Everyone she loves is gone—dead or changed beyond recognition. There's no one left, and her hell is an empty place, all shadows and illusions.

Months ago, after Los Angeles fell and Wesley dragged his crippled band of comrades to Sunnydale to fight alongside hers, they started keeping score, tracking their losses in a sick game of one-upmanship. She thinks she's ahead; she'll have to check the books. There's still some debate about who gets to count Angel. Wesley was closer to him towards the end, but she thinks she gets bonus points for having her last girlish illusions shattered by the whole Cordelia thing. Maybe they should just flip a coin.

Not that it matters. He still has two people left to lose, so he'll win in the end. Three if she counts herself, which she doesn't.

She stares out at the empty street. Night and day have lost all meaning, and it's hard to keep track of time. Even Wes has given up on wearing a watch—as sure a sign as any that they're living at the end of days. Cordelia's belly serves as their calendar: almost three quarters of a year now since the beginning of the end.

Cordelia's close to term, and Buffy realizes she's jealous again. Not of the imminent motherhood (the very idea is one of the few things that can still scare her—since her pill prescription ran out, she's been playing Russian roulette with five chambers loaded and somehow getting the empty one each month, but she knows even that small amount of luck will most likely dry up sooner rather than later), but of the reasonable chance of death associated with it. It just seems easier than slowly starving from the lack of food and hope.

The lack of the latter hurts more than the former. Even Pandora's box released hope with hell.

The touch of his hand on her shoulder breaks her out of her reverie. "It's safer inside," he says.

By which he means he's not ready to let her give in to the inevitable, not yet. Maybe because if she does, he'll be dragged down right along with her. He's still clinging to the possibility of continuing the fight from sheer stubbornness. She knows he finds the idea of failure intolerable, even when it's already gone from idea to reality.

It's another thing she's tried arguing with him about, when she was trying to make him see that maybe death wasn't such a bad option. She even brought up her own experience to try and prove her point. He just quietly informed her that it all depended on where one was going.

She lets him lead her back into the house, where they feel their way up to the bedroom in the darkness. Their supply of candles is limited, so they make do the best they can without light whenever possible. He helps her undress, lights one of the candles, and then leaves the room.

When he comes back, he's balancing two bowls of water and her toothbrush in his hands. He tries to keep all of them focused as much as possible on the mundane realities of life as it's become. Which, apparently, means being careful about oral hygiene. She doesn't think he really believes that they'll live long enough for tooth loss to become an issue, but she brushes and flosses twice a day to keep him happy.

While she's using one of the bowls to rinse her mouth, he's dipping a washcloth into the other. He waits until she's done, then washes her face with something approaching tenderness. Watches her in the flickering light as he moves the cloth to her neck and shoulders. She closes her eyes so she doesn't have to see it, because she's close to breaking down completely. The terrycloth is cold and soft, like dead kisses against her skin.

She waits until she's started shaking to open her eyes. His expression is unreadable, but she still knows what he's doing—he does it every night. It works, of course. She already feels heavy and damp, almost languid. He keeps stroking her with the cloth, brushing the tips of her breasts and the slight curve of her hips until her jaw grows slack and the noise in her head finally subsides.

He backs her towards the bed. Pushes her down and kisses her like it could somehow keep her tied to the world. Works her with his hands until the lassitude vanishes and she's twisting frantically beneath him again. She can taste the desperation on his lips, can feel it inside her as he tries to keep her with him.

It works, for now. But it won't be long before he can't pull her out of it, before she finds enough strength to give up the fight.

It's just a matter of time, and she's counting the days.

Coda

Cordelia did not survive the birth of her child. With Buffy's help, he removed the body to one of the nearby cemeteries for disposal. Afterwards, while Buffy tended to the infant, he burned the blood-soaked bedding and Cordelia's personal effects. Five weeks later, the child passed on, unnamed and essentially unmourned. No assistance was necessary in disposing of the tiny corpse.

The following week he abandoned his efforts to find a functional portal to anywhere. The opening of the Hellmouth had sealed all the recorded ones, and, in all likelihood, all the unrecorded ones as well. Shortly thereafter, he realized that Buffy's last courses had predated Cordelia's death by about a week. Had it not been for the fact that she was having difficulty holding down water, he might have been tempted to attribute it to stress, grief, or starvation rather than the most obvious cause.

"You've caught."

"Yeah." Resigned lightness tinted her words. "But I'm not going to live long enough for it to matter."

