Rattlesnake

by Lise and River

They're a crime scene, she sometimes thinks, she's never been good with metaphors; leaving blood and sweat and semen, and the afterscent of fear, and fibers of each other.

She thinks, sometimes, if only she could have divided the evidence, separated the molecules, perhaps she could trace the course of this, find the root, gnaw it raw until it let loose of this strange possession she's never liked much.

I hate the extreme proportions all this angst seems to take. Nothing feels real anymore.

I can buy it when other people dish it out. Sometimes. Making it is· a bit harder on that center in charge of suspending disbelief.

We suspend nothing.

But, we find nothing either.

And when I'm honest with myself, there isn't anything to find.

That's when it hurts the most, when I have to spit, screaming, into this abyss that life has come... that's when I work harder, and run faster, and forage longer hours.

She calls me brave.

I call it lying.

It doesn't matter what we call this crime scene... the evidence? It disappears quietly, with a hum and the sound of grinding. Like the way two gears grind, axles strained and oil already burned away.

And each time the world changes, who the fuck cares. New crime scene, new place to forage.

Extreme proportions.

I can't fucking stand it anymore.

These days, it seems like, everyplace I look, the lines just twist away. The evience proves *nothing*, my words don't mean dick. I don't, I'm not even sure anymore that I meant them to, back back back when they left my mouth.

They seem to think that I know what I'm doing. I don't get what gave them that idea. I can't be that good a liar.

When it's dark and quiet and starry outside and she rolls away in her sleep, and my arm's cold, sometimes. Sometimes I hate them. For wanting to believe.

Look at the evidence. *Look* at the *evidence*. What kind of a fighter are you if you can't give judgement to your circumstances?

You used to be a fighter.

--- All my thought trails end up angry.

Maybe I want to believe, too.

I don't think that excuses any of us.

*

I spring up, look around, defenses ready.

It's daylight. But the way things look, there are snakes in the bed. Shining and slippery, blue light cold and serene, like ice snakes. Snakes made of ice. There are a hundred thousand snakeskins laying on the ground around us, each of them with a length of at least thirty feet.

Fuck.

I hate reptiles.

The temperature is steamy, and we're in long grass. Volcanic ash, savanah, desert, nightmares, hell, Hell, the sun on the south pole, a distinct lack of starlight... toxic gas that made Cordelia drop almost instantly.

You remember those satellite dishes that got five hundred channels, but all of them ended up being shit? --We don't have a remote, but it's kind of like that.

It's kind of like the reception's bad.

She stirs beside me. I back off. Somewhere around here, Angelus is roaming. I felt him, as soon as I woke up. I usually do.

It smells like predators.

There's a stirring in the forest beside me, things alive and gnawing, and I hunker down over her, while she eyes me sleepily. "Where the hell did we end up?"

I shrug, and then her eyes widen, finger points up. I tilt my head back, peer up into the sky, and get my first glimpse of pterodactyl.

I just stare. What a time not to have the remote control.

There's another rustling in the bushes.

From somewhere to our left, deep inside the green and amber leaves, there's a noise like something making sound deliberately. A great big ugly thing -- lizards with teeth, wonderful -- looks away from us. It may have blinked, but maybe I'm just imagining. All my dyno education comes from Disney cartoons.

It walks away, and I'm trying to decide if it's just Slayer-senses that make me feel the ground humming after it.

When I look back at her, as it disappears into the huge leaves, I can tell that she's blinking because my Buffy education is vast and hard-learned. So I know what she's gonna say.

"It's going after Angel. Come on."

But people get pissy if you don't let them say their piece.

Hand on her shoulder, and I'm just smart enough to make it pay-attention not stay-there and don't wind up with a broken arm. "Angelus. And he'll be gone before that thing gets to him."

"You don't --"

"I do know that," and I'm never quite smart enough to follow all the rules I know of, and, "And so do you, damnit -- you saw it move."

She nods curtly, and we sit back for a minute, look around. I see her eyes -- or maybe that's just her mind -- follow that big and ugly through the woods, seeking out its hunt. I can feel her follow it, and when the crashing starts, I see something-- die, in her eyes.

Fucking corny.

Another casualty to add to the pile. We've got ourselves a serial killer.

A figure storms out of the underbrush, cursing in a very familiar Irish accent. He stops when he spots us, and smirks. "Ladies. And what would you be doing out in this big, bad world?"

I roll my eyes. B answers, "Hunting."

She's never been closer to figuring out who she really was than at that moment.

