Sunnydale, California, Late March 2003
Feb. 7th, 2012 05:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brat_inslayageLong day. It had been a long day, filled with training (as usual) and more training and trying to get the girls up to speed on weapons work. This was where things started to get tricky: the Potentials came from such a wide range of previous experience, from girls like Molly and Vi who'd had a few years of it to ones like Caridad and Rona who hadn't known until the Bringers showed up to kill them. Add in language barriers and different personality types, not to mention a few probably inevitable freakouts about actually working with weapons, and trying to get everyone more or less on the same page could be next to impossible. Really, teaching the kids at the youth center in New York had been a hell of a lot easier: they were younger, eager to learn, no apocalyptic pressure on them, and definitely not as set in their ways.
Another thing Kennedy had found was that different Watchers had vastly different teaching techniques, and every day lately there had been at least one argument about fighting styles, which, again, was a royal pain in the ass if you had to struggle to convey your meaning. She'd been doing her best to rein it in, but today her frustration had boiled over into yelling at Chloe for being out of sync during a kata-- having Principal Wood drop in to watch them hadn't helped, since his skeptical expression had fueled a desire to really make sure the girls gave a good show, and if they didn't look good how was that going to reflect on her as their drill sergeant? She wasn't particularly inclined to like the guy, either, what with Spike being all broody over his whatever it was the principal had going on with Buffy, so it had all culminated in a supremely cranky incident that Kennedy wasn't particularly proud of.
In retrospect, sure, she could have gone a different route than making Chloe do pushups because she'd gotten too far into the drill sergeant thing. Chloe was struggling to keep up as it was, not as sharp as the other girls, not as quick to catch on, not as able to repress the constant apprehension about the big fight they suspected was coming, even if they didn't know when or how. Actually that wasn't entirely true; Chloe was just easier to read than some of the others. She knew it and they knew it and it was a whole big feedback loop of blown confidence.
Kennedy wasn't doing so great with the repressing either, to be honest; she was hard on the girls in training because of it, because she wasn't going to be responsible for another Annabelle, another girl who ran and got herself killed because she wasn't prepared. So they'd be prepared on her watch, damn it, even if she had to be a little bit of a bad guy to make sure it happened. (And no one had stopped her yet, so hey. Full steam ahead.)
So she was lying on the bed trying to unwind after aforementioned long day, complaining to Willow and Rona about her frustrations with the training sessions, only half listening to Buffy and Dawn giggling outside in the hall.
Until Dawn's laughter turned into a shriek of horror, anyway.
Kennedy and Rona shared a look and bolted out of the room as Amanda came running down the hall, Kennedy demanding, "What happened? We heard--"
The rest of the sentence stuck in her throat, or was cut off by the hand she slapped over her mouth to quell the bile that suddenly rose from her stomach.
Visible through the open bathroom door, too visible to Kennedy, Rona and Amanda, and Buffy and Dawn and the other girls who'd come running at the sound, was Chloe's body, dangling from a knotted bedsheet, and her bare feet and cartoon pajamas only added to the extremely young quality of her face, tinted blue from asphyxiation.
Kennedy only barely heard Buffy ordering Dawn to go find her a knife, through the dull muffled haze of nausea and horror... and guilt, yeah, that too. She could have started to beat herself up for this, and would have, too, except that suddenly Chloe was standing beside her own body, looking at all of them with a casual, carefree grin like they'd only seen on her face a few times since she'd arrived.
When she'd been alive, Kennedy tried to remind herself, but it was so real, if surreal, if anything could be both at the same time.
"Good thinking," the First told them in Chloe's voice. "But on the other hand, why rush? Up or down, I'll still be dead."
Kennedy was about to protest strenuously that there was a serious pronoun screwup there, that it wasn't actually Chloe, but Buffy beat her to it. It was more unnerving than reassuring to realize that Buffy sounded just as shaken up as she felt and the other girls looked.
"Yeah, well. Neither is she, any more. Now she's just..." The First looked up and shrugged. "Chloe's body."
"What did you do to her?" Kennedy heard herself ask in a voice that was too shaky and unsure to belong to her.
The-First-not-Chloe looked at her with a hurt expression that only hit Kennedy's guilt button a little harder since she'd only seen it a few hours ago while yelling at the girl. "Nothing! We just talked all night! Well, I did most of the talking, but Chloe is..." The First's smile turned nasty. "Sorry. Was a good listener. 'Til she hanged herself."
