Disclaimer: All the characters belong to Joss Whedon. If they belonged to me I would be writing in my limousine on the way to work instead of the commuter rail. Thank you to my amazing beta SanityFair for whacking my commas into shape. And thanks for all the lovely reviews! Keep them coming!
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Chapter 2 –New Year’s Day
 
Spike’s consciousness returned slowly after an untold amount of time spinning in blackness. He gradually became aware that he was lying on something soft and faintly fragrant. What the hell happened? His eyelids felt like lead as he finally succeeded in opening his eyes. He was in a dimly lit close space. Struggling up onto his elbows he realized that the soft, fragrant stuff he was lying on was apparently hay, and the small space a cramped little hayloft. The hell? Where am I? His body was sore and bruised, and he winced as he got into a sitting position, his head almost touching the roof above him. Across the loft, sunlight filtered in around the cracks of a door, which presumably was meant for hauling hay up from below. He was shaking his head to clear it when he noticed Buffy lying a couple feet away from him.
 
Buffy was also struggling to rejoin the land of the conscious. She wasn’t sure if she was dreaming, or dead, or what. As she gradually became more awake, she rather wished she were dead. Her head was pounding, and her legs ached. In fact, she generally felt as though she had been hit by a truck. Groaning, she rolled over and opened her eyes then sat up with a gasp and another groan as the sudden movement pulled at a healing cut on her side. “Spike? Is that really you?”
 
“It’s me, pet,” he responded gently. “Are you hurt?”
 
“No, I mean, yeah, but…” she babbled, staring at him while her mouth tried to form coherent words. “You’re… alive.”
 
“Well, undead still but, yeah.” He braced himself for the inevitable questions, wondering how exactly he was going to explain this to her. Even after she’d been through a war she was still so gorgeous, and he wished he had about a week straight to just drink in the sight of her.
 
Buffy just kept shaking her head again and again. Her senses were telling her that this man, whom she had loved and lost was there, really there, whole and in the flesh, but her brain just couldn’t process the information. She had watched him burn, had suffered months of nightmares about it. He couldn’t be here, looking at her, inquiring about her well-being. But he was, and she found herself asking, “How?”
 
Spike rubbed the back of his neck a bit sheepishly. “Bit of a long story, that,” he replied.
 
From his manner, Buffy wasn’t sure she was going to like what he had to say. She hesitated then as usual clamped down on her brewing, conflicted emotions in favor of action. “I think we’ll have to delay that story until we figure out what the hell just happened to us.”
 
Relieved to be off the hook for the moment, Spike ventured, “Well, we’re in a hayloft.”
 
“Yeah, and I’m trying to figure out why. How did we get here? Do you remember anything?”
 
“I just remember some sort of light behind us.” Spike frowned, trying to remember.
 
“It felt like something was pulling me,” Buffy said, her brow also wrinkled in concentration. “Like I was being sucked into a black hole or something. It all went dark, and then I woke up here.”
 
“That’s about all I remember as well.” He cocked his head and looked at her. “Where did you lot spring from anyway? I didn’t know Angel had called in the cavalry.”
 
“He didn’t.” Buffy’s voice was tinged with irritation as she began explaining. “Willow’s in this really powerful coven now. One of the witches in the coven is a seer – she gets visions all the time. She had this vision of a horrible battle, and she kept having it again and again, but she didn’t know what it meant. Willow finally did some mind meld thing with her and realized that she was seeing Angel fighting a whole bunch of demons. We tried to get in touch with him, but we just got the run around from Evil Lawyers Inc. Finally they did some spell so that we could see what was going on in LA, and we saw that the battle had started. We scrambled as many of the trained Slayers as we could, and the coven teleported us all over. The only problem was we landed right in the middle instead of on the outside. I don’t… I don’t know if anyone’s going to make it.” Buffy’s voice faltered on the last sentence as she realized that she had most likely led the other girls to their deaths.
 
Spike stared open mouthed. “So you all just dropped everything and came running because Angel was in trouble?” He tried hard to keep the slight note of hurt out of his voice. It’s still all about Angel. Even after all we went through together.
 
Buffy shook her head, looking down, away from those searching blue eyes. “No. It had nothing to do with Angel. Siobhan’s vision seemed to indicate that the world would be completely overrun with demons. If the battle was lost, it could mean the end of the world. We didn’t know what the hell Angel had done to bring all this about, but we couldn’t stand by and let it happen.”
 
Spike nodded, believing her and feeling a palpable sense of relief. “Well, I guess I can answer some of the question about what the hell Angel was doing. He decided to take out the Circle of the Black Thorn – group of evil types behind a lot of Wolfram and Hart’s schemes. Problem was he pissed off a lot of powerful people and demons in the process. We were screwed before the battle even started. Wesley was dead, Gunn was wounded – he lasted about ten minutes. Ilyria – she’s this goddess from another dimension, blue skin, bad temper. She was fighting, and so were Angel and I, but what could the three of us do against that lot? Don’t know what happened to Ilyria. I guess there might be a chance if she and Angel keep fighting and rally the Slayers…”
 
“Angel’s dead,” Buffy cut in. Spike jumped and Buffy continued in a quiet voice, “I saw him fall off that dragon thing. It roasted him and a bunch of Slayers. I never saw him again after that.”
 
“Shit.” Spike closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had never really liked Angel, but he had grown to understand what drove him in the past few months. Good or ill, Angel had been a huge part of making him what he was. The line of Aurelius was disappearing, and it felt like a chapter had been ripped out of his personal history. Then he realized that Buffy was probably upset about it too and he looked at her with pained eyes. “I’m sorry. I know… I know he meant a lot to you.”
 
