Title: Buffy Summers and the Art of Sleepwalking
Author: Fleur
Pairing: Buffy/Angel, but that certainly isn't the focus.
Summary: What happens when that feeling of being between asleep and awake becomes reality.
Author's Notes: The style this is written in is very deliberately done; this fic came into my head fully-formed, and I hope you enjoy it - it makes a big change from the all-X/G-all-the-time I've written lately.

Buffy had time, while she was falling, to think about dying.

The thing was, since four years ago, she hadn't given it any thought at all. Maybe there were going to be pearly gates, all the dead people she'd ever known waiting there, playing harps and wearing white. If she could have, right then, she would have laughed.

After all, there wasn't any way Buffy would find herself near anything that sounded like that. She wasn't dying like a Slayer usually would; finding a demon or vampire or very bad thing that was having a better day than she was. She was sacrificing herself on an interdimensional portal.

Absently, she wondered what it was going to be like. In Glory's dimension, that was. Was it going to hurt?

Because right now, there wasn't any pain. There was blinding, insanely bright light making its merry way right past her eyelids, and there was that continual sense of falling, but there was no pain at all. Screaming in her ears, the strange sensation of being pulled apart, that horrible pressure from all around, but no pain.

And then all of a sudden, the ground rushed up to meet her body, and Buffy was gone.

*

There's a certain feeling one gets when they know they're dreaming. You know the feeling, don't you? When straight edges are just a little bit too fuzzy, when everything seems to be just a pinch the other side of reality.

Well, that was the feeling that Buffy Anne Summers, recently deceased, had when she woke up safe in her bed.

The morning light was filtering through her window and she blinked, wanting to yawn, but instead finding that she just wasn't that tired. (Actually, she thought, to herself, barely daring to breathe, she was probably still asleep. Any minute now, she was going to wake up and have to face her eternity in whatever hell this was going to be.)

But as for now, it was just so very warm. The moment before your alarm goes off when your bed embraces you and you think that if you could just stay here, just cuddled in bed, then nothing would ever be wrong again. Buffy smiled at the thought, turning her head to try and see out the window, where she could hear the birds singing. Maybe she could just stay here forever.

She would have, too, or so she told herself, it wasn't for the fact that right then, the scent of waffles reached her nose. Which led to a moment, just one, but most certainly a moment, where Buffy was suddenly unsure if any of this was happening.

So she pinched herself, and wrinkled her nose when it hurt.

"Ow," she complained, quietly, and got out of bed, first her left foot and then her second, and there her slippers were, right where she hadn't left them, slipped under the side of her bed. She smiled. She'd certainly done a good job on this dream.

As she got up, she whispered to herself, "Please don't wake up," and stood, paused, for several seconds to try and make certain of it. She reached for her bathrobe, folded neatly on the end of her bed, and paused again, and most definitely did not wake up in any sort of demonic dimension of evil and torment. Tying the waistband tightly, she smiled, satisfied, and went out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

In dreams, where there comes a very sudden and very realistic shock, more often than not, the sleeper in question is startled right back into consciousness.

Buffy herself knew this, and so when she stood in the kitchen entrance watching her mother make waffles, she closed her eyes for a moment and waited to wake up to her future.

And waited,

and waited,

and

waited.

But when Buffy opened her eyes again, she wasn't in another dimension, and she wasn't being tortured, and she was still watching her mother at the waffle iron, and that was the very moment when Buffy began to suspect that none of this was a dream at all.

"Mom?" Buffy asked, very quietly.

As soon as she spoke, her mother turned around. "Oh, Buffy," she said, and Buffy knew she should have felt sad, then, but she didn't; she didn't miss her mother, she wasn't miserable for what she'd lost, she was just calm and warm and happy. Leaving the waffles, which, from where Buffy stood, looked perfectly cooked, she stepped over to her and put her arms around her.

And as Buffy just folded against her, closing her eyes and inhaling the scent of happiness, her mother stroked her hair, and went on, "We thought you'd never get here."

