Reality // Buffy solo

Reality: Buffy was finding it harder and harder to keep a firm grasp on, even with slayer strength. She couldn’t tell what was just the product of her imagination and what was fact. Was she experiencing incredibly realistic fantasy of dreams or was she a part of some time travel-y world saving? She didn’t know anymore. She’d stopped wishing for things to go any certain way days ago. Her predictions and assumptions about her life had all been wrong.
Dawn was back, alive and kicking, only something was missing. Angel was back but the time they spent together before he ascended to heaven didn’t mean they could be together, not that she’d want him to even see her in such a messed up state… She had all of this anger building up inside of her, anger she’d tried desperately to let go of. She was still estranged from Willow and no amount of rationalization or people defending Willow’s actions could remove the pain she felt when she thought about the fact that even before the time travel Willow had essentially chosen Faith over her.
Faith, the woman who had brutally murdered her sister. Sure she didn’t have a soul, but even Angel hadn’t attacked Buffy this way when he didn’t have a soul. The psychological torture he’d inflicted upon her was nothing compared to losing a person who was a part of her in every way. Dawn was even created from Buffy by the monks, and losing her to a brutal murderer wasn’t something Buffy’d easily forgive. Especially not when she’d just returned from giving her life for her the second time around.
And Spike, she couldn’t even begin to comprehend what the deal with him was. He was back on humans even though he had a soul. She wasn’t sure what she could do about it when Spike wouldn’t even accept her help. If he kept on killing innocent people, she feared she might have to chain him up and force redemption upon him ala the old days. And even though he wasn’t anywhere near the man he should be, Buffy found him to be the only person she could trust at the moment.
And then there was Cameron, she hadn’t spoken to him since their conversation on the evening the world had returned to real time. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was avoiding him, but she certainly was. She shouldn’t have been, not when she was about to tie herself to at least 18 years of parenthood with him. Because, yes, she was knocked up with his child and had at one point even been excited about it. The pregnancy seemed like burden now, in light of the onslaught of other problems that had decided to fall on her head at just the wrong moment.
But three positive pregnancy tests couldn’t lie. Three positive pregnancy tests had all the power in the world over her. Three positive pregnancy tests had brought her here, to a women’s clinic where she was now lying on a table with ultrasound goo on her flat abdomen. She looked at her stomach and couldn’t believe that a potential person could be within it. But even missing most of her high school health class, she knew it was more than possible. It happened every day. It even happened to slayers like herself.
“Miss Summers?” The clinician’s voice rung through the room, Buffy’d come there alone and had been silent the whole time apart from answering the array of health questions that had to be answered before the clinic could peek inside her uterus to the little bundle o joy cooking within her oven.
“Huh? Sorry,” Buffy replied in a cracking and flustered voice, she’d been lost in her thoughts. But now she looked to the clinician expectantly. The woman smiled, a hint of uncertainty lingered behind her eyes and Buffy suddenly felt a rush of worry fill her. Was something wrong?
“Miss Summers,” the woman began, the ultrasound tool still pressed to Buffy’s cold, gel covered abdomen. “You’re not pregnant.” Buffy felt her entire body tense up when she realized what the woman had said. Did she lose the baby? She couldn’t have. She still hadn’t had her period which, as far as she knew, meant only one thing.
“The home pregnancy tests were false positives,” the woman just continued on with her analysis. Did she even care what Buffy was feeling? No, she just began wiping the goo off of her machine and rambling on about some sort of “chemical pregnancy”.
“But what about my period?” Buffy felt the question spill out of her mouth, and the woman had an immediate answer to it. There was always a scientific answer to these sort of things. She wasn’t really listening for the answer, though. The next minutes passed in a daze. She’d been financially stable for long enough that both she and Dawn had insurance, which covered the ultrasound fee.
She should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. She shouldn’t have been upset, and yet she was. This shouldn’t have felt like a loss, even though it did. She shouldn’t have been shocked about this. If anything was true it was the fact that she shouldn’t be the least bit surprised. If things like dreams could turn out to be real, then why couldn’t pregnancies turn out to be fake?
Buffy didn’t know who she could talk to about this. But she had to talk to somebody. As she walked out of the clinic she scrolled through her contacts for a certain someone she hadn’t seen since Sunnydale. He was probably the only person on the planet who had firsthand experience with what she’d be missing, and she didn’t know what he could even offer her. But she knew he’d understand. With that she failed the number for the one and only Robin Wood and hoped like hell he’d pick up.