Give the astronauts a chance to regroup and they take back the ground they lost, because they’re sneakier than the stone-age men. The astronauts cheat.

**

“I was dead, Wesley,” she says for the ten-to-the-tenth-power time, because she keeps explaining this and she knows he’s trying to understand, empathize, whatever else good boyfriends (is he?) do, but he can’t. She’s floating in space, yelling into a vacuum.

“You weren’t.” Not the big eyes, Wesley, she can’t stand for him to look at her that way, like she’s still the same. Puts his hands on her shoulders, so gently she could drop to the ground and scream all the air out of her lungs, only they’d just bring her back. “Fred, you never died.”

“Then why do I remember?” Oh, he’s wincing – too loud, then. She keeps doing that, screaming when she doesn’t mean to.

He holds her. She stands stiffly with his arms around her, feeling like a corpse.

He doesn’t answer her question.

**

This is the timeline. She draws it once she’s alone in the lab, scribbling with a marker pen on the whiteboard, where Knox will never write another joke about how two does not equal three, even for very large values of two.

The line starts with her birth and trails into dashes two days ago, when they brought her back. She draws a little off-ramp for her five years in Pylea and marks with an X the moment when she died. Another X, smaller, a quarter-inch or so back from that. It’s not to scale, but it’ll do. She just needs a model.

Wesley tried to explain using words like blood magic and codex and shaman and when she wouldn’t calm down he got the top people from her department to talk to her (where’s Knox? she’d asked and Wesley’s face had gone tight and empty and she’d known). They talked about a fold in time and quantum teleportation and pulling her four months into the future an instant before she breathed the dust of the sarcophagus.

She writes ‘paradox’ on the board and ‘multiverse’. Wesley won’t listen to the suggestion that she’s from a parallel version of this reality, even when she points out that if she never breathed in that dust then Illyria would never have taken her body, and there would have been no need to fold time, and then it’s travelling back in time to kill grandfathers and stand on butterflies and invent rock and roll at the school dance.

She thinks Wesley can’t face the idea that he’s not her Fred, that she’s somehow less real than he wants her to be. She can’t talk to the others. Gunn can’t meet her eyes and Lorne just tries too hard and Angel killed a god wearing her face. Spike, she thinks, is the only one who gets it. He told her about another girl who came back from the dead and then understood when she needed him to leave her alone.

At her next birthday she’ll be four months younger than her official age. She was pulled out of time and brought here without crossing all the space between, so she shouldn’t remember, right? Shouldn’t remember breathing that dust, or her body getting consumed from the inside out so a god could try on her skin like a Sunday suit. She’s out of space on the board, moves to the window that divides her office from the main lab; draws a light-cone, time axis going up the centre and labels it ‘Illyria’. It starts at the place where they ripped her out of time, and she shouldn’t, can’t, know anything about it –

“No faster than light signalling,” she mutters, resting her forehead against the glass. “Non-locality in Bell’s theorem doesn’t allow for it. Cannot, should not, did not, would not clone a quantum state, so if you take something from there to here you have to destroy it and make a copy somewhere else.”

She feels like a copy, badly Xeroxed, like Harmony screwed up at the machine.

Her cave’s different today, made all of glass.

**

She dreams about portals. Swallow you up to take you to Pylea, take away Professor Seidel when Gunn snaps his neck, pull you away from death because the men you love can’t seem to let you go; she wants to ask Angel why not Cordelia, ask Wes why not Lilah, ask Spike how he could let them when he can sit there and tell her about Buffy and heaven.

But those questions aren’t fair, and the answers are easy. She didn’t want to die. They had to have known that. They saw, or they heard from Wesley, how hard she fought, how much she wanted to stay. She doesn’t get to turn round now and saw that wasn’t her, that she’s just an echo of that girl.

When she wakes up there’s someone crouching over her, haloed in green.

“Jasmine?” Fred whispers.

The light fades – it’s still there, if she squints and pretends she’s not trying to see it – and it’s just a girl. Teenage and skinny, long brown hair and big eyes she probably took half her adolescence to grow into.

It’s like looking at herself, aged seventeen.

“Are you okay?” She kneels by the couch, Fred realizing for the first time that she must’ve fallen asleep in her office. “Do you want me to get somebody? I could call upstairs. I know Angel’s in his office, I just came from there.”

“No,” she says, sitting up. Her head feels clearer, like something in there’s beginning to untangle. Just needs to get a tiny bit clearer and she’ll know who Feigenbaum is, and then she’ll be able to find him. “You’re Dawn.” Statement, not question. She’s heard the story of how the spell was all but impossible because it needed massive power, and how their only hope was something called the Key. Older than Illyria, older than the oldest of the Old Ones.

She imagines Spike, or Angel, but probably Spike, said, “Oh, yeah, I know the girl. Lives in Italy.”

She doesn’t know how they talked her into the ritual. This is the part where she should be falling to her knees and thanking Dawn. Instead she wraps a hand around her wrist, pushing back the sleeve of the girl’s pink sweatshirt.

The thin, pink lines run wrist to elbow, four neatly parallel cuts. Four more on the other side, she guesses, unless there’s a mystical number like seven or nine that made the scars more magical than symmetry would. Too neat for Dawn to have made herself. Did the shaman hold the knife, then? Or did he stand by and chant and let Wesley or Angel or one of the others cut up a little girl?

She must have been so scared, Fred thinks, but it’s just an observation, like the sky is blue except on cloudy days or beta decay shows evidence for violation of spatial parity.

Dawn says, “They don’t hurt.” Quiet. “And the cuts were shallow. They won’t permanently scar.”

Fred’s entranced by these four lines, pretty as strings on a violin. She was never much good at music, back home, back at school when she was young and looked like Dawn. She runs the tip of her index finger over the scars and then brings Dawn’s wrist to her lips. Kisses the lines, frowning a little in concentration as she makes sure to get each one.

Dawn’s eyes, startled right now, are blue. Fred can’t remember the colour of her own. Her mind’s tangling up again. Keeps doing that every time she thinks back on what it felt like to have her soul ripped to tiny little pieces.

“I wanted to learn everything they knew,” Fred says, lips just barely above warm skin, “and find out some things they didn’t. Found out lots’a things nobody knew.”

She feels Dawn’s free hand, tentative, on her arm.

Most people don’t understand about time. Fred does, now. A Brief History Of. Time flying when you have fun. Time standing still as a statue in that moment when your soul’s dragged down into the flames.

Malleable time: leave your twin behind on Earth and get in your space rocket. Travel fast enough and for long enough and when you get back you’ve aged a year, and they’re forty years older.

Einstein said it, and Fred thinks she’s living it in reverse. She’s sitting here inches from a girl who might be herself ten, eleven years ago. Lets go her wrist and cups both hands around her face, like she’s a warm, living mirror. When she presses her lips to it she leaves behind a smudged print, lipstick or blood; she’s not sure which one and doesn’t rightly care.