It leaned a little closer toward Kennedy. "Like when you got all hardcore on her earlier? Yeah... she really heard that."
"Don't listen to it, any of you," Buffy snapped, an edge of desperation to her voice despite the force behind it.
The First snorted. "Oh, let 'em. The only reason why Chloe offed herself is 'cause she knew what you're not getting. I'm coming." Pause for emphasis, just to let them fill in the obvious blank for themselves. "You're going. All this? It's almost over."
No no no, this wasn't what the girls needed to hear, it wasn't what Kennedy needed to hear, it--
"We'll be here," Buffy snapped, and the defiance grabbed Kennedy by the scruff of the neck and kept her from falling over the edge into despair.
"All of you?" the First inquired coolly. "But wait, I thought--"
And then it was Buffy's voice coming out of Chloe-not-Chloe's mouth, which felt like a betrayal even before any of then had time to process what she was saying. "They're not all gonna make it. Some will die, and there's nothing I can do that will stop it."
There were gasps and murmurs of horror from some of the girls, and even if Kennedy couldn't tear her eyes away from Chloe's body she could guess that they were looking at Buffy in some kind of silent plea for reassurance that it wasn't true, that she hadn't actually said that. Even without looking away Kennedy knew from the smugly self-satisfied look on the First's stolen face (that was wrong, that was so wrong, Chloe never looked like that) that Buffy couldn't deny it.
Oh. Hi, edge of despair. You were still right there.
"Hey, I didn't say it," the First protested, holding up its hands (and there was that bracelet of Chloe's that Kennedy had thought was so cool, the thing that had sparked their one really good conversation about the things they were into). "But I'll be seeing all of you... one by one. TTFN."
With one last, cheerful, too adorable smile the First waved jauntily at them and blinked out of existence.
"What's TTFN?" Buffy asked, and as it turned out questions were not a great way to break the silence.
"Ta-ta for now," Rona supplied dully.
"Chloe loved Winnie the Pooh," added Amanda.
And god, those two sentences spoken aloud made it all so much worse. Kennedy kept her emotional balance by sheer willpower and the barest of margins, but the muffled sobs that occasionally broke the stunned, renewed silence said that some of the girls hadn't been so lucky.
***
For the number of people gathered in the living room that night, it shouldn't have felt so cold and numb, but it did. Everyone was huddled in groups around the room: the Potentials, the Scoobies, and Andrew. Kennedy stuck close to Willow's side at the dining room table, not really paying attention to whatever Willow was looking at on her computer, just badly shaken and needing the closeness. It was largely silent, punctuated by the occasional sniffle or murmured word of reassurance, but mostly everyone was waiting for Buffy to get back from burying Chloe.
That was one particularly horrifying aspect of the job that Kennedy hadn't considered. She'd always considered burying people in the woods some kind of shady criminal thing, but then again they weren't exactly licensed or anything, were they?
It didn't go well, when she came back looking miserable and even more exhausted than she usually did these days. Buffy asked them if they had anything to say about Chloe and when no one spoke up she lit into them about Chloe being weak and stupid, and how they'd all been coasting on her for too long, she'd been wasting her power digging their graves...
It was horrible, and at first Kennedy was too rocked back on her heels to say anything, too busy fighting the urge to break down and cry like she heard some of the other girls doing, but when Buffy finished her tirade by throwing her shovel to the floor with a clatter that made Willow flinch, which Kennedy couldn't have possibly missed, she'd had enough.
She'd still argue that she had been right, that Buffy was out of line yelling at them like that, but maybe the giant argument she'd sparked wasn't so great.
In the end Spike stormed out after Buffy accused him of being weak, and any morale they had left was pretty much shattered, so yeah, it was the emergency Buffy declared it to be when she ordered Dawn to herd the Potentials upstairs.
Except Kennedy, who got to stay, whether it was because she was sort of a lieutenant or because she was dating the boss's best friend. She didn't know or care, much. She'd always wanted in the inner circle, and now that she was, it wasn't really cause for celebration.
***
Principal Wood had brought over a battered old leather bag earlier, telling Buffy that it had been his mother's--his mother, a previous Slayer-- and should have been passed down to her except that he hadn't been able to part with it. It was some sort of Slayer emergency kit, though from the looks of it the thing hadn't been opened basically ever.
Kennedy wondered if Buffy thought this was another part of the legacy that had passed her by; the abrupt way Buffy snapped the lock on the bag seemed to imply as much.
