Friday, January 21^st, 2005:

Buffy woke, shivering from cold, with a dull ache in her head and sharp pain shooting through her whole body.  She didn’t know how long she’d been out. She’d stayed in the rock shelter with Spike for what seemed like days, but time was hard to judge in the cold, desolate world; there was no sun, no moon, just endless, angry, red and purple skies. Spike never woke up during all that time, and his wounds never completely healed, although the bleeding had eventually stopped.

Buffy tried to rub her aching head, but couldn’t raise her hand. As she tried again, she suddenly realized, to her horror, that she was shackled to the bed.

Buffy began pulling frantically at her confines, which were not only her wrists, but her ankles too, and the whole bed began to shake and slide. The noise of the bed legs scrapping against the floor and her shackles rattling against the railings, drew the attention of her ‘captors’.

“Buffy … stop! Calm down! Buffy, please!” Riley begged her, trying to hold her arms still and stop her from struggling. “You’re going to rip your stitches out!” he warned her. “STOP!”

“Let me go!” she demanded, pulling even harder against the padded restraints until she felt something in her wrist rip and warm blood begin to run down her hand.

“Damn it, Buffy!” Riley exclaimed, pressing down on her wrist to staunch the bleeding.  Suddenly Giles and Dawn were there too and a man dressed in surgical scrubs, who she assumed was a doctor.  The doctor raised a syringe in front of his face, checking the dosage and clearing the air from the needle, before lowering it and injecting Buffy in the arm with the drug.

“We’ll need to stitch that back up…” she heard him say as she lost control of her muscles and relaxed.  She could feel them unbind her wrist and swab it with warm iodine, then more needles injected more pain killers. Buffy could feel them pulling the thread through her flesh as they stitched her wrist back up, but she was unable to move, unable to escape.

Buffy fought to stay awake, she had to find out what was going on. When the doctor finished, she felt them bandage her wrist, then the restraint was buckled back around it. She could hear their feet moving on the hard floor as everyone left her room, but from the sound of their voices, they hadn’t gone far.  She could still hear them talking out in the hall, just outside her door and she struggled to stay conscious and listen.

“We’re going to have to keep her sedated and restrained until her wounds heal … then I would suggest transfer to Bedlam Sanatorium in Bromley,” said a male voice in an English accent – the doctor that had given her the shot and re-stitched her wound. “If her body temperature had been any higher, she would’ve almost certainly bled to death…”

“A mental ward?” Giles questioned. “Do you think they can handle her … special needs?”

“With proper warning and guidance, I think they can handle her,” the doctor assured Giles. “They’ve been doing this an extraordinarily long time, since the eleventh century … I seriously doubt it’s the first ‘special needs’ patient the Council has sent them.”

“It’s not fair…” Dawn whined – she had actually started to like amnesia-Buffy. “She seemed to be doing better…”

“Except for the amnesia and thinking she was from another dimension, married to a vampire with a soul named Spike, with three kids, and living in Angelus’ mansion on Crawford Street …” Riley added sarcastically. “The only thing missing was the white picket fence and blood-red geraniums in the window boxes…”

Dawn rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest, then looked despondently down at the floor. “She said I would do great…” she murmured softly, more to herself than them.

“Quite right,” Giles agreed with Riley, ignoring Dawn. “I believe that Angelus is the key – she was reading a Watcher’s diary about Angelus and the Aurelian clan when she made this latest attempt on her life.  She’s created this world in her mind – this vampire with a soul, to replace what she lost with Angel. She’s trying to regress.”

Dawn sighed heavily. Even though she had told Buffy basically the same thing just a couple of days ago, she was starting to wonder if that even mattered. So what if her sister had a secret garden hidden in the back of her mind where everything was peachy with a side of keen? She had seemed lucid enough … well, right up until she tried to kill herself by apparently gnawing on her own arm and slashing and stabbing her throat and neck with a letter opener – at least that’s what Giles and Riley had told Dawn had happened.

“I’m sorry I can’t give you a better prognosis … I’ve read over her records … you’ve tried everything available – therapy, antidepressants, electroconvulsive therapy,” the doctor apologized. “Perhaps in the future there will be some new treatments that would be effective, but until then…” he shrugged as his voice trailed off, his meaning clear. Until then, placing Buffy in an institution was the only option left for her own safety and those around her.

Buffy felt tears well in her eyes and spill down her cheeks; she’d never felt so alone in her whole life, even when she'd been apart from Spike before, she'd always had her friends to lean on ... now she had no one.  She had to get out of here – she had to get Spike out of the hell he was trapped in, she had to get them both back to their own world and not only did she not have any help, but she was being fought by her own family and friends…or what remained of them.

Buffy closed her eyes and just let the drugs overtake her, forcing her mind to relax. If she couldn’t get out of these physical restraints, at least she could go back to Spike – at least her mind was still free.

