It is dark and raining and cold. Hannah wouldn't be surprised if it began to snow. There's no one in the café -- indoors or outdoors. The stone walls are crumbling, the tables are rusting, the wood is wearing away.
The guy with the eye patch is no where to be found, and neither is Tara. Hannah sits in the rain and shivers and waits and clutches a pencil in one hand and a cross in the other. She's never been religious, has always thought God something for her mother and older brothers and father; she doesn't know why holding the cross makes her feel better.
Her mother would say, "Any port in a storm." Hannah thinks maybe that doesn't really apply to the end of the world. If that's what this is -- she doesn't know. It seems likely.
**
Everything is empty. Hannah can hear the roaring of fires outside her house, but can't see anything -- it's too dark, and the rain is coming down too hard. Reality isn't supposed to be like this. There's no electricity and no phone and no one inside. She never thought she'd miss Lij's horrible music or Kelly's incessant phone calls or her mother's nagging to clean up her bedroom, but she does. She never thought she'd miss having other people around or being able to watch television, cause she almost never did, but she does.
She wonders what's happening on The Valley, because Kelly hasn't called her to update her. She wonders if Kelly is even out there somewhere.
Maybe Hannah is the one who is missing. Maybe Kelly is calling every day, and Hannah isn't picking up the phone. Maybe Lij and her mother are frantic with worry. Maybe she's been kidnapped. Yeah, kidnapped right into another dimension.
Stuff like that doesn't happen in real life.
Neither does the end of the world.
**
Hannah feels badly because she misses the guy with the eye patch and his perfectly brewed coffee and the beautiful Tara more than she misses, say, Billy. But not more than she misses Viggo. She thinks the guy with the eye patch would have really liked Viggo.
Obviously someone died, and maybe it was him. Maybe it was the girl who kept the sun in the sky. There hasn't been sun -- in the café or in Los Angeles -- for a week.
If there are no other people in the café, are there any other people in Los Angeles?
As she thinks this, a man walks through the stone wall. He's not wet and the rain is stopping anyway, but the sun still isn't coming out.
He's tall and blonde, with olive skin and a mouth just dying to smirk at her. She can tell. He's wearing a long, billowing overcoat -- it's not windy -- and jeans tucked into boots. He's smoking.
She suddenly wants a cigarette -- she hasn't had one in over a week.
"You look lost," says Hannah, and the man whirls around to look at her, sitting in the corner. "The Outsiders is that way, and Billy Idol's music video is that way." She laughs at her own joke, and wonders if this is what it's like to be insane.
She's never considered before that she could just be crazy.
"Hah. Hah. Hah," says the man in a blurry British accent that isn't quite Manchester and isn't quite Essex and isn't quite London. "Very funny. Hasn't anyone ever heard of Sid? Christ, you bloody Yanks are all -- "
"Cry me a river," she says, already bored. She feels a kind of sucking in her stomach, a pulling together, an ache, and misses Lij and Dom, and wishes she'd gone to the Justin Timberlake concert with them instead of skipping it to get high with Kelly. And then she wishes a lot of things were different, which isn't a feeling she usually has. Regrets are for people who don't have rich older brothers to fix things.
"Tell me what you're doing here," demands the blonde.
"I'm just looking for the yellow brick road, since I'm clearly over the fucking rainbow," says Hannah sarcastically. She twirls her pencil expertly, weaving it in and out of her fingers. He takes a step back, and she rolls her eyes -- who's afraid of a pencil?
He punches the wall and his fist goes right through it, and when he pulls his fist out, there's no blood and his hand isn't deformed, but there's a perfect round hole in the rock. "You're not supposed to be here!" he yells, and kicks over the chair and table that Tara used to sit at. Then he turns and walks back through the wall.
Hannah stares after him and says quietly, "Obviously, assface." She is unsurprised when it starts to rain again.
**
Hannah takes seventeen pencils with sharp sharp sharp points and three crosses -- two of her mother's and one of Lij's -- and ventures into the driveway. She can't see any of the fires clearly, but she can see the lights leaping against the sky. She's not sure if it's day or night, since all the clocks are dead and so is her cell phone. Her watch works, but it's not digital, since Lij bought her an entire Swatch collection for her birthday.
She's wearing practical clothes, jeans and sneakers and a t-shirt and a sweatshirt. L.A. isn't supposed to be this cold. L.A. isn't supposed to be this rainy. She steals Lij's windbreaker -- it's not like he's gonna need it now. While she's in his room, she realizes that he's the one who stole Dom's green plastic hat with the yellow duck pictures on the rim.
