Saw the challenge. Wrote the challenge. I keep this up, and that Wesley/Xander story is going to get done sooner than I expected.

Buffy was pulled unjustly from heaven, from her own well-earned reward.

Angel was pulled mysteriously from hell, from his own ill-timed but pretty-well-deserved punishment.

The parallels were spookily obvious. Especially when Wesley finished translating that prophecy in Urdu that had been found bound inside the leather cover of a Victorian account book that he'd just happened to stumble across at a flea market in Encino. Why was he in Encino? Why was he at the flea market? Why that book?

Why anything? He'd stopped asking that question. The answers always hurt more than the questions.

After he finished the prophecy, he debating telling Angel, but there never seemed to be the right time to say, "By the way, Angel, the prophecy where you become human after helping save the world? I'd stop putting money aside on sunglasses if I were you."

Simply put, the prophecy said that the one torn from hell and the one torn from heaven would join and rule the world, and evil would not dare show it's face again. Sounded lovely, on the face of it. But he worried about that last phrase: "And the righteous shall have dominion, and none shall stand against them or challenge them, and the ones who have seen heaven and hell will judge all beings."

Righteous did not mean right, or fair, or tolerant, or even good. Wesley feared the dominion of the righteous far more than he feared the dominion of the evil, because evil could be bargained with. The righteous saw only the "one true path."

Still, he thought he had time before having to act. The prophecy spoke of an unknown seer, a visionary who saw the truth but who was scorned. Events would not come to pass until The One Who Sees sought out The One Who Knows. The only seer Wesley knew of was Cordelia, and no one scorned her who wanted to still have all the appendages they were born with.

Then there was that phone call in the middle of Halloween night. Wesley didn't recognize the man on the other end of the line, the man who was obviously frightened and in pain. But the man knew his name. "Wesley? Wesley Wyndam-Pryce?"

"Yes, this is he. It's one a.m. Who is this?"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please don't hang up. This is Xander. Xander Harris."

"Xander? Why on earth are you calling me at this hour?"

"I had to. I don't know why, but I had to. There was this dream. This nightmare. Buffy was-- and Angel was there and--and when I woke up all I could think of was 'Call Wesley, he knows.'"

"Oh god." He thought he'd have more time. Of course, All Hallow's Eve. The turning of the year, when the veil between worlds is thinnest. The dividing night between new and old years in the oldest calendars. "What did you see?"

There was silence from Sunnydale. "You--you believe me. Dammit, I was hoping you'd call me nuts and call Giles and complain about me bothering you. Why do you believe me?"

"I have my reasons. What did you see?"

"Buffy and Angel. Together, giving a speech. They were holding hands and smiling in this really sickly televangelist way, and everyone was smiling back at them and nodding. And they were telling people that anyone who disagreed with them was the enemy and needed to be stopped, and it was for everyone's own good--and people believed them! They were burning people, Wes! There was a whole apartment building, and Angel set it on fire, and Buffy just watched him, smiling like he just brought her roses and chocolate! Mass graves. She stabbed Giles. She was crying, but she did it anyway. Please, Wes, tell me it was the nachos I had before bed. Tell me I'm crazy. I want to be crazy."

"I'm sorry, Xander."

"You're not saying I'm crazy."

"No. I wish you were."

He spoke of the prophecy he'd found, of the two who had known heaven and hell who would come to rule the earth in the name of righteousness, of The One Who Sees and The One Who Knows. He pretended not to notice when Xander began crying.

"What do we do?" Xander finally whispered.

He was the ruthless one, the one who saw the necessities and performed them. "Either Buffy or Angel need to die."

He was not surprised when the phone in Sunnydale was slammed down in his ear. He hung up his own phone and rubbed his temples, fighting tears of his own. Two minutes later, the phone rang again.

"I can't do it," Xander said very quietly. "I'm sorry, but I saved her life. I can't take it away. Oh, god, was I supposed to let her die there in the Master's cave? Then she died again, and we brought her back. Dammit, the universe was trying to stop this, and we kept bringing her back."

"Xander, stop. This prophecy needs Angel, too, and the Powers That Be brought him back from Hell. We can't second-guess ourselves. If we keep trying to think through everything, we'd never do anything."

"So. Angel. Can you . . ."

Wesley stared across his living room towards a sketch hanging on the wall. A group portrait of the Angel Investigations staff, showing more insight than skill but good likenesses of everyone. Cordelia had teased Angel for being skimpy on Christmas gifts, but her copy likewise hung on her wall.