**~**

Buffy ran the spider gauntlet as she did every time she entered this … whatever this was… World? Dimension? Hell?  She was getting better at it and now knew where the lowest ledge was that she could reach in one leap and how fast she had to run to keep ahead of the ravenous spiders.  She scrambled up the smooth walls of the crater, knocking loose rocks down as she climbed with bare hands up to the rim then down the other side.  She kept a careful eye out for the flying werewolves, as she made her way back to the shelter she’d built, where she’d left Spike, but none of the ferocious creatures appeared on this day.

“Spike? It’s me, it’s Buffy …” she called as she climbed over the wall and slid down into the rock fortress, taking care to not dislodge his coat from the top. “Spike?” she questioned again as she ducked under the coat and out of the freezing wind …

“SPIKE!” she screamed, standing back up and knocking one end of the cover loose from its moorings as she looked around the desolate landscape … Spike wasn’t there.  Buffy climbed out of the rock igloo and began searching the area frantically, making larger and larger circles around the shelter looking for him. What if the flying werewolves had come back and found him still unconscious and taken him?  What if he’d wandered off in a daze and gotten lost in this godforsaken place? What if the spiders had figured out where he was and dragged him out of the shelter and under the sand?

A thousand thoughts and fears raced through her mind as she searched the cold, barren landscape for her husband.  Thoughts of their children – what if he was lost forever? How could she explain that to Annie? The thought of Dani and Billy never knowing him – never having any memory of their father, cut at her heart just a surely as if one of the werewolves had slashed her with its claws. 

Buffy stopped from time to time and tried concentrating on contacting him through their bond, but she got nothing.  Buffy screamed his name, calling over and over again – her voice lost and scattered in the wind as she ran faster and faster, getting further and further away from the shelter…further and further away from the relative safety it provided.  Tears streaked her face as she searched in vain for him; through the cold, through the wind and the sand blasting against her skin – but he was nowhere to be found.

Finally, after running for what must have been several miles, completely exhausted, trembling from cold and fear, Buffy stopped, crumbling to her knees in the sand as uncontrollable sobs racked her body.  She should have never left him alone … she should have stayed asleep.

“WHY! God, why!?” she screamed at the angry red and violet sky, pounding her fists against the cold sand.

Suddenly, she was in the warm, crystal clear water of the lake. The water splashed up around her as she pounded her fists down, warming her and rinsing the grit and grime from her skin and clothes and warming her body.  Buffy looked around for the blue butterfly, but didn’t see it.

“Spike!” she cried, pulling herself out of the water and then racing and scrambling back up the hill towards the dusty pink rose bush.  She continued to call his name all the way as she struggled to get up the hill as quickly as her exhausted body could take her. She stopped at the rose bush and waited; there were lots of butterflies flying from flower to flower, but not the blue one.

“God, Spike, please!” she begged as she scanned up and down the path for the iridescent blue butterfly that she was now sure held Spike’s soul.  It suddenly dawned on her that every other time the blue butterfly appeared, she’d been smelling one of the roses, so Buffy leaned forward, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, taking in the sweet fragrance that always made her think of their wedding day and the look of love and awe she’d seen in Spike’s eyes as she made her way down the aisle towards him. 

More memories flooded her mind … every birthday, every Valentine’s Day, every ‘just because’ – all those times that he’d given her the roses. Every time he’d been so careful, making sure they were the very same shade that she’d used in their wedding, right up until the last time, as he waited for her on Rodeo Drive. His words from that day still rang in her head, “I love two things, you and the rose. The rose for one day, and you forever.”

Tears stung Buffy’s eyes as she dropped to her knees in the soft grass next to the rose bush. “Spike…” she sobbed, unable to stop the tears from falling as the possibility that he was gone and never coming back washed over her heart like a heavy, black cloud. 

Suddenly she felt like a ray of sunlight was breaking through the cloud around her heart … like her soul was being filled with warmth and love. When Buffy looked up, the blue butterfly was flitting around her, circling her head, waiting to land.  Buffy held a finger out and it landed on it softly, completely unafraid, like that was where it belonged – like she was a rose. 

“Spike … what do I do?”  she sobbed, knowing that she’d get no answer.  His soul was here while his body was in the cold, red, spider-invested purgatory. It was suddenly clear to Buffy that the dimension she’d awoken in with Riley and Dawn wasn’t some other dimension, at all. It was her dimension, their dimension, but without Spike.  Somehow, someone or something had erased him from it … and not just recently, but as far back as 1880 when Dru should have turned him…perhaps back even further than that.

Buffy lay down on her side in the soft grass, the blue butterfly still on her hand. She laid her hand down in the grass in front of her face where she could see the beautiful blue of her husband’s eyes reflected in the flying flower still perched on her finger.  The butterfly opened and closed its wings lazily – it’s tiny feet tickling Buffy’s hand as it turned first one way then the other, as if trying to give her comfort the only way it could.

