“Dawn. Open your eyes.”
Dawn sat up quickly, nearly dumping herself from Giles’ swivel chair. She made an embarrassing smacky noise with her mouth, like she’d been asleep for ages.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she blurted.
“Dawn,” Buffy said. “It’s okay. Danger’s passed.”
Dawn glanced around surreptitiously, then uttered an uneasy laugh. “You sure?” she asked.
“Well, I did just get off the phone with Headmaster Torrance,” Buffy said. She took the seat next to
Dawn’s and leaned in, affecting a stern glower.
Dawn slunk into the cushiony chair. “And?” she squeaked.
“He said you’d been cutting classes since early September,” Buffy said. She waited for Dawn to offer some kind of explanation. When she didn’t offer one, Buffy said, “Well?”
“World was ending?” Dawn said. Dawn rubbed absently at the spool-of-gauze bandage at the base of her throat.
“Yeah,” Buffy said. “If I’d have used that excuse…”
“I know,” Dawn said, rolling her eyes. “You’d have never graduated. So. What should I do?”
“Thank Giles,” Buffy said.
“Huh?”
“You’re lucky he knows a lot of scholarly British types,” Buffy said. “He put in several good words, so you will be able to repeat this semester next spring. Of course you’ll be indentured to him till you’re sixty.”
Dawn grinned. Buffy looked pleased. She ran her hand down Dawn’s hair, which she had restored to its usual shimmery silkiness.
“You’d better get ready,” Buffy said.
Dawn slumped again. “Is she serious about the party?” she pouted.
“Dead serious.”
“Did you explain to her that the British don’t celebrate Halloween?”
“I did. But I think she just wants a farewell thing, you know. Leave on a high note,” Buffy got up, stretched.
“Come on. It could be fun.”
Dawn got up as well. She followed Buffy’s lead into the kitchen.
“Did you also explain to her our various and weird histories with Halloween? I mean, things could go very
wrong here tonight. That wouldn’t be much of a high note finish…” Dawn said.
Giles, Spike and Willow were in the kitchen. Willow was hunched over her notebook, listing things. Giles and Spike were having tense words, which they continued even after Dawn and Buffy walked in.
Giles said, “I don’t know what it is that you propose we do about it, Spike. He intends to find Thellian. It’s
not our place to stop him.”
“Rupert, you must fall on Quasimodo’s side of the Bell Curve if you think the boy can make to Hell on his own,” William said.
“Fine,” Giles said. “Do you plan to go with him? Because with the vampires gone, we can expect a
resurgence in demon activity...”
“I don’t think this lot's concerned with job security,” William cut in.
“Wait. Go with who?” Dawn asked, alarmed.
William looked up, tripping over his witty retort.
“Connor,” Giles said, sounding tired. “Connor plans to pursue Thellian.”
“H-he can’t,” Dawn said. “Can he? I mean, Andrew said that Luxe and Thellian went to Hell. So he can’t… go to Hell.”
“He can,” William said. “Right books. Right spells. Boy can go damn near anyplace.”
“He’s injured,” Dawn said.
William spread his arms expansively. “Well, hello preacher. This is the choir.”
“Every day lost puts Thellian further away,” Buffy said.
Dawn whirled on her. “You’re taking his side?”
“I don’t have a side…” Giles interjected.
“Giles isn’t wrong,” Buffy said, remaining calm. “We can’t keep Connor from doing what he thinks is the
right thing. But we can give him the tools he needs to find Thellian and defeat him.”
William was shaking his head. “Look. Angel wanted us to look after Connor. Not send him to his death.”
“Angel also thought that Thellian would die along with him…” Buffy said.
“And he would have, if Andrew hadn’t read that sodding spell,” William put in.
“Hey,” Dawn snapped. She turned to enlist Willow. “You’re sane and rational. You can’t be on board with this.”
Willow raised her eyes. “Huh?”
Giles sighed. “We are getting nowhere here. Connor plans to go after Thellian, with or without our helping
him. Willow and Maya are working on protection spells, and he’ll have the Looking Glass. Not to mention, he is Angel’s son.”
