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What Might Have Been by Clarity

What Might Have Been:
Prologue




Author: Clarity

Disclaimer: Joss. Is. GOD. I just try to interpret his works.

Summary: After the finale of Season 6, Buffy, Xander, and Dawn relive old, bad memories and wish that things were different. Anya makes it so. Little do they know that change isn't always good.

Rating: PG at the moment, possibly stronger later on

Spoilers: Pretty much everything major in the series. If it happened, chances are I'll mention it, and probably change it.

Relationships: Giles/Jenny, Xander/Willow, Buffy/Jesse, Buffy/Angel (slight), Cordelia/Riley, Tara/Patty (OFC). Also, the gang in LA, which is mentioned but gets no camera time, is all paired off except for Angel: Amy/Doyle, Fred/Gunn, Wesley/Darla. Yes, I said Darla. Don't ask, just read.

Author's notes: On a vacation in Florida during the summer of '02, I managed to catch the cable reruns of the very beginning of the series. I started bitching to my father about how they killed off Jesse in the first episode and never mentioned him again, which got me to wondering what would have happened if they hadn't. With the utter hell the gang had been going through since the very beginning of Season 6, the rest just fell into place.





They met without speaking, in the street in front of her house. No words were necessary, not now, and none would have sufficed, anyway. There were just looks, tired, sad, regretful, that said all that needed to be said. Buffy held the door for Xander, who was all but carrying the nearly unconscious Willow. He mannaged a small smile in thanks, a curving of his lips that came nowhere near the region of his eyes.

“You should...you should put her in my bed,” the blonde Slayer offered quietly. “I mean, instead of the room where...” She trailed off, unable to continue, and he nodded in agreement without speaking. Dawn slowly shut the door while Xander maneuvered the red haired young woman up the stairs.

He laid her down on the bed with a tired sigh. Willow murmured something, too quietly for him to hear, and curled up like a kitten. Xander watched his best friend for a moment, then rubbed at his eyes tiredly and turned to go back downstairs.

The slayer was on the couch, staring blankly off into empty space. Dawn still hadn’t moved from the doorway. He sank down next to Buffy, wrapping one comforting arm around her and patting the sofa next to him on the other side. Dazedly, the younger girl took a seat, one arm curled around Xander’s waist, the other reached across so that she could hold tightly to her big sister’s free hand. None of the three spoke for a long moment, simply taking comfort in each other’s presence after the hell that had been the last twenty-four hours and, to a greater extent, the past seven years in their entirety.

“How did our lives end up like this, huh?” Xander finally asked, his voice sounding strangely loud as it broke the pervasive silence. “How did we end up like this?”

“It’s my fault,” Buffy admitted somberly, not shifting her gaze from the empty space that so captured it. “All of it is my fault. It was my job, my...my responsibility, to notice, to take care of things, before they...I don’t know, before they...”

“Spiraled out of control into the kind of mess none of us had any idea how to handle?” Dawn countered. “Buffy, we’ve been over this. It’s not your fault. We should have noticed, should have done something...I mean, with you all wiggy from the whole ressurection thingie...I’m the one that made the wish that trapped us all in the house, and stole all that stuff, and...I mean-”

“It was everybody’s fault.” Xander shook his head slowly. “Or else it was nobody’s fault, I don’t know. I mean, this whole past year has been...”

“Hell,” Buffy declared flatly. “And I don’t just mean...in comparison,” she added softly. “Even our lives before...none of us were sane this past year. Everything went wrong. Not just Willow. Between me with Spike, just so I could feel something again, to Dawn’s whole klepto phase, to...”

“Me leaving Anya at the altar, her getting her powers back, Giles abandoning us all to go back home to England...”

“It all just kinda collapsed, didn’t it?” Dawn finished. “I mean, Tara was kinda the only one of us still more or less sane.”

“Was it always like this?” Buffy asked. “Our lives were always complicated and painful and everything, but...didn’t there used to be a time where the good guys were the good guys, and all we had to fight were soulless demons?”