“Spike … I need you.” Buffy spoke quietly to the butterfly, wishing with all her heart that it would speak back to her … but it couldn’t.  But she could feel it in her soul … she knew it was Spike and his soul was drawn to hers, just as hers was drawn to his.

“The babies need you…” Buffy continued, then stopped abruptly as she realized, there were no babies; no Annie, no Dani, no Billy – without Spike they didn’t exist. Just like without Spike most of her friends were dead, disfigured, or insane … apparently including herself.

“Oh, God! The babies!” Buffy exclaimed, sitting up quickly and making the butterfly flutter into the air. “Spike! The babies! They don’t exist! Our babies don’t exist!” she half-yelled, half-sobbed as the blue butterfly fluttered around her head, then landed again on her shoulder.

“No…no…no,” Buffy sobbed as she covered her face with her hands. “This can’t be happening…can’t be…”

Buffy collapsed back down onto the grass, curling into a tight ball as sobs wracked her body. Everything was gone – Spike was gone, Annie, Dani, and Billy - her whole family was gone, the few friends she had left thought she was insane…

“Tell me I’m not insane, please tell me I’m not insane …” Buffy pleaded as the butterfly fluttered in the air above her then landed again, this time on her arm.  The butterfly walked up her arm, through her hair and to her tear streaked face. Buffy thought she could actually feel Spike’s lips kissing her tears away as the butterfly paused and fluttered its wings against her damp skin.

“I must be completely insane…” Buffy moaned, closing her eyes as the butterfly roamed over her face.  Her mind saw Spike in front of her, comforting her, holding her, assuring her – telling her that he loved her – he’d love her forever.

“Don’t forget your promise, luv,” his voice rang in her head.

Buffy nodded as she tried to stop the tears. “I promise to not give up. I promise to not give up… I promise …” she repeated, over and over like a mantra, taking deep breaths in between to try and calm down and regain control.

Buffy finally wiped her tears away and sat up despondently with her back against a tree.  The butterfly fluttered around, then landed on a wildflower not far from where she was sitting.

“Okay,” Buffy started, taking a deep, cleansing breath, trying to clear her head and think, as she spoke to the butterfly. “What do we know?

“We know we’re not insane… we hope.

“We know someone with power to spare and knowledge of magic must’ve done this,” she continued.

“We know that I’m the only one that remembers you … why do I remember you but no one else does?” Buffy posed to the butterfly, who simply looked at her from its perch on the flower.

“Why would someone take you out of our lives but want me to remember?  Why let the Slayer remember? Or was I immune because I’m the Slayer?” Buffy continued trying to piece the puzzle together.

“Who would want you out of our lives that badly?” Buffy questioned. “You vote for Angel?” she questioned the butterfly’s silent answer.  Buffy considered that a few moments before shaking her head.

“No … I don’t think so - I’m married to Riley, not Angel. Maybe if I was with Angel…” Buffy mused quietly. “Plus, I still remember you – not ideal for Angel or Riley. If I didn’t remember, then that would be different, but if I didn’t remember, then I wouldn’t be here wondering about why I remember, ‘cos I wouldn’t remember what I remember.”

Buffy looked at the butterfly … she thought she saw it roll its eyes and heard it sigh. “Right – not Angel or Riley,” she concluded, her voice sounding more confident than she felt.

“Maybe me remembering wasn’t an accident…” she postulated and the butterfly turned around on the flower, making a complete circle before facing her again.

“Oh – you like that idea, huh?” she asked him with a small smile. “Ok … not an accident,” she agreed. “Someone with knowledge of your past, obviously; someone with powerful magic or powerful friends … someone capable of completely changing history … and not Angel or Riley,” Buffy thought aloud, pondering their list of enemies.

“It would have to be someone who wants to make me think I’m insane … or someone who wants to drive me insane … or someone who wants to punish us – punish all of our friends and family – maybe get even for something we did…get revenge…get vengeance…” Buffy’s eyes went wide. “Someone like a vengeance demon! Someone like Hallie!”

The blue butterfly fluttered up off the flower and flew in wide circles around Buffy and the rose bush a few feet away. It flew up higher and higher until Buffy could barely see it, then floated back down gracefully and landed on her shoulder.

“Hallie … I think we can assume she’s not a rat anymore … well, not a small, furry one, anyway,” Buffy amended.

“May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun, and find your shoulder to light on; to bring you luck, happiness and riches today, tomorrow and beyond…” Buffy repeated the blessing Spike had said when the butterfly lit on her shoulder the first time. 

“Let’s hope that sticks this time…” Buffy prayed as she stood up and turned her face towards the bright, warm sun which never seemed to move across the sky here. It felt good on her skin and she closed her eyes a moment, taking strength from its heartening rays as they tingled on her flesh. 

