Birth Right

By Alecca

Ashes I: Of the Day

The Hollow Crossroads
Absolutely nowhen

"That’s it? The battle’s lost?" Willow asked incredulous.

"It was never a battle to begin with. One of wills perhaps, but not what you had in mind with those words," the Hur’dha replied calmly.

"Does anyone remember anything?" she asked, new to this sort of time manipulation.

"Besides you?" he asked with a smile on his face. "But you’re not really one of them anymore, are you?"

"Just answer the question," Willow said annoyed. She didn’t feel like joking around.

"The girl, she remembers everything. The person that changes time always does," he explained making an elegant gesture to further express his words.

"And the rest?" she asked looking somewhat lost.

"Their actions were annulled. They were never in the past,’ he said as he sustained himself on his staff. "Whenever it is manipulated, time tries to adjust to the new changes: in some cases, like that of your heroes and those children, it restored the natural course of the world, thusly erasing their actions in the past. But in the case of those that caused the changes in the timeline, it cannot annul their presence without annulling the changes themselves, so they are left with the memories of what they’ve done and the timeline they changed."

"So Mina Parker remembers," Willow stated lost in thoughts. She suddenly realized something and got a great idea. "What she did is pointless."

"We both know that, but she doesn’t," the Hur’dha said looking at Willow and trying to guess what she was thinking about.

"Well she’s about to get a very cold shower," Willow suddenly smiled.

"What are you going to do?" he asked her knowing that smile full well.

"I’m going to give her a lesson that she’ll never forget," she said heading towards a crossroad. "You’ll help, right?"

"I don’t think I have much of a choice," the Hur’dha sighed.

"Good, because what I’m about to do is probably going to destroy time as you know it," she said smiling and her eyes flashed black for an instant.

"You’re scary when you talk like that," he said, but his expression didn’t change to worry or fright, it remained calm and curious of the redhead’s plan. Waving a last goodbye the witch disappeared. The Hur’dha sighed looking in the horizon. Willow was not the most trust worthy person he knew, but when she hatched up a plan, it usually worked. He hoped she would be able to fix the mess he had unintentionally allowed to happen. He had never thought that Mina would be able to pass him by, but the girl had proved to be a worthy match. He frowned when a light portal tore into the fabric of the Hollow Crossroads just a few steps away from him.

The next moment, Lonny landed face down on the hard empty land. The Hur’dha looked at her surprised until he realized something.

"What the...why the hell am I back here again?" Lonny asked clutching the ring of Batt-Hura she had taken from the safe in one hand as she got up. "I didn’t use this thing yet," she held up the ring.

"Congratulations, you have just been erased from reality," the Hur’dha said amused.

"What?!" Lonny asked incredulously. "Who or what erased me from reality?"

"The girl - that slayer the two vampires went after - she succeeded in her plan. She stopped the spreading of the slayer line," he explained.

"And what, because I’m not a slayer, I don’t exist?" she asked confused and annoyed at the same time.

"Actually it goes a little further back then that. Your father faced a vampire at one point in his life, before you were born. He was saved that day by a slayer, but since that slayer was never a slayer to begin with, he died before he had a chance to conceive you," the Hur’dha said calmly.

"So why am I not...gone or somethin’?" she asked feeling a growing anger towards this girl that had, through her actions, taken the life of her father, whom Lonny had loved more than anything in the world.

"Good question," he rose his shoulders. "Some people simply disappear, others become time anomalies."

"Anomaly," she repeated with anger.

"That’s right," the Hur’dha nodded.

"I’m gonna kill that bitch!" she suddenly said coldly.

"You won’t solve anything by killing her," he warned her.

"And what do you suggest I do?" she asked. She was so angry her hands were beginning to tremble.

"Wait," he suggested. "Willow’s..." but he didn’t have a chance to finish his phrase as Lonny took off towards the crossroads.

"All right, thing-a-ma-gig, time to work your magic. Get me to Sunnydale," she told the ring of Batt-Hura and as if listening to her the ring came alive and pointed its feathers towards one particular crossroad. Smiling, she ran towards it. "I’m gonna stop that little bitch myself," she muttered as she disappeared.

The Hur’dha sighed:

"Kids."

New York City
2083

When she woke up, she was slightly dizzy and didn’t recognize her surroundings. It was a big empty building that seemed to be undergoing a general restoration. Brushes, paint, wood, tools of all sorts were scattered everywhere. Luckily for her, no one seemed to be working at the time. Her presence there surprised her. She had thought that when she’d wake up in her time again she’d be somewhere around the area where Sunnydale had once been or somewhere in Los Angeles where she had used the ring of Batt-Hura to enter the past. Remembering the ring, she looked down at her belt and the place she had hung the ring from. It was still there. Though she thought its presence to be strange, considering that the time alteration meant she had never stolen it, she sighed relieved.