If she found Dom, she'd tell him that, because it went missing right before Lij moved to New York, and wasn't in Lij's room while he was gone. Her brother was so stupid.
The SUV starts right up; yay for gasoline combustion. The CD that plays is one of Dom's -- he's developed an obsession with rap and hip hop, and it's a weird mix cd of old stuff that Hannah barely remembers from MTV, and new stuff that's never been on MTV. She sits and listens to a creepy song with a lot of layered voices; she can't make out many of the words, but it gives her the chills. And then a song she knows -- it's a sign, she decides. A sign to get moving.
"I'm going going back back to Cali Cali," says Hannah, and guns the engine.
Cars are toppled over, burning, blood everywhere. She has the high beams on; without the street lights, everything is too dark. There are no people, and no L.A. traffic, and no traffic lights. She stops for a stop sign and laughs at herself. Some buildings, some houses, aren't on fire, and she wonders if those are houses like hers, with people inside dreaming about Billy Idol wannabes and icy cold rain.
She gets tired of driving around sooner than she thought she would, and parks at Lij's lawyer's office, right in front. Not in the middle of the street, but close enough. She feels like a fucking rebel, which is silly because there's nothing to rebel against anymore.
With her head against the window, she falls asleep.
**
"Do you hear that?" asks the Billy Idol wannabe. His hair is slicked back and he lights a cigarette.
"It's the fires," says Hannah. She balances a pencil on each index finger.
"Quit it, Happy Meal," says the guy, and knocks the pencils down.
"Give me a cigarette," she says, and he hands one over and lights it for her. Strong tobacco, perfect-tasting. A gust of wind knocks it out of her hand. "What the fuck?"
"Look up," he says, and smirks at her.
"You don't get to be mean to me," she says. "Not unless you bring me coffee like the other one did." Then she looks up and laughs. "A dragon? Don't you think that's kinda played out? A little stupid?"
"What's stupid is your inability to see reality," he snaps and shakes out another cigarette for her.
What's stupid is anyone's insistence that this shit is reality, but whatever.
The noise from the dragon's wings is getting louder, but she's protecting her cigarette from the wind. She leans against her table and crosses her feet.
"So?" she says.
"So what?" he replies, and exhales smoke into her face.
"Is it looking for a princess to eat? Do I need a knight to save me? A prince of all this fucking darkness to slay it?"
He laughs, but it's a short laugh, a mean laugh, and not a sound she likes at all. "Tried that already, darlin', and it didn't quite work the way we expected." Another laugh and he crushes his cigarette under his boot. "Oh. Hm."
"What?" she says.
"See you around," he says, and walks through the wall.
The dragon circles over Hannah. It does look kind of scary, but it also looks kind of like bad computer animation. She watches it as she finishes her cigarette and pulls out two more pencils.
**
Tapping. Tapping. Tapping.
Hannah blinks. It looks like the man with the billowing coat is standing outside the SUV, knocking on the passenger side window.
She blinks again. He's still there.
"Open. The. Damn. Door," he says, almost yelling. His accent is clearer, more upper class -- like Cate instead of Dom. She stares at him, feeling stupid and sleepy and slow. In sleep, her pencil dropped to the floor. She has another tucked into her sleeve, and she lets it slide into her hand. He keeps glancing over his shoulder, and then his elbow is hitting the glass -- hard. But it's reinforced and bullet proof and it just bounces off, and now he's screaming and kicking the SUV and rocking it back and forth.
She hits the button to unlock all the doors and he tries to climb in.
"FUCK!" he yells. "Invite me the fuck in! Don't you fucking know anything?"
"Come in?" says Hannah. He climbs into the car. He's soaking wet, and she realizes that it's still raining in L.A., even though the rain in the café finally stopped. He pulls the door shut tight and locks all the doors, and Hannah looks behind him. Lots of... monsters. A crowd of monsters. Coming fast, with wrinkly foreheads and long teeth.
"Hm," she says, and starts the car. "Where are we going."
"Drive," says the guy. He reaches into the pocket of his coat, and she can't decide whether to shrink back or stab him with her pencils. But before she can do anything, he pulls out a walkie talkie and a pack of cigarettes.
"This is Spike," he says into the walkie talkie. "I've got her."
Hannah speeds away, and automatically takes the cigarette he hands her. The tip is kind of damp, like he licked it before he handed it over. Gross. Billy did that too -- he couldn't keep his fucking tongue to himself. And Viggo. Viggo licked everything. Kelly always lit her own cigarettes, though, even while she was driving.
"HEY!" says Spike, and she realizes he was talking to her.
