Title: Castaway
Author: Sweetdoggie (stirling_summer@yahoo.com)
Pairing: B/G
Rating: FRAO
Summary: Buffy falls through Glory's portal and doesn't die.
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: No permission has been granted to use the characters. They are owned by their creator, Joss Whedon, Twentieth Century Fox, UPN, WB, and Mutant Enemy. This story is non-profit and is intended solely as entertainment. No copyright infringement is intended.

Buffy, having offered her last-minute advice to Dawn, ran full tilt into the portal, knowing her sacrifice would close it forever. Her deepest regret was that her last words with Giles had been harsh ones. He would never know how sorry she was or how much she loved him. It was too late now. She had expected it to hurt, but after a brief period of dizziness, she felt nothing till she landed with a bone-jarring thud on hot sand.

“Sand?” she mumbled out loud.

Opening her eyes, she saw that she was somewhere else, someplace that definitely wasn’t Sunnydale. The sun shone down, blisteringly hot, and strangely red in color. Realizing that she didn’t have the leisure to think about things right now, she looked about for shelter from the burning rays. Behind her was an ocean while ahead and to her right were some cliffs that might give her some shade at least. She walked rapidly towards them, the red sand under her feet giving way to a red shale-like rock and then to unbroken stone.

The cliffs did offer some tiny amount of shade, but it was still stiflingly hot. She needed to get off this beach. The water reflected the sun like a magnifying mirror cooking her and not all that slowly. Looking left and right revealed nothing but miles of cliff on both sides, unbroken and forbidding. If she stayed here, she’d die. Glancing up the steep wall in front of her, she began climbing. By the time she reached the top, even her Slayer muscles were protesting. Her arms quivered with exhaustion and her hands were scraped and bloody from the climb.

“I wonder if this is Glory’s home world? I wonder why she wanted to come back?” Her voice echoed loudly to her city-bred ears and she decided that maybe speaking out loud to herself wasn’t such a good idea. It gave her the creeps.

The world at the top of the cliff was moderately more inviting. It was still blazingly hot but there were plants and trees up here. In fact, not all that far from her, there was a forest of purple foliage. Trees meant blessed shade and also would offer her some shelter at night. She might be able to craft some weapons from their wood, if she was going to be here for any length of time. Surely the others realized by now that she wasn’t dead, just gone missing? They were looking for her, she assured herself.

She reached the dense undergrowth that seemed to block entry into the deeper woods and pushed her way through it carefully. Looking down, she spotted a thin trail that wound its way through the trees. Having nothing better to do, she followed it, hoping that if it was an animal path, it would eventually lead her to water.

As she walked along, she picked up a stout branch that would serve well enough as a club. Feeling moderately better now that she was armed, she continued her exploration. After she had walked for what she estimated to be several miles, she heard the sound of running water. The heavy forestation broke into a grassy meadow complete with a very scenic little brook. Keeping an eye out for predators, she approached the water carefully. Bending down, she cupped her hands and drank thirstily.

It tasted odd, not exactly brackish, but definitely not like water from home. Or maybe this is what water tasted like when it wasn’t in bottles? Who knew? She just hoped it didn’t make her sick because she was going to have to rely on it till she was rescued.

Buffy put her back against a tree and studied her surroundings. The beach was where the portal had opened and she’d like to stick close to it, but the water was here and that was important for her daily survival. The forest probably had small animals that she could kill and eat if she had to. Grimacing, she hoped the rescue didn’t take too long. This place was way too hot to be comfortable, even to a girl raised in a warm climate. In the relative coolness of the forest, it was still a good hundred and ten, she estimated. Better than the beach, but not easy, not by a long shot.

She went back to the stream and drank another time, wishing she had a canteen or even a bowl or cup to hold the precious fluid in. Shrugging her shoulders, she stood and scoped out the trees, looking for a good one in which to spend the night.

Most of the branches started at about twenty feet over her head. Not impossible for a Slayer, she thought as she jumped and caught the lowest one. She hauled herself up onto the large limb and kept climbing, hoping to see some signs of habitation. She climbed up as far as she could and gazed out over a vast untouched forest. Looking back the way she had come, she could see the line of the cliff only because it looked slightly different from the unbroken vista of trees. She climbed back down to a lower level and crouched in the spacious crotch between several large branches. She would sleep here tonight. No danger of falling out.

She curled herself into a fetal position, still holding the club in her hand and fell asleep, exhausted by the events of the day. The sun slowly sank in the horizon but she was already deep into slumber.

Awakening the next morning from the persistent burning of the sun on her skin, she made her way out of her perch to the water. A small fish-like thing flashed its ruby scales at her as it darted to the protection of a rock, but she just smiled. It was way too small to bother with.