"Yes. Yes, I can."

I know if I try to name everybody, I'd forget someone, so I won't, but I love all of the responses to Cindy's challenge.

Anne, do you have yours up somewhere where I can pimp the living fuck out of it?

Turns out I replied to this challenge, too, except I wrote for an hour and a half and it was propelled by a dark rage at Chuck Palahniuk more than anything else.

So, uh, when I say "post-apocalyptic fun with Tara", I mean "these cadences are satirical".

---

This is the way it starts. You wake up, and your hair is black again.

You don't notice until you're already in the bathroom. You flicked the lights on automatically, even though if you had taken a second to think about it you would have said, I do not want to see my face in that little bathroom mirror.

I don't want to see the lines across my face.

But your wrists still remember a time when electricity came with the touch of your finger to the wall, and you lived in a house with the girl you loved and the girl you half-adopted. Your fingers still grope around the floor near the couch, when you wake up after a night spent on the couch in dirty bombed-out living room, because they think they need the remote control to turn off the television that must be what lulled you asleep there, made you spend the night in such a strange place. Of course.

The old yellow couch with strange dark stains on the armrest.

The floor of the kitchen.

The walk-in closet.

These are the places you sleep, now. Your soft cheek knows the pattern of that linoleum. You wake up and its lines are all over you. Describing your skin. Just like the veins inside your face, rubbing through.

But it's too late for that. Isn't it.

You wake up with patterns on your face, from sleeping on someone else's carpet, someone else's recliner with the torn cushion and broken spring. Plastic insides leaking out.

You could ask the person who owned it why they kept such a beat-up piece of furniture. But you don't know the person, because you've never met. Because you just woke up one afternoon inside their house. Because the person isn't around now, and you know this for a fact.

Because all the people there ever was or ever will be are vanished, gone, vamoose.

All this leaving aside the fact that you wouldn't need to ask in the first place. You're no stranger to need, or the sight of ugliness so daily it fades out of notice. Until suddenly you are saying, Why do I have a blue leatherette recliner with yellow zig-zag trim.

Until you are waking up with its imprint in your face.

Is this really mine? Is this really me?

These are questions you're used to, because you asked them over and over again, in your old old life, so many chrysales ago your memories of it are watery sepia-tone. You were a little girl, and you played in hot dirt under a bright sun. Your mother had long red hair and when she sang to you the air twisted open and flowers moved behind your eyes. The walls of the trailer were brown and there were places where the metal rusted through.

You escaped. You found money dangling from the sky in the form of a scholarship, you found a girl with short red hair who couldn't carry a tune but her voice turned you open, dropped you flat on your back with your breath lost. The magic moved through you. Both of you. Together in bed, a real bed, with sheets and pillows.

It keeps coming back to that, doesn't it. The fact is, you don't know where you are. The fact is, you are trespassing, you are stealing your sleep from someone else's furniture and any minute they might come in the door and shoot you for being there. The fact is, you know they won't.

Vamoose.

You don't know where you are and you won't know you where you are tomorrow when you wake up again. Early afternoon, late morning, half past midnight. Your circadian rhythms are huddled in a corner whimpering.

You might be able to figure it out-- country, state, climate-- if you went outside. But you don't. You lift your head off the couch's ratty arm-covering, and feel your cheek. You walk to the bathroom. Limbs still heavy with sleep. All you're thinking is, you need to pee, and maybe the plumbing here works. So you don't notice it when your hand hits the wall where the light switch should be, and your eyes re-focus in the sudden brightness.

When you stand up, you have enough time to take a good look at the décor of this bathroom. You don't have anything better to do.

You have plenty of time to notice things like, the mirror isn't broken here. Your own face blinks right back at you, skin luminous white and hair black like a bad dye job, like tar on a new asphalt road.

You have time to notice things like, the light switch has been ripped out at its roots. Wires dangling loose. A scrape on the wall where the metal panel used to be.

Home sweet transient home. You have time to notice things like, there is no real electricity, and that brightness filling the room is sparking from your own fingertips. Swelling the lightbulb on top of the mirror.

You brush the wall again where the end of the wires hang, and the lightbulb glows even brighter, then smashes apart.

Vamoose.

It's dark again and now there's broken glass on the floor near your feet. The fact is, this isn't an unordinary day.