What was inside...
She'd been expecting something like more books, or a cool weapon, not one book (in Sumerian, and she'd take back her incredulity about the Conversational Sumerian for Dummies volume now) and a bunch of shadow puppets.
She had definitely not been expecting the shadow puppets to do an animated play while the room filled with the sound of disembodied ominous drumming.
Not to mention discovering-- once the book started magically translating itself, because Dawn wasn't that good at Sumerian-- that the First Slayer had gotten her powers by being chained up by the original Watchers and forcibly imbued with a demon's essence.
Except that the worst part was the portal that opened up in the living room. No, strike that. The portal wasn't so bad; it was the part where Buffy immediately dived through it and a demon came back in her place that sucked.
***
The demon had royally kicked their asses, and as much as Kennedy downplayed the cut she'd gotten across her knuckles (now neatly bandaged by Willow) she knew she'd been lucky to get away that easily. Hell, that thing had thrown Spike through the ceiling before smashing through the back door, and Kennedy wasn't much of a literary-metaphor person but even she noticed the depressing symbolism here. Poor Xander, having to patch things up again.
She'd pushed to take some of the girls to go after the demon and bring it back-- "Find a way," Buffy had told them just before she dived through the portal, as if they even knew where she'd gone, much less how to get her back, and Willow was on the edge of panic over it which wasn't putting Buffy in Kennedy's good graces-- but Spike insisted he had it handled.
Which left Kennedy to stick around feeling a little useless as Anya and Willow tried to work out a solution with the occasional caustic comment from Dawn, mostly directed at Anya.
It was big magic, she could guess that much, and she had nothing to contribute here. Hell, she could barely follow along with all their talk about catalysts and spell ingredients, but watching the nervous look on Willow's face and the way a flicker of doubt seemed to cross it every time Anya brought up a new question or concern made her feel a little less useless. She'd said she wanted to stick up for Willow when she had to, and someone in this room needed to abstain from the dubious-look-exchanging party. Which, she was pretty sure, was her.
She had absolute faith in Willow's ability to pull this off, after all.
***
Once they had everything they needed it looked like it was, as Xander put it, "spell o'clock."
Kennedy stood in the living room and watched along with Dawn, Xander, and Anya as Willow poured green sand out of a bag onto the floor.
"The sand forms a circle, the circle forms a barrier, the barrier contains the portal," Dawn recited. Kennedy could actually understand that much-- it reminded her of the seance they'd done to try to find Raven-- but if the recitation calmed her any she wasn't going to protest.
"So what now? We hold hands and chant kumbaya or something?" She remembered asking Tara that once, during that seance, and she could still remember the indulgent smile she'd gotten for the question at the time.
Tara would be so much more useful in this situation than she was. It was a half irrational thought, and she was annoyed at herself for it, but it crept up before she could stop it.
Still, when Willow turned to her with an adorable frantic look and confessed that she thought she might pee in her pants, Kennedy took the bag of sand and said firmly, "You can do it. The magics. Not the pants thing."
It... turned out to be more anticlimactic than that, at first. Which was to say that after Willow spoke the incantation the first time, nothing happened.
Then a gust of wind from nowhere blew through the living room and knocked them all over, and over the sound all Kennedy could hear was Willow howling in pain.
She struggled back to her feet and watched, her heart pounding a drumbeat as loud and steady as the one that had come out of nowhere with the shadow puppets earlier, as Willow screamed into the maelstrom and demanded that a portal be opened. She watched Xander, Dawn, and Anya exchange uncertain looks and felt a chill go down her spine when Willow glanced back at them with eyes that glistened black and hollow in the candlelight.
Still...
"Give her time!" she snapped at Xander, stubborn and loyal and determined as ever, because if she couldn't contribute anything else she would pour in every ounce of her belief that Willow could do this. "She's getting it!"
"Or maybe something's getting her!" he shot back.
Kennedy, hovering just outside the circle, opened her mouth to argue--
"Will, maybe you better back up," Xander yelled--
With an incoherent snarl, Willow reached her hands back toward Kennedy and Anya--
The chill she'd felt earlier paled in comparison to what Kennedy felt now, like something had just reached straight into her gut and ripped out her essence, because she was freezing, immobile, hovering a foot off the ground in some invisible grip, drained of something that went beyond physical energy.
She fell to her knees in horrified shock, barely noticing the portal that glowed brightly in the middle of the circle, or Xander darting in to pull Willow out of it.