Buffy knew she needed food. Even her Slayer metabolism couldn’t function forever on just water. She gathered a pile of rocks from the stream bed and went to sit behind a bush. It wasn’t very sporting of her to kill something that came down that path to drink, but she didn’t have the option of waiting. If it came down to her or an animal, it was going to be her, every time.

Finally, her patience paid off as a large, bunny-thing hopped into view. She raised a rock and threw it with extreme accuracy, hitting it directly on the skull. The meaty sound of the stone sinking into its brain was off-putting, but she put the squeamish thought aside. She retrieved her kill and took it well away from the water to skin. Pulling out her last silver dagger, she set to work. This was no worse than cutting up a demon for disposal, she thought queasily.

After the meat was butchered, she cut it into strips and hung it on the highest bushes she could reach to dry till she could build a fire. Clearing a spot on the forest floor, she used a sharp stick and her hands to dig out a pit that she lined with stones. She laid kindling as she remembered her father doing when he built a fire in their fireplace. Brush and bark then twigs and finally larger sticks. Now, all she needed was some way of starting it. She sat and looked at it, hoping for inspiration. Vaguely, she remembered something about rubbing two sticks together. She shrugged and grabbed two foot-long pieces of wood. After ten minutes of rubbing, there was a slightly warm spot on the bark of the sticks but that was it. It irritated her and she deliberately put herself into Slayer overdrive. The sticks became a blur of motion between her hands and soon smoke could be seen rising from the wood. Seconds later, they were burning. Hastily she lowered them to her kindling and started her fire.

She stuck the meat on twigs and balanced them over the flames, opting to have her pseudo-bunny well-done. As soon as it stopped showing any pink and was starting to get sort of darkish brown, she pulled a piece out of the fire. It burned her fingers and was tougher than an old boot, but the taste was ambrosia to her starving mouth. She cooked and ate the entire creature, not knowing how long raw flesh could be preserved in this awful heat. Heading back to the stream, she washed herself and had another drink.

“I guess I should make a list of things I need and then figure out how to make them,” she told herself.

“Food,--bunny-thing is good for now, but I’m going to need some carbs and fruits, so, foraging? Yeah. Sounds good. OK. Weapons. Rocks and the club are pretty lame. How about a spear? Could I make a bow and arrows? What would I use for string? Leather? Could I use the bunny skin for something?”

She looked at the stiff, bloody hide and shuddered. It would have to be scraped to get any remnants of meat and fat off it or else it would rot. What did you use to tan skins? She had no idea. After looking around, she found a couple of semi-sharp rocks and began scraping. Her sweat stained the skin and gave her an idea. “I could go back to the beach. I bet the ocean there was full of salt. People use salt to preserve stuff. Why wouldn’t it work on skins?”

A stand of saplings gave her a dozen stout poles that would work as spears with very little work. The grass in the meadow gave her an idea for braiding and proved to be extraordinarily tough. It would make excellent twine. She used sharp rocks for cutting whenever possible, wanting to spare the blade of her knife as much as she could. Who knew how long before she was rescued, after all?

By the fifth day, she was beginning to worry. Why hadn’t they found her? She had passed the time by fashioning as many weapons as she could. The grass-twine worked well enough for a bowstring as long as she was careful with it. Feathers that she found on the forest floor served to fletch her homemade arrows. She had knocked out some crude points from the rocks in the stream and bound them to the arrows, but found that, for the most part, fire-hardened wood worked just as well.

After fetching a large chunk of flat shale from the beach, she began keeping track of her days by hash-marking lines on the soft stone. At the end of three months, she more or less gave up hope of rescue as a daily thing and learned to think of it as something that would happen, but probably not that day.

She got tired of jumping into trees every night and worked diligently on a rope made from the tough grass stems. She tied knots in it every foot or so and attached it to the limb of the tree so that in a hurry, she could simply scurry up the rope and pull it up after her.

Foraging at dawn became a daily habit. She found nuts and berries and watched the animals in the forest carefully to see what they ate after she got a severe case of diarrhea from some little yellow fruits. Her new rule was, if the animals wouldn’t eat it, neither would she.

The grass went to seed eventually and she cut the tops off and worked them between two stones to grind a coarse flour. She mixed it with water and fried it on another stone in the fat of some of her kills. It was the best thing she had ever eaten.

As the days grew slightly cooler she began to wonder about winter. Would she get cold? It seemed impossible when the temperature was still in the 90 degree range, but she decided that she had better make plans as if she were going to be living in the arctic.

