See Part One for Disclaimers

It was indeed an eclipse.  Buffy felt herself going into what she called "Slayer mode": her breathing became deeper and more regular, her heartbeat increased, her limbs tingled with anticipation of action, and her mind became glassy-clear, totally focused on the task at hand.  It had saved her life several times.

The other students weren't as lucky.  Buffy could hear their panicked breathing and a few soft moans.

And the Mayor flinched.  He tried to resume his speech.

"And so as we look back on . . ."  He stopped, grunting with pain.  ". . . on the events that brought us to this day . . ."  Another pain seemed to hit him.

Buffy took her cap off.  "Come on," she urged softly.

"We . . . we must all . . ."

And he screamed in pain.  The students sat bolt upright, tensing for action.  The faculty looked confused.

The Mayor suddenly straightened, speaking with some effort.  "It has begun," he announced.  "My destiny.  It's a little sooner then I expected -- I had this whole section on civic pride.  But I guess we'll just skip to the big finish!"

And as the students watched in abject horror, the Mayor's form twisted and writhed, growing and distorting into the form of a sixty foot-long serpent.

***

Xander had seen pictures of the demon the Mayor was becoming, but facing the reality was even more frightening than he'd imagined.

You're a soldier, he told himself.  Do your job, soldier.

"Now!" shouted Buffy.

The graduates rose.  Caps and gowns were stripped away to reveal weapons and crosses.  Xander stood on his chair and looked at Buffy.

"Flame units!" she yelled.  Larry and Derrick, on opposite sides of the graduates, fired up their flame cannons at the demon Mayor.  He screamed in pain

"First wave!" yelled Xander.  "Fire!"

Willow took the lead in firing metal lances at the demon Mayor.  They flew fast and thick.  The demon screamed again in pain and frustration before suddenly lunging down and snatching a student from the first row.

That did it for Darin Hadley and a few others.  They broke and ran down the steps . . . and straight into the vampire mob that had come up behind them.

"Xander!"  It was Oz.

"Arm bowmen!" ordered Xander over the crowd's noise.

The bows came out.  Arrows were set to string, then lit afire.

"Fire!"

Flames roared from the cannons in the front, and in the back, flaming arrows dusted vampires.

It was pure chaos.  The flames and lances were keeping the demon Mayor off-balance, but he was still lunging at the students.

"Fall back!" cried Buffy.

Xander turned back to the archers, who had re-armed.  "Fire!"

This time, the arrows cleared the road.  The vampires fell back, running away from the deadly projectiles . . .

. . . and straight into the basketball team, led by Angel and carrying crosses, stakes, and baseball bats.  Only Angel was unarmed.  He took point, leaving wounded and unconscious vampires scattered across his wake.

"Stay together!" shouted Percy as the team attacked the vampires.

Xander turned from them back to the front.  The flame units fired again, only this time, Larry's wasn't working.  As the big football player was distracted, only for a second, the demon Mayor's tail whipped around.  Larry was thrown high in the air.  Xander watched in horror as Larry hit the ground with a crunch and didn't move again.

Snyder was yelling something off to the side.  It caught the demon Mayor's attention.  A moment later, the principal was gone.

"Fall back! Get back!" yelled Buffy.  She turned to Willow. "Go!"

Willow threw down her lance, as did the others.

"Xander take �em down," Buffy ordered.

Xander pulled a stake out of his back pocket.  "Everyone!  Hand to hand! Everyone! Let's go! Move! Move!"

The students turned as a group and ran for the stairs.  Below them, the basketball team was still grappling with the vampires.  They were making headway. Xander watched as one staked a vampire Angel had left prone.  Angel tossed another aside and lit into two more, while Dominic staked a vamp trying to feed on Percy.  The vampires were being driven back toward the stairs.  One of the vamps yelled to "Get the kids!"

The student body surged down the stairs just as the vampires turned.  Crosses, baseball bats, axes, and stakes held high, they literally trampled the vampires coming back up the stairs.  Jeanne threw a bottle of holy water in one's face and it fell, screaming.  Jonathan jumped on another as it made a grab at Annie.  LeeAnn Axton of the softball team nearly took another's head off with a perfect swing of a baseball bat.

The vampires fought back as hard as they could.  Harmony screamed as a vampire grabbed her hair and sank its teeth into her neck.  In her panic, she grabbed the hand that was holding her chin and bit it . . . hard enough to draw blood.