“Once upon a time,” Xander agreed heavily. “God, it feels weird saying this, but I miss the Master.” Both of the girls shot him looks.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I don’t know,” Dawn disagreed with her sister. “I kinda know what he’s saying. I mean, I wasn’t really around much before last year and all that, but I remember you gearing up to fight demons, and you always knew what you were going to do with them. You didn’t know how you were going to kill them, but you were always going to make them dead. Even with the whole Glory thing, we all had each other. We knew who we were fighting, even way, way back when we didn’t even know who we were fighting, and it wasn’t us.” She blinked at her convoluted sentence. “Okay, that probably made the kind of sense that doesn’t.”

“No, you’re right. Even with Angel...well, nobody ever was saying that Angelus wasn’t evil. We all knew he was evil. The question was just if we could save Angel.”

“And meanwhile, the biggest personal issues the rest of us, your faithful sidekicks, had during that period of time were how to teach computer class and not fail biology,” Xander added. “We all pretty much knew what we wanted at the time, or at least who we were.”

“Right. My boyfriend was trying to kill me, and I felt...well, I felt hurt, betrayed, angry, like my heart was ripped out and fed through a paper shredder, but at least I was feeling. I knew I was alive, and in the end I knew what I had to do.”

“So when did it all change?” Dawn asked of the two semi-adults. “When did it stop being all black and white? Why did it get all gray?”

“We grew up,” Buffy responded bleakly. “We learned. Life’s not just right and wrong, that’s why it’s so hard.”

“It just kinda took the whole world falling apart for us to figure that out,” Xander added.

“I wish Giles had never left. I mean, even when things were kinda going crazy early on, he sorta...held us together. You know?”

“I know,” Buffy agreed with her little sister. “I missed him, too. Everything was just so...I wish I hadn’t ever slept with Spike. I wish the whole Spike thing had never happened, period.”

“I wish I’d never left Anya at the altar, not like that. I wish all our personal lives would just settle down, that we could all find some kind of stable relationship and actually be able to stick with it.”

“Well, while were wishing...”

“Go ahead and say it, Dawnie. You wish Tara had never died. We all do.”

“I wish Tara hadn’t died. I wish we’d never even heard of Warren and his stupid threesome.”

“I wish I’d been able to see what was happening with Wills before we did,” Xander added. “I wish we’d been able to stop it when we could.”

“I wish I’d been able to see anything. That I hadn’t felt so dead. I wish I’d never died in the first place.”

“We all wish that, Buffy.”

“And I wish I hadn’t failed so badly against Glory for so long. That we were able to defeat her earlier.”

“I wish I could help, you know, Buffy? That I was able to be something besides the little sister you had to protect all the time.”

“Yeah, and I wish I were more than just the smart aleck zeppo. We’re sidekicks, Dawnie. We stand on the sidelines and cheer her on.”

“I wish we were a real family, Dawn. I’m sorry...I know I’m not Mom, and I never will be...I just wish so much we could be some kind of normal family, with the mother and the father and the two girls, and...just, normal.”

“I wish this family, our family, didn’t keep loosing members like this.” Xander again. “Even before Tara...I mean, Riley, and before him there was Oz, and Angel, even though I never really liked him, and...Cordelia, when they left...”

“Breaking hearts to pieces every time, right?” Buffy almost smiled at that. Almost. “I wish all of our hearts hadn’t been broken so many times. With Riley leaving me, and Oz with Willow, and Angel, and you and Cordy...”

“And even Faith...I wish she hadn’t turned on us like she did.”

“I wish Faith hadn’t turned out like she did, too. That she hadn’t gone evil...that I didn’t have to throw her off a roof.”

“I wish we never had to blow up the school on graduation day...scratch that. It was almost kinda a little bit fun to blow up the high school. But I wish so many people hadn’t died.”

