apocalypsos | Yay! Now I can go get a Slushy! *happy dance*

Title: An Unbearable Lightness of Brain Cells
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Buffy/Angel
Pairing: None. I swear. Witch's honor. I don't care what it looks like.
Summary: A chance meeting between Connor and Dawn results in some major life-changing damage.
Archive: Just give me fair warning.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters. Otherwise, I'd be much nicer to them, with the sole exceptions of Connor and Dawn, who'd be fed to rabid mutant squirrels. But I swear I'll be nice to them in the story, honest. (By the way, anybody who thinks this isn't me being nice to them ... they're still alive, all of their body parts are intact, and they have yet to have naughty pictures taken of them in compromising positions with farm animals.)
Spoilers for: Angel -- "Home", Buffy -- "Chosen"

Chapter Two: Rejects from Another Time Zone

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Dawn Summers who didn't exist.

She didn't exist on the sidewalk leading through the quad. She didn't exist at the metro station. And she didn't exist on the train, regardless of the slimy jackass who insisted on bumping into her over and over again.

"Do you mind?" Her voice was barely above a whisper, harsh and rattling in her throat.

The jackass in question, a pale skinny punk with a wispy goatee and a ragged flak jacket, gave his equally skanky friend next to him a friendly shove and a laugh, then bumped against her again, twice as hard as he'd been doing since she'd gotten on the train. "Nope, princess, don't mind at all."

And even though she didn't exist, Dawn Summers turned to look at him, and that's when his entire life changed.

If anybody would have asked Dawn why the punk started to wail and scream the way he did, she would have told them that it must have been because she looked like a total wreck. That she'd been crying ever since she'd walked from the TV room to her dorm room and confirmed her guess that her name plate and photos wouldn't be on the door anymore. That her eyes were probably red, puffy and bloodshot, that she'd put money down on there being a dazed, painful look in the back of her eyes that'd bring down a water buffalo at fifty paces.

But Dawn wouldn't have known about the green lights flickering along the edges of her irises like an iridescent fire. And she also wouldn't have known that as soon as he got off the train and walked back to his apartment, the pale skinny punk would shower, shave, eat three sandwiches, flush his stash, break up with his trampy girlfriend and pothead friends, see about enrolling in college courses, and immerse himself in the want ads until he found a real job.

All Dawn would have known was that she'd boarded a train headed for a very bad part of town, the part of town where you avoided eye contact and held tightly onto your valuables, and she had no idea why.

********

"Did you hear what she said? Who are you and what do you think you're doing in her apartment?"

Connor opened his mouth to answer, then quickly shut it again as he raised his hands where Tracy and the fireplug could see them. He thought about telling the truth -- I live here, we're boyfriend and girlfriend, you've got a birthmark shaped like a dragonfly on your inner thigh -- but he figured at least one of those was bound to be worth a free ride on Brad's fists right out the front window. So forcing an uneasy smile and trying desperately to come up with a reasonable explanation for all this, Connor said, "This is Sunset Road, is it?"

Brad and Tracy looked at him like he had chipmunks dangling from his earlobes.

"Right, not Sunset," he said, then managed a shaky laugh and shrugged. "Look, it's just a mistake, all right? My buddy Danny told me I could stay over his apartment tonight but I must have gotten the address wrong."

"Damn straight," Tracy muttered, but the basketball trophy she held lowered just a bit.

"Here, I'll just grab my stuff and --"

Before he could grab onto his knapsack and make the quickest exit possible, Brad latched onto his collar and yanked him off his feet.

"Brad!" Tracy yelled, dropping the basketball trophy.

Brad shook Connor like a rag doll and snapped, "You honestly think we were going to believe that bullshit story?"

"Yeah, I guess I did think that," Connor said, then grabbed onto Brad's wrists and pulled. Hard.

He could have sworn he heard a loud "snap" sound out, but all Connor knew was that Brad screamed like a girl and let him drop. Working on a strange instinct he'd never known he possessed, he punched the musclebound jerk straight in the face, and Brad's nose gave a sickening crunch. Then, before he knew what he was doing, Connor grabbed onto Brad's T-shirt and flung him clean across the room.

And through the window, and across the parking lot, where he landed with a loud thump and a weak, pitiful moan.

There was a split second in Connor's rather narrow view of the weird events of the past hour or so where his normal life and thoughts crept into his head. For the briefest of instances, Connor could only savor the beating he'd finally given the moron who'd stolen his girlfriend, the way he'd barely broken a sweat and still left Brad lying in a heap on the other side of the parking lot, groaning in pain and probably regretting ever touching Tracy's wussy ex-boyfriend.

It's why he couldn't help but smile in an oddly triumphant way, looking to Tracy as if he half-expected her to leap at him with arms open wide and swear to never, ever leave him again.

But she chased away his hopes with a fearfully disgusted look and a quietly spoken, "Jesus, what are you?"

The smile fell away as she ran out the front door to go to Brad, and Connor looked down at his hands before staring out at Brad, lying in agony fifty or sixty feet away. No one normal could have thrown someone Brad's size across a room, much less across what probably amounted to a city street. "I ... I don't know," Connor said in confusion, more to himself than anybody else.

Already, a crowd was starting to form, the gang members and punks roaming the streets around here congregating for this new and different theater of violence. Out of the corner of his eye, with night vision that was growing more acute by the second, Connor spotted a girl in skintight cutoffs point in his direction, and it suddenly hit him that he was never going to find out what the hell was going on with the mass amnesia deal if he didn't get the hell out of here.

Snatching up his knapsack, Connor darted out the front door and raced down the steps before anybody could stop him, halfway across the parking lot before anybody seemed to notice he was going anywhere. But then a voice called out, "Hey, someone stop that guy!"

With a1l of the energy he could scrape together, Connor ran as fast as he could, dodging cars and garbage cans until the repetitive sounds of footsteps chasing after him died away.

Then, too afraid to find out what would happen if he stopped, he just ran faster.

He had no idea how long he ran, or where the hell he was going. All the voice of reason and logic in his head kept telling him was that he had to get away, that he had to find something ... no, someone ... and if he just kept running --

He turned a sharp corner into an alleyway littered with trash and reeking of vomit and urine, catching his breath in his throat to keep from throwing up. A moment later, someone stepped out of the shadows into his path, and not able to stop quickly enough, he collided with the person in a weird sort of dance, heels spinning on whatever dreck coated the alley's floor. He almost stepped back to wipe his hands on his pants, unsure of who he could have run into in a place like this, when the crisp beam of a streetlight lit upon her face.

What the hell was the girl from the metro doing in a place like this?

"You," Connor blurted out, shocked to see her standing there.

But the real shock came a moment later, when the pretty girl narrowed her tear-swollen eyes, stared at him long and hard, and said, "You're not real, either. Are you?"