AUTHORS: LAWard and Sanguine
RATING: PG-13 (for now)
DISCLAIMER: Not ours. Never ours. If they *were* ours we'd be a
lot nicer to the characters than Mutant Enemy.
SUMMARY: When stars align, fate has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Willow's trip to the dark side has unanticipated consequences, Spike
struggles with his past, and Buffy is plagued by unseen forces
working toward Armageddon. An AU Season 7 fic.
FEEDBACK: [email protected] and [email protected]
ARCHIVED: http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/eclectic_fiction/spikefic.htm
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"God does not play dice." - Albert Einstein
"But all evidence indicates that God is an inveterate
gambler, and he throws the dice on every possible
occasion."
Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
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Prologue
It's a funny thing when stars align--no
one actually knows it. There may be astronomers with their telescopes and
astrologers with their charts trying to keep track, but they can't see. . .not
really.
The light from one star might take two hundred years to reach the earth. The
light from another might take a few thousand. By the time someone saw the cosmic
connection it would have long since ceased to be, and, because of the world's
limited vantage point, the alignment the person did see would only be an
illusion.
We never see the real deal. The real deal happens without our noticing, and
without our even having the ability to notice. Perhaps a mathematician of the
genius variety, an Einstein or a Hawking, could figure it out if they knew what
to look for, but there are so many stars. . .
With all the bits of light and matter following their own paths of motion, no
one could be expected to sense the true moment when the connection had been
made. And, given the speed of light and the distances traveled, by the time
someone understood the connection all that would be left would be the light and
shadow and aftereffects. Aftereffects like the mist enveloping the cliff where
not too long ago a witch gathered forces too dark and too powerful for her to
control. The black magic had been siphoned off her and channeled into the earth
where, in the fading light of dusk, a gray tendril of preternatural brume
stretches from the cliff down the hill to the graveyard where beings of
unearthly power had violently been turned to dust.
Fate may have noticed the alignment. Fate may have foreseen the events that
produced such consequences, and, if the Earth had been an inch to the left or
spinning a fraction of an second faster, the whole mess would have been avoided.
But Fate was a bitch and didn't really care. Besides, this was Sunnydale and
stuff happens. . .