"Right flank close in. Close!" shouted Xander over the melee.  A vampire grabbed him, and Xander was forced to fend it off.  "Jason and Paul, you guys are right flank!"  Someone staked the vamp, and Xander was up again.

The battle continued.  Angel grabbed a vamp that was attacking Jeanne and threw it a good fifteen feet.  Cordelia staked one like a pro.  Xander yelled for Derrick to get the rear guard up here now.

Everything was chaos, blood, screams, and fire.

***

Buffy waited only a moment after the students started their retreat, then jumped into the demon Mayor's line of sight.

"Hey!"

The snake reared back as it saw her.

Buffy held up Faith's knife, mottled with dried blood.  If she'd been able to think, what she was doing would have appalled her.  "You remember this?" she taunted.  "I took it from Faith. Stuck it in her gut." She looked at the knife almost contemplatively.  "Just slid in her like she was butter."

The demon Mayor gave a snarl of rage.

The Slayer held the knife up a little higher.  "You want to get it back from me . . . Dick?"

It did indeed.  Buffy turned and ran, ran faster than she ever had.  She wove in and out between the pillars, barely keeping ahead of the enraged demon.  She ducked through the doors and ran through the familiar halls in a familiar route.  Behind her, the serpent broke through walls and doorways.

Buffy wheeled on a dime, running for the library.  She ran in, up, and between the empty stacks, and the demon Mayor came right behind her.

***

The demon Mayor stopped in his pursuit of the girl who had hurt his Faith as he realized something was very wrong.  What was all that stuff stacked around the library?

Well, strike him pink.  He wouldn't have thought it of those kids.  Why, they had some gumption after all!

"Well, gosh!" he said, right before he was blown back to Hell.

***

The explosion shocked the combatants outside into temporary immobility.  Cordelia cried out and Jonathan threw himself over her, protecting her from the blast as best he could.

As the smoke rose, Xander noticed the light was coming back.  He turned, eyes connecting with Angel's for just a moment.

"Move!" Xander yelled.

It seemed to jar Angel out of his immobility, for in the next moment, he had wheeled and was closing the distance to Oz's van faster than was humanly possible, capping his run off with a magnificent twenty-foot bound before he disappeared inside, leaving a tiny wisp of smoke behind.

Xander breathed a sigh of relief.

Percy shook his head in amazement.  "We really could have used him on the team!"

Xander gave a snort of disgust.  Bright sunbeams shot through the smoke from the explosion and over the battleground.  The remaining vampires screamed and tried to escape.  Very few made it back to the safety of the sewers.  One young man got his shirt caught on fire when the vampire he was struggling with combusted.  In seconds, ash and dust were all that was left of the vampire mob.

It was over.

***

Buffy wandered, mind almost completely disengaged from what was going on around her.  She knew time had passed -- the afternoon had given way to evening -- but it seemed remote, somehow.  There were fire trucks and ambulances and police cars, there was smoke and mist, and there were people.  Lots of people.  Some large, some small, some wearing uniforms, and she was certain she knew some of them.

A girl walked up to her and wrapped her in a hug.  This had been happening quite a lot lately.

"God bless you, Buffy," the girl whispered.  "God.  Bless.  You."

That was Annie.  Annie would say something like that.  That was nice of her, wasn't it?

"Thanks," Buffy murmured.

Annie pulled away, wiping tears.  Close on her heels was Jonathan.  He shuffled forward, cleared his throat several times, tried to say something, then gave it up and hugged Buffy, too.

They left quickly, leaving Buffy to her thoughts.  There were entirely too many of them.  Larry, Faith, Angel, and the face of every student whom Buffy knew had died.  On top of too little sleep, severe blood loss that she hadn't really recovered from, and the fight, it was too much.  Buffy's mind and emotions had simply short-circuited.  Too much to deal with right now.

"If I could . . . could just get something for the pain. It's rather a lot of pain, actually. Aspirin? If you would, uh, ah . . . . Perhaps I could just be knocked unconscious."

It was Wesley's voice.  Buffy looked over to where he was being loaded onto an ambulance and wondered idly what had happened to him.  Xander was suddenly by her side.

"We got off pretty cheap considering," said Xander.  His voice was a bit hoarse from shouting orders, and it carried the terrible weight of someone who felt like he could have done more to prevent the deaths they'd seen today.