“His only son,” William said. He backed away from the bar and the conversation. “You know what? I don’t
know why I even bother to care.”
“Will,” Buffy said.
He raised his hands. “I’m going out.”
“But the party!” Dawn said. But he was already heading for the door.
“No, Dawnie. Let him go,” Buffy said. “He’ll be back.”
Dawn flounced into the bar stool. Buffy glanced at Giles, who could only shrug in response. Willow returned without a word to her listing.
Dawn toyed with the edge of a daisy notepad on the counter, then tugged it forward to read, then re-read, the recipe written on the top page.
“Newt’s eye stew?” she said, grimacing.
Giles leaned in to read it over Dawn’s shoulder.
“It’s not real newt’s eyes,” Willow explained, not looking up. “It’s made with okra and tomatoes. The seeds look like the eyes. Of newts. It’s Halloweeny.”
Dawn sneered. “It’s got bacon in it.”
“I know,” Buffy said.
“You’re not craving bacon, are you?” Dawn asked.
“Slayer cravings,” Giles said. “Be glad it’s not raw hamburger or blood of lambs.”
“Giles, stop,” Dawn said. “So gross.”
“Earthworms with bean dip,” Buffy added.
Dawn shuddered. “That’s it. I’m going. You disgust me.”
Andrew met Dawn under the archway. Still dressed in his Star Wars PJs and fuzzy Simba slippers, he
resembled a shuffling and disheveled Tim Conway. He veered past her, single-mindedly aimed at the dish drainer.
Dawn eyed him like an owl stalking a mouse. Andrew snatched a long handled wooden spoon and began to
furiously poke it under the edge of his bandages.
Dawn and Buffy both leapt in to stop him.
“Get off me! Giles, help!” Andrew wailed. He attempted to gnaw Dawn’s forearm. Giles pretended to read.
Buffy wrenched the spoon from Andrew’s grip, then wrangled him into a chair.
“Stop scratching!” Dawn demanded.
Xander came in from the hallway bearing a stack of mail and circulars.
“Hey guys. Did I miss some insanity?” he asked.
“Andrew. Ignoring doctor’s orders,” Willow said.
“It itches,” Andrew hissed.
Dawn resisted the urge to scratch at the wounds on her neck and chest. It wasn’t easy.
“Mine itch too. But do you see me attacking it with utensils?” she said. “Scratching only makes it worse.”
“How can it be worse?” Andrew sneered. “My hand’s off.”
Xander laughed. Everyone looked up at him, appropriately aghast.
“Ah, don’t worry so much,” Xander said. “Maybe you can get one of those nifty cyborg limbs like Luke
Skywalker in 'Episode V'.”
Andrew brightened. “Really, do you think…?”
“No,” Xander said.
“Xander,” Dawn said.
Xander waved dismissively. “You know, Andrew,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that when Luxe said, ‘hey give
me a hand with this spell,’ he wasn’t speaking in the literal sense.”
“Xander!” Dawn shouted again. She smacked his knee with the wooden spoon.
“Ow. What? Like you guys didn’t poke sackfuls of fun at me when I got this,” he said, pointing to his eye
patch. “Pun intended.”
“You can laugh,” Andrew muttered. “Together we’re like the casting call for 'Shaun of the Dead'.”
“I do have a point,” Xander said softly. “And that point is, you did something brave, Andrew. And it could
have been worse. Much worse.”
Andrew sulked. He picked at the raveling bandage that turned his forearm into a cotton batting bludgeon.
The six lapsed into an uncomfortable stand-offy silence.
“So… Connor’s going to Hell,” Dawn announced.
Giles folded the paper fastidiously and left the room.
“Maybe I should go, too,” Andrew said quietly.
“Don’t be stupid, stupid,” Dawn said. “You already lost your hand. Wanna lose the rest of you?”
“I know the transverse theory of correspondence between the quadrant trans-dimensional barriers, in
relation to the time-space configuration conduit,” he said. “I’ve got knowledge you can’t even begin to
dream…” he said, pointing to his head with his cotton-ed hand.
“Ooh. Talk nerdy to me,” Dawn said.