Her pile of skins grew. She still wasn’t satisfied with the preservation techniques, but her experiments showed that soaking the skin in salt water for a couple of days, and giving it a good scraping after, usually stopped it from rotting. When it dried, she rubbed animal fat into it to make it supple again. The fat sometimes got rancid and the skins stank but she kept them anyway.

Once a week, she dug a new latrine for herself and buried the old one. It was hard work since it was done with a sharp stick and a flat rock for scooping, but it was necessary for her hygiene. She caught a glimpse of herself in the stream one morning and saw her hair had completely grown out of its blonde dye and was now a medium brown streaked with sun-ripened natural blonde strands. “Not too bad, if I had a case of conditioner to tame it,” she chuckled. Her skin had burned a dark brown. She had a brief worry about skin cancer, but decided that there was nothing she could do about it anyway and stopped thinking of it.

Winter turned out to be not as bad as she was expecting. The temperature dropped at night to a mild fifty. She slept on her animal skins and used the best-smelling ones as blankets. It was bearable.

One day she noticed that her clothing was barely covering her body any longer and realized that she was going to have to start wearing the stinky skins. Trial and error allowed her to make a pair of bunny-hide pants that wore like iron. She killed a four horned red deer-thing and used its hide for her new moccasins. Those turned out to be a lot harder to make than she thought they’d be, but since she had nothing but time, she didn’t worry about it a great deal.

She learned to store water in the cleaned out stomachs of her kills. It was disgusting, but she needed to be able to hoard it, just in case. Also, it meant she could explore a bit farther from the stream without running into trouble.

She cut saplings and tied them together to form a shelter from the worst of the sun and the very occasional rain storms. “Just call me Buffy Crusoe.”

She kept track of the days, but didn’t count them any longer. It hurt too much. What was happening at home? Were her friends and family all right? What was going on with the Hellmouth? Who was taking care of Dawn? Who was taking care of Giles?

She missed him desperately. He had been her mainstay for years and she realized how much she had come to love him in that time. She had loved Angel and even Riley a little, but Giles was her other half. The longer she thought of him, the more she missed him and realized that she hadn’t treated him very well. Well, that would change when she finally got home, she vowed. He would learn that he was her number one guy and that was all there was to it.

All her life, she had been a very sociable girl, not one for hanging out by herself, so this enforced solitude was wearying. She talked to herself to hear a human voice. Sometimes the sound startled her. Words were beginning to sound very strange to her ears. She sat in front of her fire every night and recited words to herself, calling forth the mental image they represented.

“Lights.” She thought longingly of flicking a switch and having the room flooded with a golden glow.

“Bath.” Thoughts of sinking into a tub of clean, clear water while she washed with perfumed soap made her moan with longing.

“Pizza.” The sharp acid bite of tomato topped with melted cheese. God, she would kill for a slice right now.

“Silk.” The luxurious feel of fabric as it slipped against her skin.

“Giles.” The smell of books and leather, tea and a hint of metal. She would hug him to her and run her hands over his dear face before drawing it down to her own. His wonderful lips. Why hadn’t she taken advantage of his presence in her life? What a fool she was.

One morning, almost five years after she had leaped blindly into the portal, it opened up nearly in front of her. She felt something pulling her forward. At first, she fought it. Who knew what the strange force was? Then, she began to hope that it was taking her home again. Something that she had long ago given up on.

She began to run and leaped once again into an unknown. She tumbled to a stop on grass, real green grass. Looking up, she saw the faces of her friends, her sister, and farther back, her beloved Watcher. Unable to move for the wonder of being home again, she crouched low on the ground, spear in her hand, looking like the cave woman she had once reverted to.

Her friends and family didn’t know what to do, so they stayed back. Besides, she was pretty gamy. They could smell her yards away. Only Giles took a step towards her, then another. Soon he was running and swept her into his arms holding her tightly against him, ignoring the scent of rancid fat, sweat, and slightly high leather.

“God, Buffy! I can’t believe we got you back! We’ve been working on opening the portal for three months, but we needed to be able to find you as well. I prayed that you were all right.” He held her and rocked her against him, never slackening his grip.

“Three months? I’ve been gone for five years, Giles.”

He looked down at her, shock written across his features. “Oh dear Lord! I was afraid of a time differential. I just prayed you wouldn’t be dead when we found you.”

“Came close a couple of times, but I’m all right.”

He finally noticed the smell and wrinkled his nose a bit. “Ah, from the looks of you, I’m assuming you didn’t fall into an urban dimension?”

“Not hardly, Watcher mine. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I want a bath, a pizza, and real clothes.”

He grinned. “Then you shall have them!” He turned to the others. “Let’s take Buffy home.”

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