The end of life as it was

********************

Chapter One: The end of life as it was


Once again, I do not want anyone to be spoiled so here is the warning again: This story has spoilers for all of Firefly (aired and unaired episodes) and Serenity.

Translations are at the bottom of the page.

I don't own Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Firefly and I am not profiting off this story.

I'd like to thank my beta FaithUnbreakable for her wonderful proof reading jobs for which I would sound like an idiot without. [I probably still do anyway . . . :)]


How many years had she been here? Three? Four? She had stopped keeping track of time after her first few months on Shadow. No one was going to rescue her. Even if they tried, they would only muck it up. History had proven that one. Besides, if they could find her, they would have done so much quicker than the space of months. Hope was pretty much lost on that front.

Luckily, she had gotten to know a woman who owned a ranch in the area. Her name was Sharon Reynolds but she had everyone just call her Ma’am or Reynolds. It wasn’t that hard to remember who she was considering that, besides Buffy, she was the only woman on the ranch.

Forty men and two women. Normally Buffy would like those odds but she wasn’t particularly interested in any of the men the way some of them were interested in her. All the men she had ever been with had some kind of mystery to them and the ranch hands were pretty easy to figure out.

At least they had been before most of them, maybe all of them, were killed. There had been word out about Reavers who had been going through towns on different worlds and they were headed in Shadow’s direction. About three days after that notice, Reynolds had contacted somebody on a ship to get some help. Said he was family but Buffy wasn’t so sure about what kind of familial relation he was. The whole of the ranch was family according to Reynolds.

The Alliance didn’t have that strong an influence with the people out in Shadow’s little corner of the ‘verse and when the Reavers came to town . . . Buffy still couldn’t figure how they had stayed alive. They were the only ones left on the homestead when the Reavers came. Everyone else was out trying to finish their work early and that’s how they knew they had finally come.

It was a few hours before they were going to have their annual ‘founding of Shadow’ feast. Apparently there used to be fairs and the like, but that hadn’t been allowed since the Alliance won the war. She had been able to tell right away that that was a big bone of contention between the people on Shadow and the Alliance but when people really want things they find ways to get it. So, every year, Reynolds and her ‘family’ would have something Buffy thought of as being akin to Thanksgiving and it just happened to be on the day that Shadow was originally founded.

Absolutely no coincidence there.

Buffy heard the screams and the sound of flesh being ripped apart just as Reynolds took her arm and led her to the basement. There was no time to grab anything useful on the way down as they could hear the Reavers tearing through the house. They were just reaching the underground bunker when a couple Reavers caught up with them. One of them clawed at Reynolds from behind. Buffy fought them both off and they made it inside the bunker, barely. Reynolds put in the security code and they heard a bang that shook the door.

“What the hell was that?” Buffy asked.

“That was the gorram handle getting’ broke off the door. Only way a person’s gettin’ in here’s if they got the right code. Only one I know of who does. Don’ worry. He’ll get here soon. Was only a coupla days out . . .”

That was the last time Buffy saw her conscious. Reynolds was barely hanging on and all Buffy could do while they waited for salvation to come was listen to her breathe and count her heartbeats. She had done all she could in the way of patching her up but Reynolds was old and had lost more blood than Buffy was comfortable with. No matter how spry she might have been, age catches up to a woman real quick when she’s been cut open a few times and doesn’t have any real medical help. Not to mention there was no water. Shadow was damn hot in the summer. Being underground helped, but there was the issue that the power had gone out and now they were trapped inside.

Just keep listening to her breathing. This isn’t a tomb; there are people alive in here. It can only be a tomb if the people are dead, Buffy chanted to herself.

Most of the screaming had died down by this time. Buffy knew that by now everybody had to be dead.

I should have done something. I shouldn’t have gotten caught up and let myself be led down here. I should have fought.

She was the damn Slayer after all and Slayers did not hide in bunkers when people were dying outside. Slayers did not run and hide. They just didn’t. Buffy’s only consolation was that Reynolds would probably be dead by now if she hadn’t been with her to patch her up.

Reynolds was so sure that someone was going to come for them but Buffy didn’t have the same faith as she did. She was locked in from the outside in an underground bunker. She was living one of her worst nightmares all over again. It always seemed that she ended up trapped underground in small spaces with no way out from the inside. Then there was the fact that the adrenaline was wearing off and she realized that not all the red that she was seeing was Reynolds blood but her own as well.

She had gotten really close to Reynolds since she’d been on Shadow. She hadn’t asked Buffy anything about her past and set up a deal with her straight away that she would give her food and shelter for as long as she was willing to work for it.

She stopped counting periods of time – weeks, months and the like – after she finally lost hope. It just didn’t seem to matter anymore. She couldn’t even really explain how she ended up where she was. There was no little visit from any messengers for the Powers that Be or anything like that. There was a fight. Some demon she couldn’t remember the name of anymore who was trying to open the Cleveland hellmouth. It was killed pretty early on in the fight and the creature had not had the time to even begin the ritual, let alone screw it up to such mammoth-like proportions. Her little trainees were quite the learners and when they worked together, her girls could knock out any threat in no time flat. No, there had to have been something else going on that they weren’t informed of. Something that shouldn’t have fallen through the cracks. No one ends up 500 years in the future without a sound and reasonable explanation. There was no way that they shouldn’t have had some kind of warning about what was coming. No way at all.

Of course, none of that matters when you’re about to die anyway . . . Buffy thought as her eyelids started to droop.


Gorram = ***damn


Reviews are highly appreciated.