“While we’re wishing, why not just wish the Ascension had never even happened, period?” Dawn suggested. “That would kinda take care of the whole thing.”

“Okay, I wish the Ascension had never happened. I wish the Ascension had never happened, and that Angelus had never tried to open Acathla to begin with...heck, I wish I’d never turned Angel into Angelus at all.”

“And I wish he hadn’t killed Miss Calendar.”

“I wish I’d been able to get to know Miss Calendar. She was a witch, right? And your computer teacher?”

“And kinda Giles’ girlfriend,” Buffy added. “I wish she’d never died, either. Especially not before I got a chance to apologise for blaming her so much for Angel loosing his soul.”

“I wish Drusilla hadn’t killed Kendra. God, I don’t want any of our friends that were killed to have been killed.”

“I wish it had all gone differently for you guys. That you hadn’t had it so hard.”

“I wish the whole damn thing had started better. All of it, from day one, ever since the first day you walked into Sunnydale High, and the first night I followed you out into the cemetary to find Wills.”

All three were quiet for a moment, remembering the blood that had been spilled to christen the Slayerettes as early as their first night together in a cemetary: the blood of one of their own. Then finally, once again, Xander spoke.

“I just wish it had started better. I wish Jesse had never died.”



Three quarters of the way up the staircase, just out of sight of the three on the sofa, a figure stood in shadows. She’d teleported with ease into the house so full of pain and suffering that, even with its destructive edge dulled, stood out to her like the beacon of a huge lighthouse on an otherwise pitch-black night. Her first intention had been simple. With Giles resting more or less comfortably, and assuring her that he was fine, she had wanted to check on Willow. Willow, and none of the others. She wasn’t sure she could face the others right now, not when she was still so uncertain as to whether she still cared for them as friends-or more-or not.

But now, listening to the conversation taking place in the living room, the thousand-year-old vengeance demoness Anyanka realized that at its main center, the pain she could feel emanating from this house didn’t come from the redhead sleeping in the room above. No, it stemmed from the hearts and souls of the three below; poured out from them like a tidal wave as they relived all the suffering they’d been forced through for so many years. Their quiet speech served as nothing but a whispering echo of the screams she could hear from all three of them.

Normally, Anyanka used her powers in very special circumstances. She helped scorned women, granted them wishes to revenge themselves upon the men that had hurt them. A hundred years ago, Anyanka would have shrugged and left. The people sitting upon the sofa had been hurt, yes, badly hurt, but not by any one person, certainly not any one boyfriend, one unfaithful lover. They had been hurt, had been ripped to pieces and stapled back together only to be shredded once again by the forces of life itself. And life was an entity that, a hundred years ago, Anyanka would never have considered vengeance upon.

But a hundred years ago, Anyanka had forgotten what it was like to be human, and not yet rediscovered it. She hadn’t fallen in love with the singularly annoying male that went by the name of Xander Harris. She hadn’t found the friendship of a blonde vampire slayer and her little sister, of a Watcher, or two witches. A hundred years ago, Anyanka had taken revenge for the pain of others, because it was her job and because it was fun, but never because she felt the hurt herself. She hadn’t herself experienced the death of people she cared about, of a self-sacrificing Slayer who, by the grace of the gods, came back, or a good witch, who didn’t. A hundred years ago, the legendary vengeance demoness Anyanka couldn’t possibly empathize enough with the three people seated in the room below her now to give them more than a second look.

But then, if she had still been the Anyanka of a hundred years ago, she wouldn’t be standing on the staircase in the first place. She wouldn’t be in this house, checking on Willow, or even in this town at all. So what the Anyanka of a hundred years ago would have done in this situation really didn’t matter. This Anyanka, this Anya, looked solemnly down at the people wishing they lived in a better world, giving voice to the things she herself wanted as much as anything. She nodded once as a final wish was made. Finally she spoke, the deep and sonorous tones of her voice reverberating with forboding.

“Done.”





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