"WHAT?" she says.
"What? What? What the fuck do you mean, what? Turn left here. We're fighting the end of the world, that's what. You know -- apocalypse?"
She turns left and lets her cigarette ash on the floor and wishes for a cup of coffee. "Apocalypse?" Maybe she wasn't crazy after all. "Like the four horsemen?"
"No, not like the four bloody horsemen. Do you see horses? Why are you bloody humans so obsessed with your fucking revelations? They're revelating nothing!" He slumps against the window and draws his coat around himself. "Four million monsters is more like it -- can't you see?"
"Are you cold?" she asks him and crushes her cigarette out on the dash. Why all new cars didn't come equipped with a just-in-case-the-Apocalypse-comes-and-you-need-a-cigarette ashtray, she didn't know.
"I don't get cold," says Spike, but he's huddled into his jacket, so she turns on the heat anyway. "Turn left here."
She turns, and then purses her lips. "I liked the other guy way better," says Hannah. "You're annoying."
"So're you," says Spike. "Take that right."
"That's a one way street," says Hannah.
"So?" asks Spike. "Are you worried about getting nicked?"
**
"Great," says Spike. "Now we have you, and I still have to see you?" He flips her a cigarette and she catches it. "This is worse than that time Dru and I ate those hippies -- I was seeing trails for days."
"At least it's not raining anymore," she says to him, and then her cigarette is lit. She looks down at it in surprise and then up to him. He smirks at her.
"Shut up," he says, and leans against the wall, hips cocked out like he's hot shit or something.
"This isn't exactly special for me, too," says Hannah, and she leans back in her chair. "At least the guy with the eye patch gave me coffee."
"Eye patch?" says Spike and stands up straight.
"Yeah. In his twenties maybe. Looked older. Tired." Hannah sighs. "He was really... cool."
"Stay here," says Spike, and disappears. Like she's gonna go anywhere?
She puts her feet on the table. She needs a new pair of sneakers, if there's any place where they aren't all burnt up. Spike must have come here without her because the garden is totally trashed and the roof of the café is caved in. There's a statue in the corner she's never seen before, and it's smashed into about a million pieces, and there's a half burnt scroll and an elaborately carved wooden box. Like a really pretty garden -- a real garden, not a café garden -- became a trash heap.
Hannah spares a brief thought for Lij's rooftop garden in New York and Dom's tiny poolside garden of pot and cat nip and Viggo's weird garden of peonies that kept dying.
But only a brief thought.
Spike reappears abruptly, one hand tightly gripping the arm of a redhead with brown roots that really need to be touched up.
"Tell her," Spike says to Hannah.
"I'm Willow," says the redhead apologetically.
"Can't we do this while we're awake?" asks Hannah.
"I'm afraid not, because -- "
"The witch is in Glasgow," says Spike. He lets go of her arm, and she rubs it a little. He looks like he'd gladly kill them both.
"Pencils?" asks Willow. "Clever."
"Thanks," says Hannah, and fights a blush.
"Tell her," says Spike. He stomps away, kicking things. He picks up a chair and starts to destroy it by beating it against the wall. There's a gust of wind and Hannah glances up, but there's no dragon flying overhead.
"He's high strung," says Willow, and sits down across from Hannah. "Tell me what?"
"Before him there was a guy with an eye patch," says Hannah. Willow inhales sharply and whispers something. "I liked him a lot better -- he was nicer, that's all. There was sun. It didn't rain." Hannah shrugs. "Hey -- am I an X-Man? Do I have mutant powers?"
Willow is blinking her eyes fast, and she chokes out, "Xander?"
"If that's a code word, I don't know it," says Hannah. "But I can use a gun because my older brother made me learn in case I ever got kidnapped -- some crazy Frodo fan? I dunno. And I can do a little jeet kun do."
Willow looks confused.
"Hey, Spike!" yells Hannah, and Spike stops smashing chairs. "Gimme a cigarette?"
He throws the pack at her head, and smashes the wooden box into splinters.
"Suicidal," says Willow softly, her voice thick. Hannah lights a cigarette with her finger -- Spike had showed her how, and she's getting good at it -- and settles back. Willow asks her a lot of annoying questions and cries a little bit and then asks more questions that Hannah couldn't really answer.
"So," says Willow. "He told you that the cheese was by itself?"
"Yeah," says Hannah. She's halfway through Spike's pack -- but with all the shit in the air from the fires? And how it's a fucking dream anyway? Hannah figures she can smoke as much as she wants. Besides, the fires were magical and that's why they never went out, and the cigarettes are magical, which is how Spike can still find them, so whatever.
