He hesitates for only a moment—

(He's wearing his Evil Fiend shirt.)

"—Okay, what do you need?"

"I need you to take this." She hands him the stupid shiny rock and prays he doesn't get distracted by how shiny it is. "Take it, hide it someplace no one will ever ever think to look for it. Not even me. Especially not me. You hide the rock as fast as you can, and then you get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can, OK? I'll - I'll find you somehow later. If the world doesn't end."

He winces slightly when he takes the rock. "Okay, cool, good luck," he says, and he gives her a quick one-armed hug and shuts the door in her face.

She sprints off in the opposite direction. She can't think. She can barely breathe. She needs to find an eight-year-old but the universe is collapsing around her - 

It takes them a while to notice her because everyone's thoughts are shouting - everyone - 

- Karen - thank god - didn't hear anything after you said you were going to go get it back - I thought - no signs of an eight year old apologizing for everything -

She trips and coughs and she hates the taste of rotting flesh -

- yeah, sorry, I'd've - I went to hell I guess and I killed Lurconis - rock is safe - can we focus on the cause now - I can't find him either but he's got to be here somewhere -

Rock is - wow, you're incredible - we're coming to you, we should probably split up to canvass for eight-year-olds but the Silmaril'll help Michael and I do that a lot faster -

- no, you gotta do it without the rock - I - it's safe but we need to think about it later, OK -

Can't, we're magically bound to get the rocks back whenever they're around, it should be fine if you wanna hold it as long as we're with you though. 

They round the corner. 

She's coughing and struggling to stand up again and already just this side of dead.

The heck does that mean - I don't have it anymore, it's safe but - you have to understand -

Oh. God.

Karen - we have a binding magical obligation to get the Silmarils and destroy anyone who withholds them from us. We can't fix anything else until we have it. We don't need to do anything with it. I can swear not to, if you want. I can swear to give it back to you later, that'll be a fucking disaster but it'll let us focus on saving this city in the meantime. But I can't - we can't - until you hand it over we cannot possibly do anything else. 

Her brain just gives up on screaming and starts laughing hysterically.

There's no way to verify - they could be telling the truth and there would be no way to verify - they could have come here just to get the rock in the first place and be pretending that this is the way it is, so that just in case they fail this time she'll keep helping them get it back until it kills her or destroys the world - there's no way to tell -

- but there's a way to be pretty sure the world won't melt. If they kill her here, and they can't find it, then even if there's no way to stop the nightmares - the nightmares are a local effect, they have to be, they're not going to spread beyond Sunnydale -

- everyone outside will be safe -

- she's so tired -

- she's going to fall asleep -

Nah. No deal.

What's the - what's the deal with the kid - so I can fix it afterwards, if there's still time -

- yeah, yeah I can tell you that, his name's Billy Palmer and he's eight and he's in a coma and, and Wishbone thinks he's astral projecting by accident and his nightmares are manifesting and he's causing it to happen to everyone else, too, you gotta - find him and figure out how to resolve that, I don't even know, he's this tall and has brown hair and brown eyes and looks like this and he's so sad and he doesn't mean it -

- if you're not trying to destroy the world I'm really sorry -

- you should have seen the demon fight, it was really badass -

- I guess I'm not making it to thirty -

He bounces her everything he can sense right now, which is a lot, a thousand sets of eyes and ears and panicked monologue. It only takes a little bit of practice to remember which senses are yours but it takes a little bit of practice. Takes everyone off guard the first time. He shoots her four times. Michael does the same thing. They're very good at it. 

"Her friend Zeke. She'll have given it to her friend Zeke."

All right, then. 

- Karen wakes up.

She hadn't really thought about this part. She knew she'd go to - well, she was figuring hell, actually, she's pretty sure she committed like a dozen mortal sins in the past twelve hours, though it's really hard to know which things to count, and she doesn't know that she has enough presence of mind to figure out which ones she's sorry for. Under normal circumstances she could ask Father Michael about this, but, uh, Father Michael just shot her four times, so that plan is out.

The world around her is, uh, hellish, sort of, but in a Sunnydale way, more than a hell way. She's confused. She doesn't feel short on breath anymore, and doesn't feel super injured. She does remember being shot. She tries to take her own pulse, and she doesn't have one, so she reaches up to feel her face, and, yep, vampire. Vampire no longer wearing sensible clothes, either, the clothes that went through hell have disintegrated and now she's wearing a nightgown.