Maybe that should have been her job. Maybe she should have--
She didn't know.
[[nfi/nfb, tl;dr, ooc okay. 1 of 2 today. adapted from btvs 7x15,"everyone makes terrible life choices this week" "get it done," and not preplayed because i love my cast too much to make them all have to hold the idiot ball. this one comes with a serious warning for npc suicide dealt with at some length, some not-well-handled aftermath thereof, and... yeah.]]
Another thing Kennedy had found was that different Watchers had vastly different teaching techniques, and every day lately there had been at least one argument about fighting styles, which, again, was a royal pain in the ass if you had to struggle to convey your meaning. She'd been doing her best to rein it in, but today her frustration had boiled over into yelling at Chloe for being out of sync during a kata-- having Principal Wood drop in to watch them hadn't helped, since his skeptical expression had fueled a desire to really make sure the girls gave a good show, and if they didn't look good how was that going to reflect on her as their drill sergeant? She wasn't particularly inclined to like the guy, either, what with Spike being all broody over his whatever it was the principal had going on with Buffy, so it had all culminated in a supremely cranky incident that Kennedy wasn't particularly proud of.
In retrospect, sure, she could have gone a different route than making Chloe do pushups because she'd gotten too far into the drill sergeant thing. Chloe was struggling to keep up as it was, not as sharp as the other girls, not as quick to catch on, not as able to repress the constant apprehension about the big fight they suspected was coming, even if they didn't know when or how. Actually that wasn't entirely true; Chloe was just easier to read than some of the others. She knew it and they knew it and it was a whole big feedback loop of blown confidence.
Kennedy wasn't doing so great with the repressing either, to be honest; she was hard on the girls in training because of it, because she wasn't going to be responsible for another Annabelle, another girl who ran and got herself killed because she wasn't prepared. So they'd be prepared on her watch, damn it, even if she had to be a little bit of a bad guy to make sure it happened. (And no one had stopped her yet, so hey. Full steam ahead.)
So she was lying on the bed trying to unwind after aforementioned long day, complaining to Willow and Rona about her frustrations with the training sessions, only half listening to Buffy and Dawn giggling outside in the hall.
Until Dawn's laughter turned into a shriek of horror, anyway.
Kennedy and Rona shared a look and bolted out of the room as Amanda came running down the hall, Kennedy demanding, "What happened? We heard--"
The rest of the sentence stuck in her throat, or was cut off by the hand she slapped over her mouth to quell the bile that suddenly rose from her stomach.
Visible through the open bathroom door, too visible to Kennedy, Rona and Amanda, and Buffy and Dawn and the other girls who'd come running at the sound, was Chloe's body, dangling from a knotted bedsheet, and her bare feet and cartoon pajamas only added to the extremely young quality of her face, tinted blue from asphyxiation.
Kennedy only barely heard Buffy ordering Dawn to go find her a knife, through the dull muffled haze of nausea and horror... and guilt, yeah, that too. She could have started to beat herself up for this, and would have, too, except that suddenly Chloe was standing beside her own body, looking at all of them with a casual, carefree grin like they'd only seen on her face a few times since she'd arrived.
When she'd been alive, Kennedy tried to remind herself, but it was so real, if surreal, if anything could be both at the same time.
"Good thinking," the First told them in Chloe's voice. "But on the other hand, why rush? Up or down, I'll still be dead."
Kennedy was about to protest strenuously that there was a serious pronoun screwup there, that it wasn't actually Chloe, but Buffy beat her to it. It was more unnerving than reassuring to realize that Buffy sounded just as shaken up as she felt and the other girls looked.
"Yeah, well. Neither is she, any more. Now she's just..." The First looked up and shrugged. "Chloe's body."
"What did you do to her?" Kennedy heard herself ask in a voice that was too shaky and unsure to belong to her.
The-First-not-Chloe looked at her with a hurt expression that only hit Kennedy's guilt button a little harder since she'd only seen it a few hours ago while yelling at the girl. "Nothing! We just talked all night! Well, I did most of the talking, but Chloe is..." The First's smile turned nasty. "Sorry. Was a good listener. 'Til she hanged herself."
It leaned a little closer toward Kennedy. "Like when you got all hardcore on her earlier? Yeah... she really heard that."
"Don't listen to it, any of you," Buffy snapped, an edge of desperation to her voice despite the force behind it.
