Lullabies: Part One
by Amywyn
Disclaimer: Okay, I did this song and dance in the prologue, but just in case it got missed before...I own nothing, Joss owns everything, Joss is god, yadda, yadda, yadda. Basically, if you recognize the person, place, thing or idea, it belongs to Joss, The WB, Mutant Enemy, and a whole lot of people who aren't me, I'm just borrowing and I promise to return them in good condition. If, on the other hand, you *don't* recognize them - they're MINE, please contact me if YOU would like to borrow THEM. I will share.
Timeline: Also covered in the prologue, but, what the heck. This gets put in there somewhere before "Passion", so Jenny is still alive, though not in the piece so far...
Just a note: I'm sure you all know this already, but denotes thoughts and a line of asterisks (***************) denotes a change of scene or time.
Part One
*Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top...*
Buffy sat bolt upright in bed, sucking in gulps of air, barely stifling the scream that threatened to escape from nightmare into reality. She pulled herself into a ball on the bed, wrapping her arms around her ankles and resting her head on her knees, unable to stop shaking. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and clenched her hands into fists, desperately trying to focus her attention on calming her ragged breathing and *not* on the scattered images from her nightmare.
Dark auburn hair pulled away from a little girl’s cherubic face. A tremulous child’s voice - - the small mouth that had never been given a chance to scream. Blue-green eyes wide with terror, begging for help. Help that never came.
Buffy herself had been unable to affect anything in the dream. She could only watch the events play out like a scene in a movie. It was the only dream Buffy could recall ever having where she had neither form nor voice, no way to change what was happening around her.
It wasn’t until Buffy had gotten over the overpowering fear from the nightmare, slowing and controlling her breathing and thereby her heartbeat, that she heard it. Soft, tinny notes slowly filled her consciousness. The music box on her dresser was softly playing. The gentle melody of the unfamiliar lullaby filled the room.
Buffy had bought the small box at a junk store several weeks earlier, having fallen in love with the intricately carved scene on the lid. She hadn’t realized the music part of the music box was broken until she had gotten it home. The pretty little box hadn’t played a note. Until now.
Buffy raised her eyes to the sound of the quiet lullaby, only to find green eyes staring solemnly at her. A mass of deep auburn waves surrounding a small, serious cherubic face.
The child stood only inches away from the foot of the bed, nearly close enough to touch, but neither Buffy nor the girl made any move to do so. She looked so much like the little girl from the nightmare, Buffy at first thought she might still be dreaming. Then she noticed the differences between the child at the foot of her bed and the child in her dream.
The hair was different, for one thing. The dream-child’s hair had been shorter, straight and pulled away from her face. This girl’s hair fell in soft waves around her small face, even the color was different, slightly. The eyes were different too, and not just in color. This child’s eyes were a deeper shade of green than the other’s, but they were also *older* somehow, although, otherwise, the two girls appeared to be about the same age.
Not the same girl from the dream. The thought drifted through Buffy’s mind and she and the girl silently regarded each other. Close, but not the same.
The little girl was the first to move, tilting her head slightly to the side, a sad little smile touching her lips. Then, dropping her eyes from the Slayer, the girl vanished.
Buffy sat stunned, staring at the empty space where a child had stood only a moment before. The girl hadn’t walked away, hadn’t dropped to the ground and hadn’t flown out the window. She had just simply disappeared in the space of a heartbeat.
And she had taken the music with her.
“Morning Giles”
Giles looked up from the book he was currently engrossed in as Buffy walked into the library. He smiled at her, although he doubted he would get much of a response in kind.
“Good Morning.” he called back, hoping for a minor miracle. Unfortunately, he had been right, the weal little thing that flitted briefly across her face as she sat down across from him could hardly be called a smile. He found himself repeating the fervent wish that she would once again bounce into view, smiling brightly and talking a mile a minute. She may have been headstrong and unpredictable, making it occasionally very frustrating as her Watcher, but it nearly broke his heart to look at her now. He wondered briefly if the sadness in her eyes would ever fade.
he thought angrily to himself, noting the dark smudges beneath those eyes. His own eyes fell away from her face, dropping back, unseeing, to the book in front of him, as the now familiar feeling of failure again rose up in him.
“And how are you this morning?” he asked, expecting her usual “Fine, thanks,” response, brief and non-committal, though both of them knew he knew better. They also both knew she would talk to him when she was ready.
“Tired, actually. Kindof a rough night.” She surprised him with her answer.
