Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own any characters relating to either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Stargate SG-1. This story is intended for entertainment purposes only and does not provide any financial compensation.


Return To Normal


Chapter Two



There is a certain atmosphere to hospitals, an unmistakable ambiance those familiar with the sensation would be able to note even through the dizzying confusion of regaining consciousness. The smell of disinfectant, the harsh prickly texture of starched sheets, the muted sound of electronic machines pinging and beeping monotonously, all were recognizable even before eyes were opened, or brain became fully functional. Buffy Summers had seen more than her fair share of hospitals, and knew them far better than she would have preferred. Even if she didn’t associate them with pain and death, she would have resented the feeling of helplessness, of not being in control, that was the inevitable result of any of her myriad experiences at being hospitalized. Even before she was fully awake, her first thought was typical; ‘I need to get away from this place.’

It wasn’t a psychic warning or Slayer dream prodding her to escape imminent danger; it was deeper, a primal awareness, a subconscious distrust of hospitals and doctors which generally stood her in good stead in terms of recovering and getting the hell away from a hospital bed as soon as possible. But returning consciousness brought a quick and brutal end to any thoughts of escape on this occasion. She was in pain. A lot of pain. Enough pain that her desire for escape was over-ruled by an even deeper concern; ‘Oh, crap; I’m hurt real bad.’

Only then did she remember the reason she was in the hospital: the fight at the airport, the horrific damage the Rock Beast had done to her before she finally put it down for good. Which explained the bandages wrapping her face, covering one of her eyes, the agonizing pain coming from her stomach, which had not only been cut open but the muscles shredded when she threw the hammer. All of it would heal, eventually; but in the meantime she felt the same amount of pain anyone else would. Being a Slayer meant she healed quickly. It didn’t mean she didn’t experience the pain of receiving the wounds in the first place, or recovering from them afterwards. And right about then she was feeling pretty much the same way anyone else would in similar circumstances. It hurt… a lot.

It didn’t help that there were tubes stuffed into every orifice, even more jammed into various limbs directly when a convenient orifice wasn’t available; temperature and electrical sensors taped randomly all over her body, thick gauze bandages slapped down apparently at random. Or the fact that they had apparently used an industrial stapler to reseal her torso after the Beast had pretty much disemboweled her. She was hot and cold and sore and uncomfortable and groggy and frightened and she really, really wished she was anywhere else but where she was…

Even before the special air-tight door to the special critical-care trauma room was opened, Buffy heard the increasing pace of the beeps and bleeps of the monitoring equipment, so wasn’t surprised when someone came to check on her. Naturally they would know when she awoke. Given the way they had her hooked up, they would know everything there was to know about her mental and physical state. The nurse who arrived was dressed up like the Mummy. Even her eyes were concealed behind goggles, every inch of skin covered in green surgical gear or rubber. Buffy wanted to ask for something to drink, but her mouth was too dry, and a huge tube was jammed down her throat, but even if she had been able to speak the nurse ignored her, simply adjusting some of the drip lines, tapping a few buttons on the huge rack of monitoring equipment surrounding the bed. Within seconds Buffy felt consciousness begin to ebb, the return of peaceful slumber as welcome as it was irritating. She had really wanted some water.
She really hated hospitals.



Regaining consciousness the second time around was marginally less brutal. She had been moved to another room, still apparently in the critical care ward, but no longer linked up to every machine known to medical science inside a steel isolation tank. Most of the tubes were gone, as well as a lot of the bandages, and she was actually wearing a hospital gown this time, which was a big step up from the naked-except-for-the-bandages state she recalled from the previous moment of consciousness. There were still beeping machines, still bags of fluid dripping into tubes impaled in her arms, but her stomach didn’t hurt nearly as much, both eyes seemed to be working, and a lot of the scrapes and cuts had healed. Some time had passed… days probably. She was a long, loong way from recovered… but well on the road to recovering. As Whistler had promised, she would live.

They were still monitoring her, because almost as soon as she awakened, a nurse arrived, this one wearing surgical clothing including mask, but minus the goggles. This room wasn’t quite as sterile as the previous one had been. Another sign of her recovery, she supposed. With the tube no longer blocking her mouth, Buffy tried to speak, her throat so dry the words were barely intelligible. “How‘m ah doon’?”

