Rating: R (language, violence)
Pairings/Characters: Ensemble, plus some OCs. Picks up after episode 07x22 - Chosen.
Length: 55,000 words over 19 chapters.
Summary: One year after the events of Chosen, the remenants of those from Sunnydale have settled in Cleveland, Ohio -- but things have not gone as they hoped. No new Slayers have been found, until a pair of identical-twin Slayers enter their lives. This event acts as catalyst for a new enemy to engage the Scoobies.
Warnings: Has death, betrayal, and loss of hope. Also, it's long. )
Author's Notes: Pretty much covered above. Obviously, I don't own any Mutant Enemy characters and make no money off them (is that even truly necessary?). Katharine Beckford, Audrey Beckford, Helen St. Claire, Kimbery Mullin, Janet Unger, Cole, and Donner are all my creation -- no use granted without permission.
Archiving: Please ask.
Chapter One
Pulling the Plug
May of 2003 - Shaker Heights, Ohio:
Katharine Beckford looked down at her twin sister, Audrey. The similarities between them were great, even for identical twins. Sometimes, before, their father would joke that Hailey Mills wasn't so similar even when she played both twins in The Parent Trap. That was before, though.
Now, as Katharine looked down on Audrey, she almost felt they were the same person. It felt like it was her down there on the hospital bed, her head shaved where the doctors performed emergency brain surgery, tubes up her nose, face pale with the remains of bruises. Six months ago, the front-right tire of Audrey's car blew out while she drove on the highway. Her car flipped, hit a concrete telephone pole, and Audrey barely survived.
Until now.
The doctors said the longer Audrey remained in a coma, the less her chance of waking up was. And, really -- did they want her to wake up? Katharine loved her sister, missed her so much it hurt, but the EEG showed only minor electrical activity in her brain and doctors said that, at best, she would barely be coherent if she woke up. Right now, all that kept Audrey alive were the machines she was hooked up to. After six months of a coma, her parents had finally come to the decision to pull the plug.
Katharine gently lowered herself down and kissed Audrey lightly on the forehead. "I love you, Audrey," she said.
Katharine stepped back to let her parents approach the bed. The room was fairly crowded, with aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins all there to say goodbye to her sister. She moved to the back of the room, her back against the wall just beside the bathroom door.
"I can't believe they're making an occasion out of this," Katharine thought. "They're pulling the plug, letting you die, and they call a get-together? Morbid."
Her mother and father stood together beside Audrey's bed. "We are glad you could all make it here today," her father said, "although the circumstances are sad indeed." Katharine shook her head and tuned her father's words out. He was given to speeches -- he liked to talk and hear himself talk, but Katharine didn't particularly share that view.
She thought about the day she learned of Audrey's wreck: they were on the school's soccer team together, but Audrey skipped practice that day to go to the library to study for a test she had the next day. Audrey always had trouble with history, memorizing dates and names; she did much better with math and sciences, where a concept lead to the correct answer. Katharine was the opposite: she preferred English and history to the hard sciences.
No one bothered to call her cell phone to tell her anything. She came home that night to an empty house, which -- aside from the absence of her sister -- was not altogether unusual. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a lawyer, and both often worked late hours. She called Audrey's cell phone around eleven-thirty, but it was off. No big deal, right? She was in the library. Made sense to turn it off.
When she woke up for school the next morning and still the house was empty, Katharine started to worry. She called her parents' cell phones: off, due to hospital regulations. She called friends and parents' friends; no one knew what was going on--
A sudden jolt brought her back to the present. She felt like someone punched her in the stomach, almost, something was spreading from a warm center in her body and everything in her muscles and mind felt weird. Her father was still talking even as he bent down to pull the plug on Audrey's life support machine, and the monitors went haywire all around Audrey and suddenly Katharine felt fine, refreshed, strong...
Her father pulled the plug out.
The monitor beeped softly, steadily. No faltering, no hesitation.
Steady.
May of 2003 - just outside Sunnydale, California:
Buffy, Dawn, Giles, Faith, and Xander all stood beside the crater Sunnydale left. They stared down at the ground where they lived, fought, bled, and died (multiple times, in Buffy's case). And they all wondered one question:
"Now what?"