Buffy knew what he was feeling, but was unable to help him.  "Seems like we did," she finally said.  She realized she was looking around her.  Something was missing.

Xander stopped, shoving his hands in his pockets.  "He made it through the fight."  Buffy looked at him, suddenly realizing who she was missing.  "Guess maybe he . . . he took off after."

Buffy looked away, and after a moment, Xander withdrew.  So Angel was gone.  Buffy thought back, trying to figure out when she'd seen him last.  Not during the fight -- it was before, in Giles' office.  She fixed that moment in her memory, knowing she'd want it when her emotions returned.  Right now, she was too exhausted to feel anything.

Giles was beside her then.  "Are you all right?" he asked gently.

She considered it.  "I'm tired," she finally told him.  That seemed to sum things up.

The ex-Watcher smiled.  "I should imagine so. It's been quite a couple of days."

"I haven't processed everything yet," Buffy said, and surprised herself with a short laugh.  "My brain isn't really functioning on the higher levels.  It's pretty much fire bad; tree pretty."

"Understandable. Well, when it's working again congratulate it on a good campaign." Giles looked at her proudly.  "You did very well."

Even in her current state, that meant a lot to Buffy.  "Thank you. I will."

Giles put his glasses on.  "I, ah, I managed to ferret this out of the wreckage. Now, it may not interest you, but" and here he reached into his jacket and produced a rolled-up piece of paper "I'd say you earned it."

It was her high school diploma.  Buffy looked at it, knowing that even if her emotions had been working, they wouldn't have known what to do with this thing.  She decided to save it and try to work it out later.

"There is a certain dramatic irony that's attached to all this," Giles continued, looking at the school.  "A synchronicity that borders on predestination, one might say."

Buffy had no idea what he was gassing on about.  "Fire bad; tree pretty" she reminded him.

Giles looked at her, affection playing across his features.  "Yes, sorry."  He put his glasses back on, expression suddenly impish.  "I'm going to attend to Wesley, see if he's still . . . whimpering."

He left, leaving Buffy with her non-thoughts again.  She felt something now, a strange pang that seemed to call her.  She looked around, searching.

He was there.  Angel stood, dark against the floodlit mist.  She saw his face, his eyes staring at her with undisguised longing.  Deep within her, she felt the same longing welling up.  For a long moment, they stood looking at each other, communicating in a language deeper than words.

Then he turned away, breaking the spell that had held them.  She watched as he faded into a shadow in the billowing mist, then as even that shadow was swallowed up.  The longing settled into her soul, and something like peace washed through her.

***

Later, Buffy found her friends gathered by a bench.  Xander, Willow, Oz, and Cordelia acknowledged her with their eyes as she approached.

"Well, that's the most fun you can have without having any fun," commented Cordelia.

Willow grinned.  "How about the part where we kicked some demon ass?  I didn't hate that."  Oz stroked her hair lovingly.

"Hear, hear!" said Xander.

Buffy finished her approach.  "You guys want to take off?" she asked them.  "I think we've done pretty much all we can."

"I'm for it," said Cordelia with some feeling.

Willow looked at Buffy.  "Are you okay?"

Buffy nodded.  "Yeah, I'm okay.  I could use a little sleep, though."  She rapidly decided that was the understatement of a lifetime.

"Yeah" agreed Willow emphatically.

Buffy sat down beside her, legs feeling like they wouldn't support her much longer.  "If someone could just wake me when it's time to go to college, that'd be great."  She wasn't sure if that was a joke or not.  At the moment, she felt like she really could sleep all summer.

Willow smiled at her gently.  Buffy decided to get her alone and ask her to spend the night.  Buffy's mother was still out of town, and sleeping by herself in an empty house wasn't at all what she wanted to do.  And her neck ached.

"Guys, take a moment to deal with this: we survived," said Oz suddenly.

"It was a hell of a battle," agreed Buffy.

"Not the battle."  Oz looked at her very seriously.  "High school."

For a moment, all five were silent, images from the past three years passing through their minds.

Oz continued.  "We're taking a moment."  Buffy and Willow got up to leave.  "And we're done."

The teens walked off, away from the burned-out school and the memories it held.  Away from their own personal battlefield, in more ways than one.

Graduation was over.

the end

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