She got out of the building and when she found herself on the streets, she closed her eyes satisfied. The world was still there despite the fact that the multitude of slayers was gone. Smiling she turned back towards the building she had exited. Her smile faded. She suddenly knew what building she had landed in: The Museum of Unnatural History. Except it wasn’t a museum anymore, but a future mall.

She realized that since there hadn’t been a large number of slayers anymore, the Watcher’s Council had never outted demons and vampires to the general public. So the Museums of Unnatural History were never founded by the Five Elders of the Watcher’s Council, one of which had been Rupert Giles, once the watcher of the greatest slayer that had ever lived, Buffy Summers.

Some sacrifices had to be made, Mina told herself as she began walking down the street. As she passed by buildings noting the small changes that had occurred because of her, she noticed a hooded man walking hurriedly through the crowd. Smoke was coming out from underneath his hood. Mina smiled. A vampire.

She followed him to an abandoned warehouse. She deliberately made a noisy entrance. The vampire looked back at her startled. He hadn’t realized he had been followed.

"Hey, smokey, what’s up with you walking around in daylight? You under the protection of the HRTV or are you just plain suicidal? Cause if that’s the case I can help you out," Mina smiled as she neared him. The HRTV stood for ‘Humans for the Rightful Treatment of Vampires’, a society of vampire rights activists that often referred to slayers as butchers and murderers.

The vampire looked at her strangely for a moment before, without a word, morphing into his demonic features and attacking her. Mina immediately felt the difference in her own body. She knew the moves, knew how to fight, but the superstrength, the agility, they were gone. Though holding her own against the vampire quite well, she was easily defeated in the end. The vampire was about to bite her when a wooden pillar came flying straight through his chest. He turned to dust, but the pillar still floated above Mina. She quickly got out from under it. She was shocked by what had just happened. She wasn’t a slayer anymore. She was a plane, old teenager.

"But nothing’s changed," she muttered and a female voice said from a corner of the warehouse:

"Yet everything did," it was Willow. "The hellmouth still closed thanks to the amulet, Spike and Buffy. A lot more potentials died though. Faith and Andrew too. I barely got out," she thought it was strange and amusing at the same time how she could remember both versions of her life. The one after and before Mina had changed the world. "Buffy found a new Watcher’s Council, but not the one you later knew as the SA - there is no SA now. Instead of gathering up the slayers, she gathered up the potentials. She had a nice thing going. Kept the world spinning. Angel and Spike continued to fight evil in LA. So the world wasn’t really affected on a big scale, but if you think of it individually a lot of people died because no one was there to rescue them. The world only had three big heroes, not a few hundred or thousands."

"Why am I not the slayer?" Mina asked not really caring about the changes the world had undergone as long as the one she had wanted hadn’t occurred.

"Have you ever thought, for half a second, that you were not the chosen one?" Willow asked as she neared the girl.

"I am the chosen one," Mina stared at her coldly.

"Doesn’t look like it to me," Willow smiled.

"Why am I not the slayer?" Mina repeated the question.

"It could be because you’re not the chosen one or...maybe because...what do you know about Buffy?" she interrupted herself to ask, making Mina even more impatient. "About what happened to her after Sunnydale?"

"She founded the Watcher’s Council, trained a lot of slayers herself among which Kioko Tanaka, Sonia Mashenka and Angelina Hayes," she named three of the most admired slayers after the great Buffy Summers. "She retired after 30 or 35 years when her niece and her husband died in a plane crash. People say she adopted their orphaned daughter to raise her herself."

"Except that Angel was the one who adopted Dawn’s granddaughter," Willow intervened. "At Buffy’s request."

"Okay, so she just retired," Mina wanted to go.

"Bingo," the witch grinned. "It appears that if a slayer manages to live through all the battles she has to face in her life she can live up to 20 or 30 years more than your average human. Slayer powers also confer certain longevity."

"That can’t be. I mean she’d be like a 100 by now," Mina said in disbelief.

"105 to be more precise," the witch corrected her. "With plenty of years still to go."

"What about Faith? You said she died," Mina said suddenly feeling very desperate.

"She did. But that whole anomaly created by two slayers being alive at the same time was fixed. Faith’s powers were passed back onto Buffy," she explained.