Like it mattered. The end of the world and Hannah's all worried about lung cancer? Stupid.
"Tell her about Tara," says Spike. Hannah twists around to look up at him -- he's standing behind her, staring coldly at Willow.
"Is Tara important?" says Hannah.
"Tara?" asks Willow in a strained whisper. She looks like she's caving in on herself.
"She just kind of stood around," says Hannah. She lights a cigarette and licks the filter and passes it up to Spike.
Willow flickers in and out. A drop of rain falls onto Hannah and she wrinkles her nose.
"Anyway, she and Xander -- Xander? Yeah, she and Xander seemed to know each other really well, but they never really, like, interacted, you know?"
Spike was suddenly behind Willow, his hand on her shoulder. "Sorry, luv," he says.
"It's okay," says Willow. "I'll be back." And then she disappears. Hannah looks from Willow's empty chair to Spike. He's grim, but also satisfied, and Hannah wishes she knew what the fuck was going on.
But she only asks, "Is Scotland like L.A.?"
Spike had clearly been expecting a different question because he opens his mouth and then closes it and then opens it again. "It's all like this," he finally says. "Everywhere. All the time. Except in the places where we're winning. Which isn't here."
**
There's so much death, all the time. There's no real organization -- "Angel did that," says Spike, but won't tell her anything else, and she got the idea that he was talking about a group of people all called Angel? Or something weird like that -- and people keep going out to fight the monsters, sometimes coming back, sometimes not.
Hannah doesn't get to fight. She cooks and she washes clothing in basins of rainwater that she gathers. There's more blood than there is death; it's overwhelming. They all carry stakes and axes and look approvingly at her pencils, and they even have a little bit of electricity that they've made by making captured monsters run in circles.
It's all a bit surreal.
Hannah spends a lot of time with a big group of teenaged girls that grows bigger all the time, called the Potentials.
"But we're not anymore," says one who looks kind of like Avril Lavigne. "Now we're all Slayers. Are you really Elijah Wood's younger sister? He's so hot."
"He was hot," says Hannah, except ew, how gross. "Slayers like the band?"
"Like vampires," says another girl, and rolls her eyes, and sounds kind of disgusted. "Like Spike? Except really evil?"
"Whatever," says Hannah. It's not like she can really deny the existence of vampires, being that there were, like, demons running around on the streets lighting magical fires.
Hannah spends most of her time doing repetitive tasks that no one else wants to do and thinking about Kelly and Lij and Zack and Mom and Xander and all the people who don't exist anymore, for no reason at all other than that they just don't. It's like she was totally traumatized at the beginning and now it's all sinking in, and it's horrible.
If she closes her eyes really tightly and holds her breath and it's quiet except for the roaring of the fires outside, she can see Xander's smile and hear his laugh, but sometimes he's Billy.
**
"You're missing," Hannah says somberly to Xander. "No one can find you, but no one thinks you're really dead."
"I'm not missing," he replies, and smiles at her. Her heart twists a little. "I'm right here."
"This place doesn't exist," says Hannah. It's a new place, not a café; a stone room, round, with no windows and no door. There's a shallow layer of water on the floor, making her feet wet through the canvas of her sneakers, and the air is thickly damp.
Hannah pulls Spike's coat closer around her body and shivers.
"Anyway," Xander continues. "I think you have the wrong guy."
She looks closer at him. He's wearing jeans. Sneakers. A sweater. He looks like the right guy to her, although he's not as tan as he's supposed to be.
But he has two eyes. He smiles again. She gasps.
**
Hannah wakes up with a jolt and has to use the bathroom. The plumbing doesn't work, so everyone is supposed to be careful where they go and how they go, and it's so gross. Spike grouses about the smell and always says that he wishes they had a shit-eating demon, and then someone tells him to watch his language.
They're in a place that's kind of like a hotel or something, with a huge lobby where people stay for most of the day, and private bathrooms in the rooms. She wants to use the bathroom in the meeting room -- the flusher actually works in there, and it doesn't smell as bad as some of the others.
She pads down the stairs and through the lobby -- there are some Potentials fighting with each other. They're like a million billion times stronger than normal people; they're the X-Men. Hannah is definitely not. Hannah's like the Squib X-Man.
Through the hallway and almost to the door and she has to pee so bad, but people are in the meeting room, and talking.