The nurse ignored her, checking the machines surrounding the bed, before once again adjusting the drip going into her arm. That was why Buffy hated hospitals. The way she was ignored, her questions not considered worthy of even a polite response. When she felt consciousness fading Buffy tried to fight it, glaring at the nurse in rage. “You do tha’ again an’ I’m gonna jam tha’ thing…” She faded too fast to complete the threat, but took some satisfaction in the sudden fear in the nurses eyes. It didn’t make up for the fact that she wasn’t able to withstand the siren effects of the drug, and seconds later was once again out like a light.



The third time was apparently the charm, as Buffy awoke in what seemed to be a more typical hospital room, attached to far fewer machines, no longer quite feeling like she was hooked up to a life support system like Spock’s brain-less body was back in the classic episode… and she suddenly thought that Xander would pee himself if he knew she had used that analogy. Some kind of plastic clamp was hooked to her fingers, and there was still a drip going into one arm, but both eyes were now clear and her stomach muscles were no longer screaming in agony. Even more importantly, there weren’t any tubes stuck into unmentionable parts of her lower anatomy. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, so she lifted her gown to check the scar on her stomach, seeing it was still an angry red jagged line extending from groin up to just below her breast, and estimated it couldn’t have been more than a few days since it happened, given her normal rate of recovery. Removing the annoying finger sensor, she scowled when the heart-rate monitor device started buzzing shrilly.

The medical staff arrived quickly. Two of them this time, both looking at her tentatively. Apparently her threat to the previous nurse had been noted, and this time the nurse –a different one, not surprisingly—was accompanied by a doctor. She knew he was a doctor by the fact that he wasn’t garbed as thoroughly as the nurse, and carried a stethoscope, and had a monogram saying ‘Dr. Elliot Ulezis’ sewn into the breast of his surgical shirt. He gave a professional –but obviously sincere- smile when he saw that she was alert and not as dead as the machine was implying, but was careful to remain out of her reach in case she reacted violently. Which brought up the other thing she hated about hospitals; when you dared challenge their omnipotence, they got all prissy and acted like you were the moral equivalent of a cannibal urinating on their temple floor. She really hated hospitals.

“Good afternoon, Miss Summers. I am Dr. Ulezis.” Buffy had to restrain herself from mentioning that she wasn’t illiterate. “I’m glad to see that you are awake. Also a bit surprised, given the extent of your injuries and the volume of drugs presently in your system. I’m just going to examine you…” He paused when Buffy glared at him, holding up her hand, finger pointing threateningly.

“Water.” Her throat was still dry, and that was her priority. If he thought he could feel her up without suffering some serious bodily injury, he was very much mistaken. There was a pause and a whispered debate about the wisdom of providing her with water, but they finally got the message of the danger of not providing her with some goddamn water RFN when she sat up, eyes glaring, feeling sore and tired and put upon and not willing to put up with any more superiority-complex issues from the medical staff -slash- torturing bastards. Long, brutal experience had taught her the necessity of being unremittingly firm with doctors, as they were unruly and needed a disciplined hand to retain control or they would walk all over you.

She got her friggin’ water.