"I should’ve killed her," Mina suddenly realized and without a warning took the ring of Batt-Hura in one hand and yelling: "Nema esta, nema deo, nema tempo ecco jero, vero nento, quera lento, en e tempo mera uno!" she disappeared. Willow looked after her for a moment, then smiled. Everything was going as planned.

The Hollow Crossroads
Absolutely nowhen

Mina landed gracefully on the empty land. When she looked up she saw the Hur’dha standing in front of her, just as tall and blue as she remembered him to be, holding his wooden staff in one hand.

"Hey, Blue. Long time no see," she said smiling. "You’re not going to give me a hard time again, are you?" she asked, not being very sure she could beat the Hur’dha without her slayer powers. Surprisingly, he stepped aside giving her free access to the crossroads. He didn’t speak a word to her. "Thanks, big guy," she told him as she passed him by.

She stared at the many crossroads remembering that before she had used the spell from the book of Katurye to enter the past, not the crossroads themselves. As she looked around she suddenly felt the ring moving in her hand and pointing towards a crossroad. She knew it was the one she was looking for and headed towards it. Shortly after, she disappeared.

"I do hope you know what you’re doing," the Hur’dha said once she was gone and Willow had reappeared next to him.

"I do," the witch said with a smile.

"Are you giving your heroes another chance?" he asked looking down at her.

"Nope, just trying to make a point," Willow said amused by his curiosity.

"A point that might cost the world a lot---well, the world itself,” he pointed out, “A big price."

"I don’t think it’ll come to that," Willow said, confident.

"You’re always so sure of yourself," the Hur’dha said sighing: "The world’s changing back."

"How come?" Willow asked surprised.

"She can’t be present in the past in two forms, so she took over her own body from her previous attempt to change the past. This way, she annulled the effects of the changes she made before," he explained.

"That means Spike and Angel are still in past?" Willow asked and the Hur’dha nodded. "And the kids?"

"Slightly more complicated," he said and Willow gave him a surprised look. "The vampire slayer, the one that’s actually a vampire, she changed her trajectory. She used the ring to go to Sunnydale before things changed back. It sent the other girl, the young one, into a time loop. I’m not sure where she landed," Willow looked at him disapprovingly. "I’ll fix it, don’t worry."

"Why do I think we have too many things not to worry about?" the witch asked amused. The Hur’dha only glared in the horizon without saying a word.

Sunnydale
2003

Lonny landed on the empty streets of Sunnydale, very close to the Summers home. For some reason, the ring focused even better on the exact location its possessor wanted to get to. Later on, when the Hur’dha would reclaim possession of this second ring, he would say it was probably because this ring was newer than the other one which, ironically, had lost some of its precision in time.

Lonny stood up and noticed immediately it was daytime. She panicked until she realized that for some reason, the sun did not burn her. She smiled as she began walking down the street, enjoying the first real walk in sunlight that she had had in decades. In the first years of her vampire days, Wesley had made spells for her that had allowed her to walk around during daytime for a few hours. But that had all stopped after the ex-watcher’s retirement.

Finding the Summers home quite easily - it was the only one that still had inhabitants - she heard commotion in the backyard. Jumping over the fence easily, it was nothing for a vampire, she saw the potential slayers gathered around two girls that were fighting. One of them was Kennedy - there were pictures of her in the Unnatural Museum of History - the other she recognized from the file she had stolen from the SA. She was Mina Parker. The girl she had come for. Some of the potentials looked at her curiously as she stalked towards the two fighters. Mina had the upper hand and enjoying beating the hell out of the potential.

"Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?" she asked Mina giving her a smug look that expressed all of her hate.

"Well, well, look who died and came to the hellmouth," Mina recognized her from the SA files. She was after all, the only living *vampire* slayer. She had held back more than once the urge to challenge her in some way to a fight, simply to see if she could win. And there she was now, simply asking for it. She smiled.

"Died a long time ago, girl, which they won’t be able to say about you when I’m done with your white trash ass," Lonny retorted.

"Standing right here, bitch," Mina said smiling devilishly. It was a smile many of her enemies and colleague slayers feared. It was the spark of madness inside Mina that made her the great fighter she was.

Lonny charged her and the fight started. They went on for a while without either one of them getting the upper hand, but in the end, even though Mina was skilled and powerful, Lonny had twice her strength and experience as a slayer and a vampire. Holding Mina in a head lock, she muttered, only for her opponent to hear :

"You killed my father, you piece of shit."

"I didn’t kill anyone’s father," Mina said kicking Lonny in the stomach and freeing herself from her grip. The truth was this Mina had no idea of what Lonny was talking about. The Mina that had seen the changed future would only flash inside this body later on.

