her face, so still and silent she might as well be dead - if what they were was considered life in the first place - and she became suddenly so, so determined to go marching right back into New Los Angelus to tear the entire city right down around Their ears that she would bite her lip until she began to bleed, the coppery taste bringing her back to reality, to life, to whatever the fuck it was that she was these days. And in those moments, she knew that Askefise was dead because Woodwose women always had someone a mission and those missions only ended in death.

Only sometimes when she is curled up silently on the bed next to Cordelia’s silent body and even the buzzing, clattering of her mind is drowned out by the sounds of desert insects and the mournful howl of a distant coyote, who she was slips in-between all the cracks and she feels so desperately, so painfully alive that even for the woman she’s lying beside, she cannot give up that feeling too soon…. Or ever.

Ever is a very insubstantial word.

Silence is never fully silent. There is always more to hear than most people care to look out for. In the first few weeks of adapting into a slow, natural rhythm in the little desert house after weeks of scrambling and hiding and searching and running and fighting and crying - Nikki realizes that they never really talked much anyway. As if they didn’t need to.

Silence is so full, so rich, so all-encompassing, that breaking it is often more difficult than the reverse. Sinking into silence after a long day, after a good laugh, after a good fight, after a terrible conversation - is like sinking into an old friend.

Finding a space for your voice in the thickness of sound that fills up every moment of silence, is so much more difficult. So much more like fighting than like winning.

Routines are like, water-rinse-repeat.

They can also be, here we are lying in bed together and when the sun rises you are smiling at me and it is soft and sad because you are soft and sad and that is how I needed every moment before this one to begin, I just didn’t know you yet. They can also be, dancing in the rain and breakfast with your feet in my lap and a book in your hand.

Routines are what make up life, Nikki learns - again. Or maybe, for the first time.

The desert brings back her first life with a speed that would have made Askefise’s fingers fly across her tablet with a scientific glee Nikki can now trace back to her own grandmother - a Biology professor never granted the respect in her field because of her gender and the color of her skin. The first change is her gait, the way she rolls her hips in her joints. It becomes more fluid, more like swimming or floating than fighting against gravity the way she was before. Cordelia notices, even if she never says a word.

Routines before - were a scrambling, desperate gamble against time and then against vampires and time. Every moment that she can now retrace feels so rushed, so heavy. The day-to-day rituals she took for granted in her first life always focused upon the simple construct of never wasting time, of squeezing each and every moment until it was dry. For a girl that didn’t see her thirtieth birthday - or her son’s …. Anything - this policy kept her alive and moving.

Now, now there was nothing but time.

Now - there was nothing but ritual for a completely different purpose.

Routines became: pancakes on the full moon the size of her palm that she carried about with her for the next two days, covering them in peanut butter and eating them on the porch while she watched the sunrise. Became: combing Cordelia’s hair when it was wet right after the shower in slow, sure strokes until it dried under just the weight of her hands, crackling and popping at her. Became: lying in bed next to a woman she loved, but not saying a word because they were both of them too old for words and too young for anything else. Became: a hand on her elbow while she pulled milk out of the fridge, elbows and knees tangled up in each other on the couch, lips pressed against skin that shivered.

Silence became routine, became ritual, like it was the third member of their relationship.

Silence over what happened, what was happening, and what would happen.

Some days, she stormed out of the house and walked for hours or days on the old road looking for the crumbling freeway again, only to come back dry and parched and no longer really worried about where the milk and eggs in the fridge were coming from.

This too, was a kind of ritual itself.

When she came back home Cordelia would be waiting for her, a hot bath drawn up rich and thick with bubbles and lotions and oils, a glass of ice-water, and a plate of thick, rich bread or something else that she could sink her teeth into, roll around in her mouth, and feel full again. On those nights, Cordelia would undress her like a child, her expression confused and pained - as if she didn’t know why Nikki had returned moreso than why she had left - and then soothingly bathe all the dirt and aches from her body and bones.

Once, out of curiousity, Nikki had taken the large butcher knife out of the block and had worked the skin on her forearm away from the bone, just to see what was there. It was white - like bone - and a shiver of pain raced up when she pressed the knife deep into it. But she could never be sure of what, exactly, they were made of. They bled, they ate, they shit, they loved.

And every few months and then weeks and then days - Nikki would strike out across the desert looking for …. The end of the rainbow, she supposed.

If talking were a thing that she even remembered how to do anymore, she would have joked about feeling like Dorothy, they were only missing a pet dog.

Except she was sure she wasn’t Dorothy. Maybe they were both the Tinman - both created and lacking anything aside from a heart. Because all she seemed to do these days was feel more deeply than she had even known she was capable of feeling.

Something about Cordelia’s lips pressed against hers, something about the silence of their existence defining them, something about the way they both went barefoot around the house and then tried to warm their cold toes on each other’s skin, something about waking up beside someone who understood when to wash the dishes and where to put the recycling and how to sort laundry without so much as an exchanged sound.

Cordelia watched from the window as Nikki struck out across the sand, this time to the East. The last time she had gone South and the time before that, Northwest. Three times in eight days.

Cordelia stood at the window, still as the glass, and watched Nikki trudge across the great expanse that held them in solitude. Someday, she’d find what she was looking for or slip through one of Dawn’s cracks or figure out that there was an off switch below her right second rib and she wouldn’t come back.