- she used to have dreams, when she was very small and afraid of the dark, where monsters would kill her and then bring her back to kill her again. It didn't always even make any sense, she'd just come back with the same obligation to live and to protect others, doomed to fail the same way five or six more times that night.

Well. This sucks beyond the telling of it. Can't even be released from her obligations by heroically dying for them anymore. Probably she'll be consumed with bloodlust at the first human she sees, too. Super. Fucking spectacular. What the hell is she supposed to do now.

     "Oh good," says a vampire, licking his lips behind her. "You know it usually takes longer than that, but this is good, we can enjoy the show together. Found your body in that sewage drift and honestly I thought you were too far gone, but sometimes - "

"I'm sorry," says Karen, interrupting him. "Can you tell me where I can buy a gun? I think I'm going to need a gun."

     He points.

"Thanks. Uh, I'm a slayer and normally I kill vampires, but I'm gonna make an exception on account of you've been so nice to me. Bye now."

And so she runs. Someone has to fix this.

She passes by a shop window full of televisions and pauses to see if the nightmare is running its own news; maybe it'll give her some idea of where she should go next. Figuring out whether Alex and Michael are killing more people would be super, in the sense of sucking but also maybe giving her some idea what she should be doing.

The newscasters are sitting around a table. "Karen: worst slayer in human history?" asks a banner over their heads. 

"The credulity is the thing that really gets to me," a woman in a bright red suit is saying, sipping coffee. "My sister and my nephew will be fine home alone during the apocalypse! I shouldn't ask what happened to the vampires we took prisoner! Anyone who looks like my vampire friend is a safe person to give this rock to! Anyone who wears a cassock and tells me to be nice to my sister is definitely still trying to serve the forces of good even when they've sacrificed babies to a demon! I'll leave them to it ...It's just the same mistake over and over -"

"In her defense, I think that the slayer Katerina in the twelfth century stacks up even worse on this count," says the man sitting across from her, "and is also the slayer who came the closest to accidentally ending the world, which is hardly a coincidence -"

"Ah, but see, I've heard her accused of malice, whereas Karen is manifestly just an idiot."

"Maybe eight centuries from now they'll look back on this, if the Silmaril is not found and the world is still around, and say 'there's no possible way it wasn't willing collusion with the forces of darkness, to run off on a sidequest dealing with a traumatized child while they searched for the means to spread the effect farther -"

"Ah, but Alex told her that the Silmaril didn't start the nightmares, you see. Would he lie?"

They laugh.

She blinks back tears. She needs to - needs to think, needs to remember which thing is important, but she doesn't remember which thing that is - she thought it was the boy but maybe she was just confused back then - she doesn't even know that Alex and Michael are evil, but - they said the meteorite couldn't have caused the effect but she doesn't remember why, something about timing, but everything's all tangled up now - if they act exactly like entities that are bent on destroying the world via shiny rock then it really doesn't make very much sense to assume that they're -

- why is everyone she knows evil -

- maybe it's because she's -

- if she knew what the right thing to do was then she would do it, she just needs to -

- if only she were smarter, if only she were better -

She pounds a fist through the glass of the gun shop and climbs in. They won't be expecting her to be alive. They can't read her if she's a vampire. If they meant well all along then she'll - she'll -

She can't think about that right now. She grabs a semi-automatic rifle and loads it and - she doesn't have her coat anymore, so that'll have to be enough. They'll be going after Zeke.

She runs.

She rips the crypt door open.

It becomes immediately clear how Zeke thought he could hide a shiny rock in here.

The whole back wall of the crypt is gone, and instead of opening back out into the graveyard, it leads to a rocky slope under a grim grey sky. There's a tower in the distance, at the top of the cliff that rises to her right; to her left, the lower part of the slope becomes quickly lost in fog. A gentle rain serves to make the climb that little bit more treacherous. It's incongruously quiet.

She creeps forward, as close to silent as any creature can be, stopping at the edge of the crypt just before the rain can hit her. 

She listens.

They catch up with Zeke at the base of the tower. "Hey."

"The Silmaril Karen gave you?" he says hoarsely. "We need it back before we can stop this thing, and this thing looks like it might swallow the whole city into the hellmouth in the next couple of hours."

Zeke leaves off prying at the locked door and turns to give them a confused look, which comes with one fewer eye than previously advertised.

"The what? Who even are you?"

"The shiny. We're the people Karen was trying to keep it from."