The doctor barely let her complete draining the glass before berating her. Not a wise move, but medical people were arrogant and slow to learn, she had already noted. So she permitted him to whine about ‘examining’ her while she checked the void in her mouth where half her teeth used to be. After giving an audible grunt, she noted that the replacements were dropping, but the process had only just started. Some were much smaller than those they were replacing, as they hadn’t had enough time to regrow since the NID knocked out the originals only a few months before. Despite their smaller size, it was just as painful as the last time she went through it. It really sucked to be a woman in her 20’s experiencing teething pain. Feeling around her chest, she could easily count the ribs, and there wasn’t even the hint of a breast. Every ounce of fat was gone from her body, and a lot of muscle had been cannibalized to repair the damage done during the fight. She probably looked about twelve years old, and as someone who already was somewhat ‘challenged’ in the height department she was not thrilled with this discovery. The doctor finally noticed that she wasn’t paying the slightest attention to his harangue and paused, the silence finally capturing Buffy’s attention the way his rant hadn’t been able to. One finger still feeling around the inside of her hospital gown, she looked up at him and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Miss Summers, this is a hospital. Our job is to help people who are in need of medical care. This includes you. Whether you realize it or not, you almost died. In point of fact, you should have died. At least three of your injuries would have been considered fatal had they occurred to anyone but yourself. So far –somehow—your body has substantially recovered from extremely grave injuries, but we have no idea if you are going to suffer a relapse or if the extraordinary effort your body took to fix itself might lead to other complications. You ran a temperature of 119° F for more than 24 hours. No one else in medical history has ever survived such an extended fever. Given the volume of blood you lost and your refusal to receive a transfusion I have no idea how you are even still alive, let alone conscious. So much about you, about your extraordinary abilities, is just so baffling. I am not going to hurt you, and I might even be able to help. Please, let me at least try.”

Truthfully, Buffy was feeling pretty crappy, so she nodded, lay back on the bed and let the doctor do his thing. He was actually pretty professional about it, probably intimidated by the distrustful glare she aimed at him throughout the process. He was astounded by the degree of healing in the massive scar across her torso, to the point where he had to remove several of the surgical staples before scar tissue covered them over entirely. It was only when he wanted to draw additional blood samples for analysis that Buffy put her foot down. “No.”

He hadn’t even been speaking to her, merely giving the nurse instructions for the tests he wanted run, and was surprised by the interruption. Buffy already knew that patients were not permitted any voice in what was done to their bodies while held hostage by the medical establishment, so wasn’t surprised by his reaction, but also wasn’t going to be bullied by it. “Buffy is like the candy store: No Free Samples. No weird testy-thingies. I don’t care if you don’t understand what’s happening. All I care about is getting better, not satisfying your curiosity. You want something done on me, you ask me. If it will help me get out of here faster then maybe I’ll let you do it. If you can’t explain why it will help me, or can’t explain it so that I understand why it will help me, then the answer is ‘no.’ No blood. No tubes up my tushie. No needles, no drugs, no random samples of various bodily fluids so you can boil them over a Bunsen burner giggling maniacally. I am not a guinea pig here for you to run through a maze. Understand?”

Naturally he argued, but Buffy was adamant. The nurse had seen the events at the airport on television and wasn’t going to do anything likely to get her head chopped off so remained silent. Even so, Buffy was awakened two days later when her ‘spider sense’ tingled, a warning she did not shake off. She had long since refused to wear the heart rate sensor so there was no warning at the nurses station when she got up from her bed and opened the door to listen. It wasn’t an alien she was sensing, it was even worse; State Security agents were talking to Dr. Ulezis about her. He was actually still trying to be professional, claiming doctor/patient confidentiality, but the agents showed him papers which gave them the right to demand all medical records on her status and treatment. Not because they wished her any harm, of course. She had saved the President’s life after all. They just wanted to be certain she would be okay.

While they were talking Buffy calmly left her room, and walked down the hall to another room where she found a nurses surgical uniform. She was actually feeling pretty lousy, and would have honestly preferred to remain in bed another couple of days. To test if she was just imagining things, she found a scalpel, still in its sterilized packaging, and used it to cut deeply into her left shoulder. It hurt, and bled a lot, but she soon located the tiny plastic-and-metal tube. Even unconscious, her senses had known when the trauma nurse had injected the RFID tag into her. Which was why she had threatened her at the time… and why she spent a few minutes now considering carrying out that threat. Because, even worse, there was another tag in her butt cheek, and to dig it out she really had to slash away at her ass using her wrong hand. Which left her in an even worse mood as she bandaged it up, got dressed in a nurse’s scrub outfit she found in a laundry bag, and made her way out of the hospital.