"This isn't what Angel would have wanted!" someone says loudly, and Hannah peeks around the door. A tall black man with a shaved head is speaking. He's totally older and really hot, which is weird, because most of the people who are in the hotel are Hannah's age and kind of normal looking and they talk about dumb shit Hannah doesn't care about, like training and England and Watchers, whatever they were, and other stupid crap. There's also Spike, and a kid about her age with pretty skin and greasy hair. She's seen him before -- he takes Potentials out to kill things, and he always comes back with nary a scratch, but Spike assures her that he's a crazy fighter.
Willow is in there, too, but transparent, like a hologram, and there's a girl about Hannah's age sitting next to her, also transparent, with long blondish hair.
The black man keeps talking, about angels and prophecies and Wolfram & Hart -- although what Lij's lawyers have to do with anything, Hannah doesn't know, and she has to pee, but she's interested in this, in knowing what the fuck is going on. And in knowing whether or not they're winning.
Hannah never really thought too much about the apocalypse, but always figured it would kind of be a lose-lose situation. Like, the devil would swallow the world, or whatever, and everyone would die -- so maybe Satan would win, but then he wouldn't have anything left to win. God's trick. She never thought that there would be anyone, like, left.
Spike starts to argue with the black man about what the angels wanted, and a pale man wearing glasses and tweed that Hannah didn't notice before looks up from the corner, and right at her. He nods rather sharply and the door is closed with a bang.
**
Willow meets her at the café sometimes; Hannah is never again in the small stone room.
"Don't talk to that anymore," Willow warns her. "You have to be careful. It will try to talk to you like it's anyone."
"What is it?"
"It's evil," says Willow darkly.
"I don't get it," says Hannah. "Is there, like, a chart I can look at? Levels?"
Willow stares at her levelly and Hannah sinks into her seat with a sigh. "Is anyone ever going to tell me anything?" she asks. "Sometimes I really get tired of answering questions about Xander and Tara and stupid cheese! Who cares whether the cheese is swiss or cheddar? Who cares if some black chick kills vampires in a desert or if I ever dreamed I had a big hairy mole?"
Willow has a new scar above her eyebrows and a bandage on her arm, exactly where Xander had been cut before he disappeared.
Finally she says to Hannah, "I'd love to tell you, but I can't."
"Fine," says Hannah. She's figured out how to make the cigarettes come to her, no matter where Spike is, and now she takes one. It's like -- it's like pulling a piece of fruit out of a Jell-O salad. Man, that's exactly what she wants. She wants a Jell-O salad with pineapple and orange and whipped cream.
"No, I'd love to." Willow sounds so sincere, but Hannah is dubious. "But nobody really knows what's going on." She stops again. "This isn't the -- I mean."
And Willow is flustered, which Hannah has never seen before. Hannah leans forward, unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers, her other hand twirling her pencil excitedly.
"What's different about this time?" she asks.
Willow stares at Hannah's pencil for so long that Hannah starts to think she won't answer and maybe she ought to change the subject. Willow shimmers, fades in and out. Hannah stabs the pencil into the table, and Willow says, "The thing is, Hannah, every other time we fought the Apocalypse, we beat it back."
Hannah looks up at her and Willow sighs.
"Every other time?" says Hannah.
"I know you're skeptical," says Willow. "But -- I was friends with -- there was this Slayer."
"Of vampires, right?" says Hannah.
"Right," says Willow. "And -- "
"Maybe you missed the part where I was skeptical," says Hannah.
"Maybe -- maybe you missed the part where the world is crazy!" yells Willow, and tells Hannah a story about her best friend being turned into a vampire and meeting a girl named Buffy.
"Buffy?" says Hannah, with eyebrows raised, although nothing really surprises her anymore.
"Buffy," repeats Willow firmly. "She was a cheerleader. And homecoming queen. And then she was the Slayer and she set her gym on fire and moved to... where I'm from." And she was all this stuff, and saved the world a bunch of times and everything got really complicated and there was all this magic.
"You're leaving out a lot," says Hannah accusingly.
"I can't tell you the whole story right now." Willow twists her fingers together. "It's just... We totally beat the apocalypse all the time, and it never got that far, you know, to the end of the world and everything."
"Would the end of the world be so bad? Like, would it be better than this?" says Hannah, and finally lights her cigarette. Willow watches her with narrow eyes as she blows out the flame that dances on her fingertip.
"Giles always said the end of the world would be terribly dull and everyone would be bored for eternity," says Willow. "If we weren't all burning in a horrible hell dimension. Which almost happened more than once, I'll have you know. Even Angel -- "
And then she stops and looks down and Hannah rolls her eyes. "Whatever with the angels," says Hannah. "Is Giles the one in the tweed?"
"How'd you guess?" says Willow, and Hannah thinks she might be joking. But maybe not.