The First snorted. "Oh, let 'em. The only reason why Chloe offed herself is 'cause she knew what you're not getting. I'm coming." Pause for emphasis, just to let them fill in the obvious blank for themselves. "You're going. All this? It's almost over."
No no no, this wasn't what the girls needed to hear, it wasn't what Kennedy needed to hear, it--
"We'll be here," Buffy snapped, and the defiance grabbed Kennedy by the scruff of the neck and kept her from falling over the edge into despair.
"All of you?" the First inquired coolly. "But wait, I thought--"
And then it was Buffy's voice coming out of Chloe-not-Chloe's mouth, which felt like a betrayal even before any of then had time to process what she was saying. "They're not all gonna make it. Some will die, and there's nothing I can do that will stop it."
There were gasps and murmurs of horror from some of the girls, and even if Kennedy couldn't tear her eyes away from Chloe's body she could guess that they were looking at Buffy in some kind of silent plea for reassurance that it wasn't true, that she hadn't actually said that. Even without looking away Kennedy knew from the smugly self-satisfied look on the First's stolen face (that was wrong, that was so wrong, Chloe never looked like that) that Buffy couldn't deny it.
Oh. Hi, edge of despair. You were still right there.
"Hey, I didn't say it," the First protested, holding up its hands (and there was that bracelet of Chloe's that Kennedy had thought was so cool, the thing that had sparked their one really good conversation about the things they were into). "But I'll be seeing all of you... one by one. TTFN."
With one last, cheerful, too adorable smile the First waved jauntily at them and blinked out of existence.
"What's TTFN?" Buffy asked, and as it turned out questions were not a great way to break the silence.
"Ta-ta for now," Rona supplied dully.
"Chloe loved Winnie the Pooh," added Amanda.
And god, those two sentences spoken aloud made it all so much worse. Kennedy kept her emotional balance by sheer willpower and the barest of margins, but the muffled sobs that occasionally broke the stunned, renewed silence said that some of the girls hadn't been so lucky.
***
For the number of people gathered in the living room that night, it shouldn't have felt so cold and numb, but it did. Everyone was huddled in groups around the room: the Potentials, the Scoobies, and Andrew. Kennedy stuck close to Willow's side at the dining room table, not really paying attention to whatever Willow was looking at on her computer, just badly shaken and needing the closeness. It was largely silent, punctuated by the occasional sniffle or murmured word of reassurance, but mostly everyone was waiting for Buffy to get back from burying Chloe.
That was one particularly horrifying aspect of the job that Kennedy hadn't considered. She'd always considered burying people in the woods some kind of shady criminal thing, but then again they weren't exactly licensed or anything, were they?
It didn't go well, when she came back looking miserable and even more exhausted than she usually did these days. Buffy asked them if they had anything to say about Chloe and when no one spoke up she lit into them about Chloe being weak and stupid, and how they'd all been coasting on her for too long, she'd been wasting her power digging their graves...
It was horrible, and at first Kennedy was too rocked back on her heels to say anything, too busy fighting the urge to break down and cry like she heard some of the other girls doing, but when Buffy finished her tirade by throwing her shovel to the floor with a clatter that made Willow flinch, which Kennedy couldn't have possibly missed, she'd had enough.
She'd still argue that she had been right, that Buffy was out of line yelling at them like that, but maybe the giant argument she'd sparked wasn't so great.
In the end Spike stormed out after Buffy accused him of being weak, and any morale they had left was pretty much shattered, so yeah, it was the emergency Buffy declared it to be when she ordered Dawn to herd the Potentials upstairs.
Except Kennedy, who got to stay, whether it was because she was sort of a lieutenant or because she was dating the boss's best friend. She didn't know or care, much. She'd always wanted in the inner circle, and now that she was, it wasn't really cause for celebration.
***
Principal Wood had brought over a battered old leather bag earlier, telling Buffy that it had been his mother's--his mother, a previous Slayer-- and should have been passed down to her except that he hadn't been able to part with it. It was some sort of Slayer emergency kit, though from the looks of it the thing hadn't been opened basically ever.
Kennedy wondered if Buffy thought this was another part of the legacy that had passed her by; the abrupt way Buffy snapped the lock on the bag seemed to imply as much.
What was inside...
She'd been expecting something like more books, or a cool weapon, not one book (in Sumerian, and she'd take back her incredulity about the Conversational Sumerian for Dummies volume now) and a bunch of shadow puppets.
