It had been a good day. Not a happy one, but at least, one that hadn't been too full of troubles. She didn't like troubles. They always seemed silly to her, like peanut butter jelly with bread instead of banana. People tended to call her daft. Once, someone had- very briefly- hailed her as a genius. But since curses and screams had followed that almost immediately, she figured it didn't count. Not that she cared, really. People were people, and they had never been able to understand her, nor she them. So everything was in balance, and that was good. Ed liked balance. A wistful smile curved slender lips. She liked it out here, in this desk job. No one bothered her as long as she fiddled with the computers occasionally and looked as if she were working. Was this 'home'? --- The lamps glowed orange in the dark, a pale, powdery orange that reminded her of the vitamin tablets her mother had used to make her take as a child. She smiled thinly. At least the streetlamps still worked. By their light she could see the ruins of what had once, a very long time ago, been home. Quietly, she moved to the spot where her bedroom had been. The scratches she had made to outline her bed had long ago been washed away. It rained a lot, here. But no more than she remembered. She sat down, not caring if the gravelly soil scratched her legs. Home wasn't much now, no matter how warm and wonderful it had been in the past. Still, it was all she had to come to now, and it held memory- blurred, half-buried in fog, but still memory. A patchwork of the past, making up the present. What was it that Spike had said? Something about the past being the past; the present the present, about not looking back. And yet, despite those words, he had chosen to confront the world of his past. It was strange and alien to her still, this world, no matter how much she seemed to fit, no matter how many new skills she had learnt. It wasn't the technology that bothered her so much as the feeling of being completely and utterly alone. She didn't know anyone here- all the people she had known before, if they weren't dead, had changed far beyond recognition. Similarly, no one knew /her/. One couldn't shake off the past, no matter how hard one tried. Not when one had no present. Home, she had once told Ed, was the best place in all the world. AN: Look, I really want to smack Faye. Wait, I don't know whether to huggle her or to smack her. Stop angsting, woman. The series is over. The angst has run out. They had pulled him out of the collapsing ruins of the building. Sent him to hospital, got him the best doctors that were available. When he woke up, if he woke up, what would he be thinking? She had seen his wounds. It was possible that he would wake up like she had, years into the future, into a world which had changed too much for him to comprehend. Then again, thinking back, she perhaps had never really understood the world of so many years ago. Life was a lie based on illusion, and maybe she had never once touched the truth. If it was so- did it matter, anyway? Perhaps the truth of life was that no matter what one did, no matter how much things might have been thought to change, everything remained the same.