Leaving turned out to be a lot easier than she expected. Probably because nobody expected her to be able to leave even if she had wanted to. In addition, the physical changes her body had undergone in the five days since everyone on the planet watched her on television ensured that no one recognized her. Her face was swollen, her mouth looked different due to the missing teeth. She was much shorter… probably less than five feet tall. She scowled thunderously at that last thought. She had already been short enough, and it would take months for the bones to regrow enough for her to regain the difference in height. Her skin was paler, and her hair had been chopped back on one side, giving her a punkish look, and had changed color again. It was also a matter of good timing; the morning shift was just arriving, and in her purple surgical scrubs she fit right in with those walking from the hospital to the attached nurses residence. There she appropriated someone’s street clothing, changed and tried to do something with her hair, before calmly walking out into open, hidden by the sheer mass of humanity of morning rush hour traffic even in a small city like Colorado Springs.




It helped that she had prepared for just such an eventuality when she was hiding out before being captured by the SGC. She had prepared a cache of clothing, identification documents, and money, just in case she had to abandon her belongings. She remembered where she had hidden everything, and despite her weakened state was able to move the huge boulder protecting the sealed pack, mostly using leg power but cringing in pain as her damaged stomach muscles made their presence felt. Her own clothes were too big for her, but fit better than those she had stolen. A bit of quick tailoring fixed that enough for most people not to pay too much attention to how baggy they looked, or to dismiss it as another weird fashion statement. It helped that she now looked like she was the proper age for engaging in hormonally-triggered fashion rebellion. After returning to town, she found a restaurant and ate, overhearing other diners talking about the events of the previous few days. Including the interesting tidbit that senior people in government were claiming that there might be ‘hundreds, perhaps even thousands!’ of the less powerful mental dominants Buffy had called ‘Priors in Training’ hiding out as Fifth Columnists. And that State Security was requesting they be given emergency powers to hunt them all down, even if civil liberties needed to be ‘temporarily’ limited given the critical nature of the potential threat.

Sighing, Buffy finished her meal and went to the bus station. There was a street preacher who stood blocking the entrance, bothering everyone as they rushed towards their buses, calling out "Are you a Christian? Do you realize that Rapture is at hand!?" She tried to ignore him, almost used to encountering ‘interesting’ people at various bus stations by this point in her life. At least he diverted attention from her, and his rant was far preferable to the guy in Phoenix who had come up to her and said “I gotta pee. Do you want to hold it for me?” She wondered how anyone not possessing Slayer powers was brave enough to get on a bus. God only knew she wouldn’t have if she didn’t, and that would have deprived her of some very interesting times with some pretty… uhm… interesting people. Bus travel might not be the fastest way to see the country, but it sure was the most colorful. And it allowed her some time to think, as she had her own problems to consider.

By now State Security would know that she had disappeared from the hospital. They would soon know, if they didn’t know it already, that their tracking devices had been removed. RFID tags weren’t active; they had no internal power sources so didn’t send off a signal, but were only activated when they returned a signal from an external sensor. She didn’t know if the hospital exits had been equipped with such sensors, or how ubiquitous the tags and sensor units had become. She was certain there were no more of them implanted in her body… but her internal senses would not have detected one incorporated into the nursing scrubs she wore when she left the hospital. It was unlikely any had been attached to the clothing she now wore, since it had been buried for awhile. But they would soon be looking for her. Not to arrest her or anything. She wasn’t in any actual danger from State Security at the moment, of that she was almost certain. But they were obviously interested in her, and would be taking measures to control her life in the not-too-distant future. If there was anything you could count on, it was that people in power would do whatever was necessary to ensure that they remained in power.

It was a good thing she wasn’t so naïve as to believe that the end of the immediate Goa’uld threat meant she was now ‘safe’ and could freely live out her life, happily ever after. There was a time when she’d believed in happy endings; but that was a long time ago. She was a lot more realistic in her world view now, and had learned the hard way that facing down an obvious external enemy was often the easy part. Afterwards things got more subtle, the fighting almost as deadly but not nearly so honorable. The implanted RFID tags were just the start, and she was already tired of the whole thing. Tired, and sore, and feeling like crap. And annoyed that everyone was treating her like the 13 year old girl she now looked to be.

However they might have had a point, because like anyone who had been hurt and needed time to recover, especially thirteen year old girls, she wanted to go see her mom for some TLC. And that was exactly what she was doing.