"I was only upstairs," Buffy replied, pulling back from the hug slightly. "I don't think you looked very hard."

Smiling, her mother just brushed her hair back a little, and then turned back to the iron. "Do you want some waffles, honey?" She looked over her shoulder, and grinned, as if she was about to let Buffy in on some sort of secret. "They're always calorie-free, here."

"Just adds to the waffley goodness," Buffy said, and nodded. Then she frowned, as if remembering some sort of long-forgotten dream, and said, "What happened with Glory?"

"Oh," her mother said, bringing over Buffy's plate, stacked high with the waffles. When Buffy looked around, she realised she hadn't noticed that the table was covered with cream and syrup and orange juice, with freshly-cut fruit, some of which she was pretty sure wasn't even in season. But she didn't worry about that, and started to top the waffles, smiling. As she did so, her mother stood behind her, and hugged her shoulders. "Everything with Glory was over a very long time ago."

"And everyone?" Buffy looked up at her.

Still smiling kindly, her mother nodded. "They're all fine. Don't you know that?"

And she did know that, when she thought about it - Willow and Xander and Giles, they were all okay and everything was going so well for them lately, even if she couldn't remember what that meant. Anya, and Tara, and - she frowned. There was someone else.

"Dawn?" she asked, after reaching for the name. "What about Dawn?"

And there was a flash of memory, then, of Dawn, and a tower, and falling falling falling--

She stood up, and took her mother by the shoulders, speaking urgently. "Where is Dawn? What happened to her?"

"Who's Dawn?" her mother asked, shaking her head, and gently pushing Buffy back down in her seat. "You're probably still adjusting, it's to be expected. It's all right." And as Buffy, placated, nodded, her mother kissed the top of her head. "We're all going to be here for you."

"She's here already?" a voice came, from the doorway.

The slight fuzziness that edged reason was more pronounced, now, and she stood up and was utterly certain this was a dream. Angel stood there, in perfect sunlight, leaning against the doorway and smiling at her. Even when she stepped towards him her feet didn't seem to hit the ground as they should have, and when she put her arms around him, she could feel that her heart had stopped. He bent to kiss her, and time stood still.

Later that day - or perhaps it was months later, maybe even years, because Buffy couldn't tell, she held Angel's hand as they walked down the road, and she seemed to feel that it was strange for the streets to be so deserted. But when she mentioned it to Angel, all he replied was that "you have to know what to see," and when she closed her eyes there was concrete rushing up to meet her far too fast.

From then on there were people on the street every day, and they were happy, and there was a woman down the street who reminded Buffy of Ms Calendar who had Angel cut her lawns and would pinch his cheeks and tell Buffy she had competition for him.

And her mother helped her to move out, and she moved to next door where she lived with Angel, and they adopted a puppy together, a gorgeous little golden retriever, and every day, they would play with hm for at least a few hours. In the evenings Angel would walk him and Buffy would sit and think about old times, and laugh, and be happy all her friends were all safe and okay, because she knew it to be so.

She never had nightmares, either, not even of tall towers and chaos gods and little sisters, not of vampires or demons, not of moments of happiness or callings or destiny, or that horrible, horrible moment of realising that the world was going to end - but really, this time - unless she made the impossible choice to stop it. Buffy never dreamed of any of that, which didn't mean it never happened, but meant it didn't any more.

It didn't seem strange, when she didn't think about it, that Angel was here and was hers again, and it didn't seem strange that she didn't think about it. Things just were: the same way it just was that she knew everybody that she cared about was okay. And she had her life, now, and it was different, but somehow everything was the same.

One night, though, the feeling of dreaming suddenly stopped, and Buffy frowned, and the world was more in focus. She looked up at Angel, who looked down at her, and smiled, just a little, and told her to close her eyes.

And Buffy did as she was told; she felt tears on her cheeks for the first time in ever, and closed her eyes, and he kissed her, and that, that very moment of pure unhappiness -

that was when she woke up.