“Seems like he meant something to you too,” Buffy observed.
 
“Yeah. Was my sire in all but the blood. Hard to imagine he’s gone.”
 
“I don’t know what happened to him since Sunnydale,” Buffy mused. “We all thought he made a big mistake joining Wolfram and Hart.”
 
Spike laughed bitterly. “Yeah, not sure I’d disagree with you there. Bunch of times I thought he lost the thread entirely. But I think in the end he was still a White Hat in his fucked up way.”
 
“Yeah.” They fell into silence, Spike leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes, Buffy wrapping her arms around her knees and resting cheek on her arms, watching him. After a few minutes she said, “So I guess we still don’t know where we are. Other than a hayloft.”
 
“Well that’s a start,” Spike began, opening his eyes and looking around. Something struck him about the roof. “The roof’s thatched.”
 
Buffy looked up and sure enough the roof was made of what looked like bundles of straws. “And…?”
 
“Not exactly common any more, are they? Not in the US at least. So I’m thinking we’ve got to be somewhere else.”
 
“Where else would you see thatched roofs?” Buffy wondered.
 
Spike shrugged. “No clue. They used to be common out in the country when I was a lad.”
 
Buffy tried to stand up, but even she was too tall to stand fully erect in the dim narrow space. She started exploring over to the door in the wall, but then noticed a square hole in the floor with a ladder extending downward. “There’s a trapdoor or whatever here. I’ll go take a look.”
 
“Maybe we should go together,” Spike said doubtfully. “No telling if something going to yank us around somewhere else without warning.”
 
Buffy looked down the ladder. “The bottom is standing in a patch of sunlight. I think you’d better let me take this one.” Spike grumbled in frustration, but realized she had a point. “I’ll be right back,” she reassured him. Checking to see if the coast was clear, she climbed down the ladder. She found herself in a small barn, with a wide open door looking out onto fields fenced with stone walls. Green hills rolled off into the distance, and a flock of sheep cropped the grass in one of the near fields. Looking around, she found two stalls on each side. One contained a placid looking cow that looked at her curiously. The two stalls across the way held larger cow like beasts that she guessed must be oxen. They had small curved horns and wet, slimy noses, and Buffy wrinkled her own nose at the smell of animal manure. She poked her head into the last stall and saw a collection of farm implements that all looked handmade somehow – buckets, a plow, and a wooden yoke for the oxen, and more piled hay.
 
Suddenly she heard a voice singing as its owner approached the barn. Not wanting to announce her presence until she had more information, Buffy dashed into the empty stall and hid under the hay, next to the wall between the two stalls. She found that a large crack between two boards afforded her an excellent view of the door beyond the cow stall, and she waited to see who would walk through.
 
The young woman who walked into the barn looked to be about her own age and height, but there, any resemblance ended. This girl carried a yoke on her shoulders with two buckets swinging from it, singing in an unfamiliar language. Most of her dark hair was tucked up under a white coif, almost like something an Amish person would wear. Her dress was long and brown, with a muslin apron and a plaid shawl over her shoulders. She was like something out of a history book, and for reasons she couldn’t explain Buffy felt a cold chill down her back. The girl put down the buckets and yoke, grabbed a small stool and one of the buckets and made her way in next to the cow. “Get over now, Sukey,” she said, giving the cow a shove until the beast shifted enough to allow her to settle in next to it. She bent over on her low stool and started milking, singing again in the odd but musical tongue.
 
Buffy jumped a bit when a man’s voice called, “Kathleen?”
 
“Aye?” she responded, pausing in her milking to eye the man who was entering the barn.
 
He wore a long sleeved shirt with a buttoned tan vest over it, with pants that fastened at the knee and stockings leading down to decidedly old fashioned looking shoes. His hat was of the tri-cornered colonial type, and he pushed it up with his arm to wipe his sweaty brow. “Have ye seen me pitchfork?”
 
In an exasperated tone Kathleen answered, “It’s in the oxen’s byre where ye left it, Sean O’Malley. And if ye don’t find it and feed the beasts they’ll be worrying themselves into anemia.”
 
With a grin Sean sauntered over to the oxen and squeezed between them, retrieving his pitchfork. “Ah, sweet Kathleen. I’d be lost without ye.”
 
“Ye’d be lost in your own sleepin’ chamber, you layabout. Now leave me to finish, or the Mistress will be cross.” She turned back to the cow.
 
Dramatically sweeping his hat off his head he bowed low saying, “Farewell, sweet Kathleen, until we meet again.” Kathleen waved her hand at him in irritation and he smirked, shouldered his pitchfork, and headed outside. Buffy watched as she finished her milking, hooked the buckets onto the yoke, and hefted her burden, heading out into the fading afternoon.
 
As soon as the milkmaid was out of sight Buffy crept back up the ladder. “What do you think?” Spike asked. “From the accents I’d guess Ireland. Girl had a brogue thicker than molasses.”
 
“Yeah, but I think the question isn’t just where we are but when we are,” Buffy said.
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“All I’m saying is that those two were wearing the latest fashions from like, the 1700’s,” Buffy replied. “Unless we died and went to Colonial Williamsburg or something, I’m guessing we traveled in time.”
 
“How the hell did we manage that?” Spike sputtered. And more importantly, how are we supposed to get back and save the world? The implications caused Spike an involuntary shiver, and they both looked at each other, completely perplexed as to what to do next.
 
TBC