He looked back up at her, wishing he was better at not looking surprised, hoping she would tell him what he already knew, what was obvious to anyone who cared enough to see, and also hoping that the feeling didn’t show too clearly on his face and push her away.
“Oh?” he replied, at a loss for anything better to say.
“Yeah. I seem to be having a little trouble sleeping lately.” She shrugged, as if to make light of the fact that she hadn’t slept a single night though since the evening of her seventeenth birthday. “Bad dreams.” She spoke in a near whisper, the relative silence of the library the only thing making it possible to hear her without straining, her eyes glued to the claddagh ring she still wore on her finger, though it now pointed away from her.
The quiet confession wasn’t much as far as revelations went, but it was the most she’d said on the subject in recent weeks. Giles clasped his hands firmly in front of him, resisting the urge to reach out and cover her smaller hand with his own, if only to stop her from turning that damned ring on her finger back and forth. He had a sudden urge to pull the thing off and throw it away, to grab her by the arms and shake her until she gave him some way he could *help* her. Instead, he held himself still, waiting for Buffy to decide how much she wanted to know he knew. She briefly glanced back up, again offering that weak little smile, tightly clasping her own hands together and placing them carefully in her lap.
“Although last night was kindof a relief from the norm,” she finally continued, focusing her gaze on her Watcher, “If, that is, you want to consider any kind of nightmare relief-worthy.”
Giles released a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding, offering her his own small smile in an attempt to hide his disappointment at Buffy’s continued refusal to allow him to offer her any kind of solace.
“I suppose that depends,” he said as he rose from the table, book in hand, “on what was different about it. So, what precisely was different about it?”
“Well, for one thing, I wasn’t in it.”
“What?” Giles paused on his way to his office, looking back in Buffy’s direction.
“Just what I said. I’m in the middle of this dream, looking around, and there are four or five people in it, none of whom are me or anyone else I know. How weird is that?” She turned to look up at him.
“Well, it is admittedly a bit odd, but not entirely unheard of. You didn’t recognize anyone in the dream?” he asked as he wandered slowly back over to where she sat, re-taking the same seat he had just vacated.
“Nope, no one. I recognized the place, but not the people.”
“Perhaps if you would go into a bit more detail as to what actually happened...”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. Not really much to tell, at least not that makes any sense. It’s mostly just scattered images, you know how most dreams are. I do remember a little girl, but I’ve never seen her before, and I have no idea who she is. She was in a playground, and then someone...or something...jumped out, grabbed her, tossed her in a car and drove away.” Buffy paused in her narrative, silently debating whether or not to tell him the rest. But *the rest* was the only reason she had brought up her dreams to begin with. She hadn’t wanted to bother him, at least not on this particular subject. No matter what he had told her, she simply couldn’t convince herself that he didn’t blame her for this whole mess, at least in part.
She looked up at him, waiting for some kind of response to what she had told him so far. He had taken off his glasses, and was staring at her in concentration, his brow furrowed - never a good look, she knew.
“Well, there are a few possible explanations I can think of...one in particular in fact.” he said carefully as he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose and once again rose from the table, walking over to the library counter and picking up the newspaper lying there “What did this girl look like, do you recall?”
She shifted her position in the chair, pulling one knee up towards her chest and crossing her other leg in front, angling her body so that she could look at him strait on as he walked slowly back toward her. “Actually, she’s the only thing about the dream I really remember clearly. She was maybe seven or eight tops, and she had dark auburn hair and green eyes.” Her eyes clouded over for a moment, remembering the fear in those green eyes as a large hand had clamped over her small mouth. “She was pretty.” Buffy concluded softly.
“Is this her?” Giles asked, placing the newspaper on the table in front of her chair. Buffy turned from him to look at the cover story for the day and felt the blood drain from her face. MISSING CHILD, the headline proclaimed, directly above a picture of a young girl’s smiling face. Even in black and white, Buffy easily recognized the child from her dream. She looked back up at Giles, who was now regarding her with concern and something that might have been either sympathy or pity in his eyes.
“Okay, so what does this mean? Is this some part of Slayerdom everyone forgot to mention? Do I now get to dream about all the horrible things I’m *not* stopping?” She glared up at him, unaccountably angry at him over this new, unexpected development. “Hey, maybe it’s in that handbook you decided I didn’t need.”