"Sell it to some other time anomaly," Lonny clenched her teeth and attacked her again.

"Enough already!" someone pulled Lonny off Mina.

"What the fuck do you think you’re...," Lonny lashed out at the person that had separated her from Mina, but when she turned to see who it was, the words stopped in her throat. Before her stood Buffy Summers, the Slayer, the One.

"Who are you? And what exactly do you think you’re doing?" the small blond slayer asked her crossing her arms over her chest.

"You’re much shorter in real life," the vampire said smiling. "I’m Lonny."

"Okay, Lonny. What are you doing here?" Buffy asked.

"Just here to help save the day," she said looking back at Mina. "She’s evil, you know," she pointed towards Mina.

"She’s a vampire!" Mina interfered.

"Are you?" Buffy looked at Lonny strangely.

"Yeah, but I still have a soul. I’m a vampire slayer. Vampire, underlined twice," she explained and turning back towards Mina, said: "She, on the other hand, doesn’t have a soul."

"What is she talking about?" Buffy looked towards Mina.

"Nothing, we just had a few run ins and I beat her. She’s just a sore loser," the slayer said getting up and dusting her clothes off.

"You wish," Lonny scowled.

"If you’re here to help, you’re welcomed to stay, but if you’re here just to make trouble, I suggest you leave," Buffy said firmly.

"Oh, I’m just here to help," Lonny assured her eyeing Mina as she spoke those words. Mina didn’t even flinch under her gaze, but told herself that she needed to be more careful now that there was someone from her time there to stop her. She suspected someone was likely to come after her, but she had to admit, she hadn’t expected it to be Lonny.

Los Angeles
2053
A graveyard

She landed in a crypt and hit her head on a marble tomb. Wincing from the pain, she got up and rubbed her forehead. What had happened? One moment she was at Wolfram & Hart, talking to Lonny, the next she landed in some crypt. She couldn’t understand how the transition had taken place.

She forced herself to open the crypt’s heavy door. Outside, her suspicions had been confirmed: she was in a graveyard. The sky was clouded and it seemed that it would rain soon. The horrible landing as well as the flash of light she had experienced told her she must have taken another jump through time. But to when?

She frowned, this had to happen when she was so close to getting home! Walking among the graves she wondered where the crossroads had taken her this time. It was well after 2000 as she noticed thanks to the many graves. Somewhere in the horizon, she saw a funeral taking place. There were about a dozen people gathered around the grave. After a few moments, they began moving away. It was over. When the people were out of sight, Fred 2 neared the grave to see who had died. When she came across the name, she found the answer to the last question she had asked Lonny before disappearing. She read on the grave:

"Kaleena Anne Summers-Perkins

2034 - 2053

Beloved daughter

Devoted friend

Fearless fighter

She lies with angels now"

She looked up at the figures losing themselves in the horizon. One of them she recognized instantly: it was Angel, holding an older blond woman by the arm, looking pitiful and miserable. Another figure, a young redhead turned her head towards her as if feeling Fred 2 was staring at her.

"Pity when someone dies so young, don’t you think?" a voice startled her. Seeing who it was made Fred 2 realized she wasn’t the one the redhead - Willow - had been staring at. She had looked back at the new arrival, Spike.

"Great pity," she murmured as she stared back at the grave.

The Hollow Crossroads
Absolutely nowhen

"There is another problem now," the Hur’dha suddenly broke the silence that had laid itself between himself and the witch.

"Another one?" Willow smiled. "What is it?"

"The boy," the Hur’dha said.

"Rupert? He’s the least of our problems," the witch said knowingly.

"Not if he gets in the way of your plans," he warned her.

"Oh, what can he do?" the witch still didn’t believe him.

Los Angeles
2083
The LA Slayer Association HQ: The SA Underground Vaults

"Are you sure about this?" Rupert asked the man leading him through the maze of vaults in the underground of the SA building. This was the place where important books and magical items were stored. Unlike Angel’s supersafe, these vaults were guarded only by standard technology, a few spells and slayers.

"Absolutely, sir," the man answered. "I don’t know how we came into its possession, but it’s here," he added as he stopped in front of a vault. He deactivated the security system with a small remote and punching in a code, he opened it. The room was packed with magical items carefully labeled and arranged on shelves. The man headed towards one shelf in particular and urged Rupert to follow him. Looking at the items on the indicated shelf, Rupert’s eyes suddenly lit up.

"And suddenly my luck seems to have changed," he said picking up the ring of Batt-Hura off the shelf. This was the same ring Lonny had used to go to Sunnydale in the year 2003.

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