To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.
The first time Nicole has a dream like this, it's long months before That Day, the day in the park, when she threw the frisbee so hard that Mary Anne turned her wrist when trying to catch it, so hard it broke the windshield of a car parked half a good few hundred metres away.
She dreams about a little village somwhere in the strange mountains, where people bolt the windows shut and pin crosses to their doors. She dreams of lambs left chained to a wooden pike on the main square, left overnight, like a prayer and a sacrifice to the evil powers visiting the village each night.
She dreams of a strange pair of saviors, coming at dusk. The girl has black hair and dark skin, starkingly different from the villagers, but so close to Nicole's own. Nicole is her, in the dream, and she isn't.
She wakes up screaming, feeling the blood spilling from her neck, warm and sticky, even though there's not a scratch on her.
*
"I had a really weird dream," Kennedy says, brushing her hair slowly.
"Was I in it?" Willow asks, sending a smile over her shoulder, a corner of her lips rising in a question.
"Yeah. But different than usual. You had clothes on, for starters," Kennedy allows herself a smirking pause, before she continues. "You were younger, longer hair. Xander was there, and Giles. In a large bookshop or something. Very strange, lots of vamps, but I couldn't move. Some really crazy vampire chick slashed my throat," she says, fingers running down her neck absently. "Have any Strepsils?"
Willow doesn't answer.
*
November 12th, 1984.
Clarkson is thrilled that I took to patrolling that much. Not sure how to tell him that it's better than sleeping, as at least, I'm not dreaming about dying over and over again. I can see that conversation going very well, better even than the one about getting my first period. Sometimes I think he needs some pills for that stress thing he has going on.
Another dream, another death. Even more flashy than the one in the metro car. Cave huge as anything, lots of strange demons, and a lot of girls around, which is new. All of them Slayers, I knew that in the dream. Not sure how's that possible. Clarkson says it's impossible for there to be more than one of us. He looked terrified by the very idea, which I could find insulting.
And hey, can add having your spine broken to the evergrowing List Of The Deaths I Know Already.
*
It's almost a tradition by now; every time Giles breaks out the good cookies, the ones he buys in that special shop that carries some British food stuff, and makes tea, glaring at her viciously when she says bagged tea would be fine, he doesn't have to have a whole ceremony on her behalf.
"Tell me," he says, sitting down, pushing the plate with the cookies in her direction.
In the warm light of his green lamps, the dream doesn't seem so bad anymore. "You should start a therapy practice," Buffy suggests. "Cookies, great start. And you'd have lots of bookshelves in your office, where you could unpack all of the books we salvaged from the library before we blew it up. Not that I still resent spending an entire afternoon carrying book boxes, but I broke a nail that day, so you understand.
"Buffy."
She knows that tone quite well. It's the one that says "I'd prefer to have my own fingernails slowly torn out one by one, than listen to the tales of Buffy's Adventures in Manicure". Sometimes, Giles' tones are much more eloquent than Giles himself.
"Fire. They burned me at stake. I mean, her, whoever she was. Hey, is it possible that Joan of Arc was a Slayer? They never told me that in history class. Hey, does that mean that the British were working with the vampires? No one told me that, for sure. Giles, do you want to tell me something?"
"Burned at stake," Giles looks at her seriously, letting her babble fade away. "I'm sorry."
"Not as much as she was," Buffy shrugs.
*
She dreams. About a dark-skinned woman fighting for her life in a moving machine. About a sister sacrificing herself, throwing herself into the abyss. About a child, not a woman yet, whose blood swirls down and mixes with the water in the gutter. She dreams of dozens, fighting on the very edge of hell. Of a young woman, skin broken by fangs. She dreams.
She wakes up screaming, pleades for them to be saved, for someone to do something, asks her father to find them and save them, describes the strange lands and foreign places.
They choose the wood for her pyre very carefully, so that she doesn't die of smoke, so that she feels the fire for hours.
She's not the only one.