He fumbled for her hand in the pitch-black and offered up the only comfort he could. "You're probably right."

He felt the movement of her smile against his chest. "Want to take bets on how much longer we've got?"

"Not especially, no." His free hand moved to stroke her hair. "Just because I'm resigned to the fact that we're going to die, doesn't mean I feel like making light of it."

Her fingers traced the outline of his ribs, soft pads against the sharp bone and tight skin. Her fingertips were one of the few things on either of them that still felt almost normal. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her as she'd been before, all gentle curves and bright skin. Pity he hadn't known her well enough to wipe the picture of her pale and practically skeletal from his mind. At least their rations only needed splitting between three people now. Though he supposed prolonging the inevitable wasn't going to earn him any thanks.

"We need t-shirts," she said. "I survived the end of the world, and all I got was this lousy lingering death."

"If we gave Fred some fabric and some markers, perhaps she could produce something."

"For someone who doesn't feel like making light of the fact that we're all doomed, you're pretty good at it."

"I can't help it if you're a bad example."

"And I can't help it if you're a rotten liar."

Lips nearly as soft and normal as her fingertips covered his with slow, languorous kisses. Her movements no longer contained any of the desperation and worry about the non-existent future that had defined so many of their actions in the past. Instead, they were hazy, narcotic touches disconnected from time and space. Morphine in motion.

He found the dream-like stupor of it almost as comforting as the knowledge that everything would be over soon. His hands skimmed the sharp ridge of her spine, folded over slender hips and he pulled her on top of him. Her weight barely registered: a ghost of a girl, save for the tight, wet heat of her body and the uneven rhythm of her breath.

Everything existed in a halfway state now. Halfway between waking and sleeping, between life and death. In a rare moment of lucidity, Fred compared them all to Schrödinger's cat, trapped in the in-between with no one to open the box and determine the outcome. Trying to live while waiting to die, which, as it turned out, wasn't as bad as it seemed, once you gave up.

All consequences were essentially inconsequential to the walking dead. He thought it explained quite a bit about both Angel and Angelus.

As the weeks passed, Buffy began to spend more and more of her time asleep, sprawled shrouded beneath the makeshift bedding. With little else to do, he would sit in the room and listen to her breathe. Occasionally, he'd curl up beside her, his hand spread possessively over her belly, states of potential layered like Schrödinger's nesting dolls.

It was funny, the efforts the body went to to propagate the species, even with extinction 'round the corner. He'd never felt any particular urge for children of his own—too many uncertainties and too much that could go wrong. He still didn't, and didn't have any regrets knowing they'd die before potential became reality. Just an odd disconnected connectedness to the experience.

Days came and went in a blur, indistinct and shapeless. Fred slipped from her room while he and Buffy were sleeping, leaving behind one last drawing—on paper this time—of an elephant (at least he assumed from the context it was an elephant, though it more closely resembled a tapir) trudging off to a pile of bones. On the back was a short, apologetic letter of explanation and the last lines of "The Hollow Men". He burned it for fuel with the rest of her possessions.

On the last night, he gathered the remainder of the candles and set them around the room. Lit them one by one until it was close to bright. Buffy's wraith-like figure, all angles and bones except for the slight curve of her stomach, glowed silver in the flickering light, the ends of her hair faded to white from months without retouching. He watched her until the candles began to sputter, then crawled next to the still form and drifted off to sleep.

There. All done.

Now to get dressed and go play.

Ah, Plei. So very painful.

So, I was going to work on my remix story tonight, but I see that I've got thousands of posts to catch up on in Bitches and Buffy. Maybe I'll do that instead.

Ah, Plei. So very painful.

but lovely all the same.

Of course. Plei knows that painful and lovely are synonyms to me.

Triptych is, for whatever reason, the only story (series, I suppose) of mine I can re-read on a semi-regular basis without feeling the urge to cut off my writing hands.

It's also the only one I will willingly admit to really liking.

to cut off my writing hands.

I now picture Plei having a box full of multi-purpose hands. Need a screwdriver? Give Plei a second to attach a Phillips or Robertson. Barbeque? Spatula on the left, fork on the right. GoGo GadgetPlei!

I now picture Plei having a box full of multi-purpose hands. Need a screwdriver? Give Plei a second to attach a Phillips or Robertson. Barbeque? Spatula on the left, fork on the right. GoGo GadgetPlei!

Well, you know...

It's steampunk or somethin'.

But, I guess if I cut off the writing hands, I would also lose the hugging hands, and the shampoo hands. Never you mind.