She had definitely not been expecting the shadow puppets to do an animated play while the room filled with the sound of disembodied ominous drumming.
Not to mention discovering-- once the book started magically translating itself, because Dawn wasn't that good at Sumerian-- that the First Slayer had gotten her powers by being chained up by the original Watchers and forcibly imbued with a demon's essence.
Except that the worst part was the portal that opened up in the living room. No, strike that. The portal wasn't so bad; it was the part where Buffy immediately dived through it and a demon came back in her place that sucked.
***
The demon had royally kicked their asses, and as much as Kennedy downplayed the cut she'd gotten across her knuckles (now neatly bandaged by Willow) she knew she'd been lucky to get away that easily. Hell, that thing had thrown Spike through the ceiling before smashing through the back door, and Kennedy wasn't much of a literary-metaphor person but even she noticed the depressing symbolism here. Poor Xander, having to patch things up again.
She'd pushed to take some of the girls to go after the demon and bring it back-- "Find a way," Buffy had told them just before she dived through the portal, as if they even knew where she'd gone, much less how to get her back, and Willow was on the edge of panic over it which wasn't putting Buffy in Kennedy's good graces-- but Spike insisted he had it handled.
Which left Kennedy to stick around feeling a little useless as Anya and Willow tried to work out a solution with the occasional caustic comment from Dawn, mostly directed at Anya.
It was big magic, she could guess that much, and she had nothing to contribute here. Hell, she could barely follow along with all their talk about catalysts and spell ingredients, but watching the nervous look on Willow's face and the way a flicker of doubt seemed to cross it every time Anya brought up a new question or concern made her feel a little less useless. She'd said she wanted to stick up for Willow when she had to, and someone in this room needed to abstain from the dubious-look-exchanging party. Which, she was pretty sure, was her.
She had absolute faith in Willow's ability to pull this off, after all.
***
Once they had everything they needed it looked like it was, as Xander put it, "spell o'clock."
Kennedy stood in the living room and watched along with Dawn, Xander, and Anya as Willow poured green sand out of a bag onto the floor.
"The sand forms a circle, the circle forms a barrier, the barrier contains the portal," Dawn recited. Kennedy could actually understand that much-- it reminded her of the seance they'd done to try to find Raven-- but if the recitation calmed her any she wasn't going to protest.
"So what now? We hold hands and chant kumbaya or something?" She remembered asking Tara that once, during that seance, and she could still remember the indulgent smile she'd gotten for the question at the time.
Tara would be so much more useful in this situation than she was. It was a half irrational thought, and she was annoyed at herself for it, but it crept up before she could stop it.
Still, when Willow turned to her with an adorable frantic look and confessed that she thought she might pee in her pants, Kennedy took the bag of sand and said firmly, "You can do it. The magics. Not the pants thing."
It... turned out to be more anticlimactic than that, at first. Which was to say that after Willow spoke the incantation the first time, nothing happened.
Then a gust of wind from nowhere blew through the living room and knocked them all over, and over the sound all Kennedy could hear was Willow howling in pain.
She struggled back to her feet and watched, her heart pounding a drumbeat as loud and steady as the one that had come out of nowhere with the shadow puppets earlier, as Willow screamed into the maelstrom and demanded that a portal be opened. She watched Xander, Dawn, and Anya exchange uncertain looks and felt a chill go down her spine when Willow glanced back at them with eyes that glistened black and hollow in the candlelight.
Still...
"Give her time!" she snapped at Xander, stubborn and loyal and determined as ever, because if she couldn't contribute anything else she would pour in every ounce of her belief that Willow could do this. "She's getting it!"
"Or maybe something's getting her!" he shot back.
Kennedy, hovering just outside the circle, opened her mouth to argue--
"Will, maybe you better back up," Xander yelled--
With an incoherent snarl, Willow reached her hands back toward Kennedy and Anya--
The chill she'd felt earlier paled in comparison to what Kennedy felt now, like something had just reached straight into her gut and ripped out her essence, because she was freezing, immobile, hovering a foot off the ground in some invisible grip, drained of something that went beyond physical energy.
She fell to her knees in horrified shock, barely noticing the portal that glowed brightly in the middle of the circle, or Xander darting in to pull Willow out of it.
Maybe that should have been her job. Maybe she should have--
She didn't know.
[[nfi/nfb, tl;dr, ooc okay. 1 of 2 today. adapted from btvs 7x15,
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Date: 2012-02-07 03:11 pm (UTC)