He lunges, and she grabs the sword from the ground by her feet, brandishes it and whips it across, severing his neck. Before he even realizes, she grabs his wrist in a hold and cuts off his finger, the digit flying into the grass. He fries instantly.

She lets the ashes explode almost on top of her even before she's fully standing up again. His head doesn't have time to reach the ground.
 
I frown; protective artifacts are such a bitch. "He had the ring?"

Her voice is... old. "I think so." She fishes around in the grass for a minute, and holds it up in the light, metal gleaming like the way a knife does when it's pulled on you, street lamp glow and sunlight glow and the glow of fear. She nods, and says softly, "Twenty three."

Buffy sits down again, and I crouch beside her while she puts the ring on the string tied around her neck, to match the other twenty two.

"I still don't get why you keep 'em."

Eight of those rings, they're just fakes, things from a corner store, warped wires, two of her own rings from places where there was no way to get a substitute and she fought them off, and didn't cry, and put them on a string. Eight Angels didn't have the ring at all, but we can't afford to lose count.

I don't know why the fuck we can't afford to lose count.

She doesn't look at me. She looks at Wesley's sleeping bag. "Because we need to stop this."

Twenty three rings, five travellers, sixty three fucking billion times we've had this talk, and I still don't get it, because she doesn't, I don't know, doesn't explain it properly. I *know* she's not crazy. I'd know if she was.

She tries to explain every time the rumble comes, the wave of shimmering air, the -- change. I decided it was a different world by the third change, because it didn't look like we'd get more explanation than that, and it was easiest. Wes, he's still trying to understand. Each and every one, each and every time. But everyone needs something to do at night.

Buffy - I don't know what she thinks. Maybe she's worked out some answers. I think she has. I just never manage to understand what they are, or how a pile of metal circles is going to save us.

Why the fuck she thinks it's not too late for that.
 
Still. Something really, really basic in her is broken. I -- don't really think it got that way when the fifth change happened and we landed in a sand storm just to see Angel dropping soldier boy to the ground. I don't think.

Sometimes I think maybe it happened way way back. But that's scary, because, hell, way way back is me. Other things, too, but -- me.

She says, "What, you think it's a coincidence we end up near him every time?" Gestures to Wesley's sleeping bag, to Drusilla's habitual place, in the middle where one of us can reach over and pat her in the middle of the night if she whimpers. "You think it's a coincidence we're all who we are? That none of them ever says anything about it?"

I get deja vu.

I wish there was someone I could still rely on who knew her longer than me, better than me. Who got her. I don't know.

It's time, though, to figure out where our fallen comrades have gone, or whether there even is a Dru or a Wesley in this place we've found ourselves in.

I almost-- wish-- that Cordelia was still around. The place, the world, we picked her up from, she'd already been bitten. She'd already been-- broken, as well. Angelus. As always.

She'd know what kind of sense to beat into the silly bitch.

"Trance time, B."

She nods. Closes her eyes. I stand up, back twisting painfully so that I can try and keep below the level of the grass. Another pterodactyl flies above us, and the shrill noises it makes reminds me of great eagles, or ravens the size of the sun.

She'll find them: the Watcher, the vamp, and the witch. All of them. We've got it down to a science. Search and rescue.

Drusilla's probably riding a fucking Tyranosaurus Rex.

*

The seizures don't hit this time. Small blessings.

I don't get any of this. But she's the one with the spider-sense, now, and she's right. They never object. There must be some logic to this.

Just because you can't see something, doen't mean it isn't there. Wes -- the Wes who lasted longest, eight changes, who got to have that sleeping bag we keep towing around, whose sleeping bag still lasted longer than he did -- he said that to me, once.

We keep getting them killed or they keep getting themselves killed or the world keeps killing them, the worlds, so there must besome deeper meaning to this.

Sometimes I wonder if this isn't just where I've started off in the first place.

But this is Summers, you know? I can make fun of it, but -- I know as well as any of themdid, maybe better. Light and good and justice and the American way and all that shit. So this must be right after all, must have somthing right to it.

I trust her. She wouldn't --whatever.

Trust her as much as she used to trust me, once. More, because she shouldn't have and I do. I owe her that. She earned it.

And each time they die, each and every time we're left standing, and on every third world where the Angelus we dust off is one that comes packaged with a soul, I tell myself they were clones anyway.