She felt the butterfly take wing, lifting gracefully off her shoulder and she opened her eyes.  The incredible blue butterfly circled her head then took off towards the lake … she could feel the warmth slowly drain from her soul as it flew further and further away. Tears stung her eyes as she watched him fly away until she could no longer see even a glimmer of his wings in the sun.  She resisted calling out to him … but her heart called, her soul called, and her spirit cried.

Buffy closed her eyes and repeated her manta, “I promise to not give up,” softly to herself, but she had no idea how hard that promise would be for her to keep.

**~**

The next days were a sedated blur for Buffy … she was aware of being moved; transported in an ambulance from one hospital to another, she remembered Dawn visiting her … talking to her about school and a boy she’d met and telling her she was sorry about them putting her in this horrible place full of crazy people. Buffy remembered Dawn talking about how much she hated this place … she was always afraid one of the crazy people would start talking about the ‘pure green light’ or telling her that she ‘didn’t belong.’ Buffy wanted to hug her sister and tell her none of that meant anything … she did belong, but the fog she was in was too thick, too deep for Buffy to fight through – all she could do was listen.

Riley had been there at least once … she couldn’t remember him saying anything, just looking at her with a combination of pity and regret – she hated that look, she didn’t want his pity and she didn’t want to be responsible for his regrets.  Buffy tried to sleep, to get back to try and find Spike in the wasteland or in the tropical garden, but she could never seem to stay fully asleep long enough – she seemed to just hover on the precipice between waking and sleeping all the time…never deeply asleep enough to really rest or awake enough to interact with her visitors … or cause any problems with the staff.

Finally, on her sixth day in the Bedlam Sanatorium (the same hospital from which the modern word, meaning uproar and confusion, was derived), the doctors adjusted her medications at Dawn’s rather loud and unwavering insistence, and Buffy’s exhausted mind and body finally fell into a deep sleep.

Buffy ‘awoke’ in the now familiar red crater and made the even more familiar trek across the sand and up the steep wall, outrunning the hungry spiders that emerged from under her feet. She could hear the spiders hitting the wall with their sharp claws as they tried to climb after her – they hissed and clattered their clawed feet on the rocks at the bottom, playing an eerie melody that she was sure Alfred Hitchcock would’ve paid good money for to use in one of his movies.

Buffy didn’t know how long it had been since she’d been here … days, months? Could Spike still be here somewhere – lost and wandering aimlessly across the bitterly cold landscape?  She didn’t know, but she knew she had to search for him … there was nothing else to do.

Buffy made her way to the rock igloo. Sand that had been blown by the wind was piled in drifts around the outside of it. Spike’s coat was gone – probably blown away by the relentless wind, as well.  Buffy tried reaching out to him through the bond, but got nothing … she concentrated on sensing him with her Slayer senses, but still nothing.  Then it occurred to her – he was never turned, at least not by Dru – he probably wasn’t a vampire and they were never married – there was no bond.  All they had were their souls … two halves of one whole.

Buffy thought about how her heart seemed to fill with love when the butterfly came near her – when Spike came near her. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, putting everything out of her mind, letting her heart guide her rather than her thoughts.  She opened her eyes and began to walk back towards the crater, when she got to it, she turned to the right and began to skirt the high wall of the rim. So lost was she in trying to concentrate on feeling Spike’s soul that she’d completely forgotten to watch for flying werewolves…

About a quarter of the way around the crater, on the side blocked from most of the wind, she was dive-bombed and knocked to the ground by one of the hairy beasts.  Buffy screamed in surprise and pain as the werewolf sunk its claws into her back when it hit her and latched onto her shoulder with its long, sharp fangs. They both rolled around on the sand, Buffy trying to free herself from the creature’s grasp and the hungry wolf-creature hanging onto its prey as if its very life depended on it. 

Buffy kicked backwards at it and jabbed her right elbow into its ribs as she struggled to get it off, but her blows were ineffective against the large, supernatural creature. Buffy struggled to her feet and flung herself back against the rocky wall surrounding the crater, temporarily knocking the wind out of the werewolf and causing it to scream in pain as its wings were smashed against the rocks. But her victory was short-lived – the monster recovered quickly and bit down on her left shoulder even harder, tearing flesh and bone as it did so.  Buffy could feel her blood pouring out of the wound, covering her body and falling in pools in the sand at her feet.

She fell to her knees as the beast continued to shred her flesh and growl in victory, shaking her like a rag doll in its powerful jaws.  Buffy struggled to remain conscious …to fight, to keep her promise, to not give up – but she was losing the battle.  The pain was excruciating and the blood loss was making her weak and dizzy.  Her last thought as she lost consciousness was of Spike and their children – all lost. She’d failed them; she’d failed them all.

**~**