Giles filched and the anger and hurt in her voice and sat back down beside her, his hands reaching toward her before he realized what he was doing. He immediately pulled them back, wondering if Buffy had noticed. “There isn’t anything about this in the Slayer’s Handbook. As a matter of fact, there is no record of Slayers necessarily being psychic in this manner at all...that I’m aware of.” He had taken off his glasses in the course of his speech, and sat staring at them in his hands, unable to meet her gaze. “I’m not precisely sure what it means...yet...I’ll have to consult my books, see what I can find.”
Buffy could hear the worry in his voice, and her irrational anger melted away in the face of his concern. She dropped her eyes away from him, and looked back down at the grainy photo in the paper, a stricken expression on her face. “I’m sure I can come up with something...” he attempted. She cringed at the defeat in his tone, aware that it was her fault, again. He didn’t deserve her anger, this wasn’t his fault and she had no right to take it out on him. Yelling at Giles wasn’t going to solve anything.
“There’s something else,” Buffy began quietly, still staring at the paper in front of her, unsure of precisely how to relay the rest coherently, “when I woke up the music box on my dresser was playing.” She looped her arms around her upraised knee and looked up at him, her hazel eyes troubled as they stared into his. “It’s been broken since I got it, it’s never played before, and there was a little girl standing at the end of my bed.”
Giles was slightly relieved at this statement, this, at least, sounded like something he could easily explain. “Well, it’s not at all uncommon to see images from a dream directly after waking...” he trailed off as Buffy began to shake her head in the negative.
“No, I’d been awake for a few minutes already, and the girl I saw in my room wasn’t this girl,” she said, indicating the newspaper photograph with a nod, “she was different. They looked enough alike to be sisters, almost doubles, and they’re about the same age, but it still wasn’t this girl. I’m sure of it.”
As much as he wanted to believe his own interpretation, he had learned fairly quickly after meeting Buffy to believe her when she said she was sure of something. He began mentally running through the possibilities he was aware of that would explain what Buffy was telling him. None of them were overly appealing.
“All right,” he replied slowly, somewhat disturbed and trying not to show it, “did she say anything to you?”
“No, she just stood there looking at me for a minute or two, and then she disappeared.” She shrugged, attempting to cover her own discomfort at relating the particulars of the story to him, fully aware of how odd it all sounded.
“She left?”
“No, Giles. She *disappeared*. As in vanished into thin air. Without a trace. I blinked and she was gone. And as soon as she was, the music box stopped playing, too.” She paused, hoping for some king of response from Giles. When he simply continued to stare at some point beyond her shoulder, his brow once again furrowed in concentration, she continued on, trying and failing at a joking tone, “So, am I seeing ghosts or just hallucinating? Is this like on of the first signs of insanity?”
That last word was what finally brought Giles’s attention fully back to the girl sitting in front of him. “You’re NOT crazy.” he informed her, a bit more forcefully than he had intended, somewhat surprised at the tone of his own voice.
Buffy didn’t seem to have noticed, however, as she merely smiled up at him with relief and no small amount of gratitude at his reassurance. It was the closest thing to a real smile he had seen on her face since Angel had...changed - it almost reached her eyes.
“Hey, Buffy!” Alexander Harris called out cheerfully as he entered the library, Cordelia at his side, with Willow and Oz following close behind. Giles watched as Buffy’s rare smile faltered at the sound of her friends nonsensical chattering, then froze in place as she turned to face the two couples.
“Hey, yourself. What are you guys doing here so early?” she asked them in general, though she looked mainly to Willow and Xander.
“We came to make sure you made it to French class on time,” Willow answered her, “Snyder’s in a snit, and if you get any more tardys he’s gonna have a stroke.”
“Not that anyone would mind if Snyder had a stroke,” Xander chimed in, “but then we’d have to get another principal, and the last time we did that scene we ended up with...well...Snyder...and I’m not sure we *could* get someone worse, but I don’t think we really want to take that chance, do you?”
“I shudder at the thought.” Buffy replied as she rose from her seat to follow her friends out of the library. “I’ll check in with you at lunch, okay Giles?” she asked softly as she gathered up her books from the table.
“Oh...yes...yes, of course. I’ll see you at lunch, then.” He stood as he watched them walk out the library doors, noting, and not for the first time, how Buffy stood out as the odd man in the group. He never noticed it when it was just Buffy and Xander, or Buffy and Willow, or even Buffy and Willow and Xander, but whenever Cordelia or Oz joined the small group of friends, Buffy just looked out of place somehow, or at least it seemed she felt that way.
He turned away from the now closed library doors, saddened by the though, and headed toward the stacks to begin looking for something to explain Buffy’s vanishing child.
To Be Continued...
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