The crime scene, it has so many false leads. Too many. I get confused. Forget who the cops are, who's the criminal. Who the criminals are. I --

It can be difficult to keep your head level when you can't do the same with the world. My shrink, that old guy in prison who never really got enough of it and always got it a little too well, he said I needed to remember the world wasn't always the way I saw it. That there was -- no objective truth, or something, so my point of view was the only thing that mattered, but that I needed to look at things a little differently sometimes. See the world not the way I was used to it.

Well. He'd be proud. That old guy, he never really knew anything, because I didn't ever plan to stay forever in some white padded room and so I could only talk in -- code. Feelings. The way I saw things. So he didn't get it.

But who can get Slayers, anyway.

I leave her, sitting in the middle of some vast field of grass, mind ranging out among the dinosaurs.

Someone has to go find something to eat, and the only one with the strength and the mask and the lies to keep practical about this shit is me. I'm the one that doesn't understand the mystic, I'm the one that's straight, up, simple--

I'm the one that doesn't believe, so I'm the one that has to hunt gophers today.

Racing through me is energy-- first Slayer-ish, but I'm not that powerful. She might be, but I don't pretend to be stronger than her. Stronger than I am, but not stronger than her.

Not where it counts, anyway.

It doesn't take me long to get enough for at least five to eat-- with the size of our stomachs, anyway, and I find her in the same spot as when I left... rooted like the massive pine trees off in the distance.

Levelled. In contact with the dirt and the living things.

She opens her eyes when I come back and sling the dead rabbit-y things on the ground with a dry 'thump'. "Luck?"

She stares off into the distance-- I think she's still seeing things in a different light than normal. "Maybe. Drusilla is alive. Few miles away. She'll be here before sundown."

Dru. The only ring that Buffy doesn't wear around her neck, Dru has on her finger. The only Angelus Buffy didn't slay. That was me.

"What about Pryce and Willow?"

Her jaw sets. "I'll find them. Trickle of something to the north."

I hesitate. I want to ask her if it's the same Willow as last world. I -- know it's not the same Wes.

She knows I'm curious, and shakes her head. "This one is different. Darker. Stronger."

One that'll survive, maybe do some damage of her own. --a useful Willow.

I start trying to clear away an area of grass big enough so we can do the kinds of magic this Willow might be capable of... a stronger witch, one that doesn't need a lover and a kind smile to bring down lighting and fire and brimstone.

Buffy whispers, "I'm gonna miss her."

Just copies. I put a hand on her shoulder, gently, and a shrill cry comes from the forest, some smaller thing being eaten by a larger thing. "Where was Dru? No, let me guess. Riding a dinosaur."

She doesn't laugh. I sit down on the ground, ass frozen and thoughts getting angry as always. Start building another fire. Number... four hundred and sixty eight, if I was keeping count.

But I'm not the one that keeps the tally. I don't need to tag the evidence, and why the fuck do I care what players, what suspects, she's got in her head. She's the mystic one. She's the one that's keeping tabs on everyone that dies.

I don't remember how many photocopies of people we've met. I don't care, either. How can you lay claim to murder if the victims keep showing up and talking to you, laughing with you, sharing the sleeping bags of victims that came before?

Just copies. Copies of copies of copies. Like the snakeskin we're gonna be sleeping in tonight.

Like the copy after copy after copy, paler and more cruel every time, of someone who tried to save me, ashed by someone who made me want to save myself.

Paler and crueler and more soulless, even when it doesn't look that way, and haven't I always been world champion at believing my own lies?

I wish I could stop poking and prodding at that crime scene. Stop looking under the rug, into the fireplace, stop searching for a less likely suspect.

You used to be a fighter. I don't know who.

I don't know who. Can't fight the universe, why bother fighting paper dolls.

Copy of copy of copy of. And my head stays the same, I think, when the world changes, and maybe my shrink wouldn't be so proud after all, and -- sometimes I dream that, a thousand and one worlds ago, one of the soulless got me. And she called my copy to her, and went on.

Slayers don't have copies. We don't shed. Maybe we're not allowed. I've never laid eyes on another Buffy Summers. Though, if anyone didn't know shit about shit, it'd be me.

And almost, almost, I want to. Shed and leave behind skin and false expressions and copies of copies of. Prove we were here, leave something behind for someone like Wes to try and investigate, try to know who we were, if all the Wes's we've gone through weren't gone already. Maybe one of those Wes's we never called to, because we arrived with our own more surviving copy. Or maybe just leave something for me, to come back through, like all those worlds were a loop and we'd come back to where we've started. Leave the evidence behind. Don't wipe the crime scene clean of our foot steps.

I want to give the cops another chance.

I want the stupidest things sometimes.

But then the change comes.

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