She hands her baby off to Valentine and tells her to stay far away from the commotion. She heads over and kneels beside Korva and pats her.

"It takes time to learn to talk safely. I know it's scary."

"It's stupid."

"You had better do it anyway."

Elizabeth pops back with Connor. She looks very tired. There's a leaf in her hair.

"What happened?"

"Oh, thank god. She hurt herself."

She walks over to Hell Karen and - 

"Did she - rip her own bone out?"

"Yes. She wanted it to make a knife. She's not - inured to the pain, really, she just figured she'd pass out and wake up once it'd started healing. She would've died. Hagan had healing."

" - okay. Uh. I can't fix something this bad selectively, I'd need to use a heal, and that could have mental effects. If I don't do it I think she just - doesn't have that bone anymore, at least until I get more magic."

"I think you should do it but possibly far away from everyone."

"Okay. Everybody else go - over there."

She gets up and walks away. She tugs Cecelia with her.

He leaves with them.

And when everyone's far enough away, she makes a hand motion and says, "May all in range of this spell be healed of all ills to mind and body."

She has a femur again. All of the damage from the injury is healed instantly. The pain is gone. The dehydration and starvation and the rawness in her throat are all fixed, too.

She remembers.

She remembers a hundred or a thousand lifetimes of the desert, with nothing but herself and the sun and the sky and the sand and the heat, disassembling herself over and over again to make great structures of bone and sand and hair-ropes and sinew. She remembers cutting her own skin off to make jackets and pants and boots to protect herself from the endless burning. She remembers great epics written in the sand, mostly false but some of them true, embarrassing amounts of them written about how her friends would rescue her, even after she forgot which of the versions of her friends were the real ones, even after she forgot who she was. She remembers coming back to them, after a thousand years of centering meditation that taught her how to move things, how to fly. She remembers not being able to make any sense of them, not even the massive letters that spelled her name.

She remembers before all of this, before she built her empire of bones and blood, those first few panicked daysweeksyears of screaming and burning and desperately hoping that her friends would find her very soon. She remembers screaming until her throat was raw and dry. Remembers that she wasn't able to speak in more than tiny rasping sounds, not ever again.

She remembers Arda. She remembers Sunnydale. A tiny, tiny, tiny slice of her existence, but the place that all of the stories spring from. She doesn't know how many years it's been. Alex might be a hundred thousand years old now. He knew her for two. She was such a silly little girl, to think for so many years that he would come, that he would even remember her a thousand years later, but here he is anyway.

Alex?

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We tried - wouldn't ever have stopped trying -

She sits up and hugs him tighter than would be advisable if he were human. 

Please don't go?

Never. - uh I don't know how much of what you got you understood but if you take big pieces out of me then I'll die. But otherwise never.

I'll not do that, then. I'm sorry, I didn't understand what - kinda still don't -

Yeah. I - I think maybe I know. I think that you went to a dimension where people couldn't die or permanently change themselves. And got used to it. But that's not how this one works. - I guess I don't know for sure, maybe it still works that way for you, but it doesn't work that way for other people and it might not work that way for you either. 

I don't like taking myself apart. Just didn't - have anything that wasn't me -

It's okay. In other places there's - lots of other stuff. So you won't need to take yourself apart.

Okay.

Hug?

Yeah, she hasn't stopped hugging him and doesn't actually have any plans to change that.

"So. Is she, uh, gonna want to go back to wearing clothes, at some point?"