You walk back out to the room with the couch and stare at the dead T.V. in the corner. The glass screen is broken but maybe you can mojo it back together long enough to see whether Channel 50 is still auto-piloting reruns of '50s family sitcoms.

If wherever you are even gets Channel 50.

Instead you decide you'll give yourself the grand tour of this cozy little domicile. There's a rubber band on the floor in the hallway and you pull your hair into a ponytail and snap it around.

The kitchen is dirty, but it looks like the kind of dirty that means no one has been here in months, not the kind of dirty that means someone made eggs and left the pan in the sink and then spilled orange juice on the floor and let it dry sticky.

You think about who might have lived in this apartment. You think it's

You think about who might have lived in this apartment. You think it's got to be an apartment, because there are only a couple of rooms and no stairs. You're not opening the front door to make sure, though.

You imagine a woman, neat and tired, coming home and heating up old takeout. Falling asleep on the couch in front of the T.V., late-night news reports with the volume turned down low, so that she could pretend the noise was the murmurs of people talking in the next room. Waking up before dawn and taking the subway to work.

You're not projecting, or anything.

The fact is, you're the only person left. You think so, at least.

Once you had a life and you had a girl and you had hair that stayed one color. You lived in a house that was big and airy and its windows opened to the California sunlight. You had a place. You knew where you were.

You had a name. People called you by it.

You didn't ever crouch on the floor of someone else's kitchen, bare feet on the linoleum grimy with dirt, hands clutched up into fists so the electricity you summoned with an unconscious wish won't get out, won't burn down her apartment. You didn't ever feel responsibility to someone you've never met, who you made up inside your head. You didn't talk to yourself. That was all before.

The fact is, you don't know anything for sure. You don't know why you can't go to sleep without changing place. You don't know if there's one, two, ten people alive in the world, somewhere. Some survivors, sorcerers clinging to the blackened sidewalks and fighting the magic that hangs like poisonous clouds in the air.

You don't really want to know, though.

You don't open the door.

The fact is, as far as you know any facts, the girl you loved is dead and so is the rest of the world you knew. The fact is, one morning you woke up and the sky was bright as usual and the sun came in through the windows of the bedroom you two shared, but no one was in the house and you couldn't hear any birdsong, any noise from the neighbors' houses, no bark of dogs or voices of children. The fact is, the later it got the more your limbs tingled, and when you caught your reflection in a store window you realized it wasn't just fear. The fact is, when you tried pointing at a parked car and saying Deleo, it exploded into shards of glass and metal. There was a huge scorch mark on the pavement where it had been and the fact is, none of the glass cut you when it flew past your face.

The fact is that when you went back to the house, because there was nothing else you could think to do, you fell asleep and woke up in a shack in what you're pretty sure was Austria. You couldn't find anyone there, either, and maybe that's good because your German isn't so hot. And there wasn't anyone in Tokyo and there wasn't anyone in Canada, and after you had a bad dream about biological warfare you noticed strange clouds misting above the streets in New York, and that's when you stopped trying.

You don't dream anymore. You have that much control, you know.

The fact is, you don't know what comes next.

Holy suffering starfish, Liz.

Jeepers.

Damn, that's strong.

Brrr. Wow. Wonderful stuff, Lizard, and sad and creepy enough that I'm glad that I read it this morning rather than before going to bed last night.

Anne, do you have yours up somewhere where I can pimp the living fuck out of it?

Plei, I'm blurbling with happiness that you liked the story. So far, it's only up in my lj, but when I go to work (which is where the file lives) I'll post it to Glass Onion.

It was great, Anne. Just great. It made me glad I posted the challenge. And Rebecca - wow. I'm glad I read it in the morning, too. I was exhausted last night, and I think it would have broken me beyond repair. You should have linked it from my journal.

Anyone who played, who wants to add me, my LJ name is CindyAMB. I made my entry friends' protected, because it's going into a longer WIP.

I'm doing a new challenge today: 15 minutes. See, I'm a nice task mistress. Most people would make you write as long or longer, but not me (possibly because I have kids to get out the door, and I do my best work in the morning).

I'll post the invite post in my LJ in a few. I'm going to continue the same story I started yesterday, because I started this to get moving again on my long WIP, and my brain is already there, anyhow.

Did my 15 minutes, here: [link]

It's continued from yesterday, which starts here: [link]