Until then, Cordelia would stand next to the window, arms loose at her side, feet bare against the grains of the hardwood floor, and wait for her to come back, the whirring ticking brain rattling in her head keeping track of every millisecond that she was gone. The possibility that someday, someday sooner than she’d like, that would be the end of both of them - Nikki gone over the edge of the horizon and Cordelia standing in a window - filled her with a certain kind of peace.

At least she’d know how it was going to end.

At least this time she’d be prepared.

She smiled a little at her reflection in the window and then jumped at what she saw.

Nikki. Returning. A wild hare sleeping peacefully in her arms. Only a few moments after she had left.

Twenty minutes, fourteen and three-quarters of a second since the moment Cordelia’s eyes lost track of her until she came back into view.

She had never left for less than sixteen hours before.

Cordelia opened the front door and walked to the edge of the porch.

Routine said that she should draw a bath and apologize in that silent way that she had grown accustomed to. But routine didn’t have an answer for something new.

Nikki grinned when she reached the steps leading up to the porch, just a mere inch or two outside the span of Cordelia’s arms.

“I love you,” Nikki said, her voice rough and low from lack of use. She let the giant hare fall from her arms and the ridiculous thing began to make itself at home on the living room couch. Nikki took a step forward, onto the first stair, eye-to-eye with Cordelia for the first time in twenty-seven minutes, fourteen and three-quarters of a second. “I love you, which is a bit fucking ridiculous, because you are a pill to live with,” she was joking, Cordelia knew this. It had just been so long since Nikki had told a joke. Ninety-seven days, fifteen hours, twenty-seven minutes, fourteen and three-quarters of a second. She took another step, and grabbed Cordelia’s hands when she would have stepped backward to make room for them, “I love you.” Nikki looked down at her and smiled, her bright eyes burning with something so honest, so honest, so beloved that Cordelia didn’t know if she was about to throw up or laugh or cry or some combination of all three at once. “I love you and I am not going to leave you. Ever.”

This seemed a bit ridiculous in Cordelia’s opinion. They were dead things holding onto life in Shells that had been made by an evil corporation. Ever was an impossibly long time for the two of them.

Nikki raised one eyebrow, “Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered back.

Two and one quarter of a second.

After dinner, Nikki picked up her glass of wine, swirled it a bit in the candlelight and then said cheerily, “Mind telling me where the fuck we are, babe?”

Cordelia chugged down her wine like she wasn’t quite sure she wanted there to be an end to it and then looked Nikki straight in the eye, “That’s not the right question.”

“No?”

“No.”

Nikki waited. If there was one thing she had learned to be with Cordelia, it was patient.

“Don’t you want to know what the right question is?”

Nikki shrugged and started to clear the table. She’d walked for days at a time in one direction, the North star in front or over her left shoulder, and she’d never gotten anywhere. She knew after the first time that the creature from the road on their way here wasn’t about to let them leave. And honestly, that was fine with her.

But she wasn’t stupid enough to think that any of this was okay with Cordelia.

There was a haunted quality to her silence, and if she needed more time - then she needed more time.

Cordelia grabbed the empty salad bowl and her empty wine glass and joined Nikki in the kitchen. “The right question,” she said, “Is where we were.”

“Okay,” Nikki folded her arms over her chest and leaned against the sink to face Cordelia. “So from what…. Askefise told me,” they both winced at the mention of Nikki’s granddaughter’s name. Before leaving they’d run around and around in circles whether to go back for anyone, Askefise and Maelid’s names always tumbling against lips that refused to give a voice to the possibility. Because there wasn’t one. They’d left everything and everyone. Nikki closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began again, “What the scientists told me was that we were on Earth - the Earth as it was after the dimensions crumbled. … they couldn’t really explain that part and I’m not eager to track down your friend and ask.”

Cordelia fought back a smile at the mention of Dawn, just as she flashed back to that moment on the road, when Dawn’s blood had finally - and utterly - exposed the truth after all that time.

She shook her head, “We were wrong.”

Nikki leaned forward a little, eyes narrowing.

“The Great Purge the…” her voice cracked. “The PTB, the elders, They told me they’d been banished or killed. But that’s not true.” Her eyes shone. “The PTB weren’t banished, we were.”

“That….” Nikki’s mind went through everything she understood about this strange, chrome-and-blood world, but kept coming up with a fundamental error in logic.

The young gods, they’d kicked Cronus off Mt. Olympus and ruled in his stead. That’s what had happened. It was a brand new fucking age.

She lifted her head and met Cordelia’s gaze across the kitchen, the remains of their dinner littering the spaces between them, the proof of their lives together in every flickering frame of reference that filled her immediate space. And then she saw it, like a flash of lightning.

“The dimensions…”

“Blurred,” Cordy whispered. “Not broken.”

“Hell. They pulled me out of heaven and dragged me into hell,” there was no ire in her voice, it wasn’t like this was the worst news. Either Wolf, Ram, & Hart and the young PTB had banded together to destroy all of fucking reality…. Or….

“Hell,” Nikki smiled. “Good. Then they can fucking stay there.”

Cordelia heard the satisfaction in Nikki’s voice and smiled back. Maybe it didn’t fix anything, maybe all those years and all of those beautiful people and that gorgeous terrible city were worth fighting for - and maybe knowing the rest of the Earth was doing just fine, chugging along the way it always had, was enough.

“For now,” she whispered into Nikki’s hair late that night, their naked bodies pressed against each other, sticky with sweat and chests heaving with satisfaction.

They could stay there for now.

But Immortality has its perks. And one of them, she’d finally figured out, was just how long you can hold a grudge.