“Guys, please stop,” Willow said. “I’m trying to make this list and you are very distracting.”
Xander leaned in. “Whatcha listing?”
“The damage,” Willow said. “212 stitches, 13 broken bones, eight bullet wounds, a fractured sternum, two
concussions – one minor, one less minor, one near-crippling migraine, one severed limb and more bruises, punctures, lacerations and hematomas than we can name. Plus the post-traumatic stress disorder we will all no doubt suffer and which will require many, many years of therapy to overcome. Not to mention Robin Wood, and the Slayers, Kennedy…”
“Angel,” Buffy said.
“So yeah,” Willow said. “Connor’s going after Luxe and Thellian.” She raked her hands through her hair. “But he’s not going alone.”
“You’re going?” Dawn yelled. It echoed against the low ceiling of the kitchen.
“And Faith. And Oz. Anjelica wants to go, but…”
“She should go,” Buffy said. “She’s a Slayer. MK, William and I can handle the school. Our normal students apparently can’t wait to resume their self-defense training after the recent unexplained world-wide spree of violence.”
“And who can blame them?” Xander said. “Violence and spree are two just words that don’t belong together…”
Willow brightened. “See? It’s not over yet, Dawnie. We’ll get ’em. But not tonight.”
Buffy smiled, but Dawn could tell it was forced. “Yeah. We saved the world,” Buffy said. “Tonight we party.”
Maya was a sucker for holidays. She went all out with the decorating. She made streamers of bats out of black construction paper and personalized mini-Jack-o-lanterns stuffed with candy and plastic spiders. She adorned the books in the dining room with poly-spider webbing and festoons of ball moss. In the center of the dining table she placed a cauldron of witch’s brew that bubbled and smoked like something out of 'Plan Nine from Outer Space'. She was aware of the non-festive-moodiness of everyone, but was convinced that once the party got going, things would settle in to a pleasant kind of fun-dom.
And she wasn’t wrong. Once Anjelica turned up with her Halloween Mix CD, Dawn came downstairs dressed as Sally and Andrew started picking at the finger foods, the mood seemed to liven a little.
Maya watched from the second floor landing as Oz and Anjelica struck up a conversation over the punch
bowl. Lorne and Connor met up with Dawn and there was some laughter. Giles, Willow, Buffy and Faith stood together in a tight knot near the newly repaired front windows, chatting in quiet tones. Maya intended to break that up seriousness straight away, but Xander and MK came into the hallway below. Maya came down the stairs to meet them.
Maya got all fluttery at the goofy look on Xander’s face when he saw her.
“'Star Trek', huh?” he said. “Am I in violation of the Prime Directive?”
“Well,” Maya said, eyeing him sidelong. “You aren’t in costume.”
MK looked confused. “Umm. What’s the Prime Directive?”
Xander patted her head. “You have much to learn, young one. And I suddenly feel very, very old.”
Andrew turned up in the entry hall, as if his Vulcan senses had been on high alert.
“You’re Lieutenant Yar,” he said, all sloppy with his gushiness. He turned to Xander. “She’s Lieutenant
Yar. Xander, you must marry this woman. And I mean really marry her, not promise to marry her and then leave her at the altar.”
MK and Maya exchanged looks of shared confusion. Xander cringed.
“Look! A Klingon!” he said, pointing to nowhere.
Andrew spun around, searching. Then he returned his attention to Xander. “Ha, so very not funny,"
Andrew slurred. "But I’ll leave you to it. Someone has to warn Buffy about the punch. I think Spike spiked it.”
When Andrew was gone, MK smiled mischievously. “She knows about the punch, and is avoiding. It was Giles who put in the good stuff.”
Maya’s brow crinkled. “So you’ll be having none, young lady. Go… drink some… tea.”
MK was still grinning when she left them.
“Maya,” Xander began.
She twitched her head to the side. “You left someone at the altar, Xander?”
Xander glanced over Maya’s shoulder, into the kitchen. He glanced down into his punch glass, downed it, then guided Maya toward the stairs.
“I did. We were engaged, and we planned a big fancy wedding to which I never showed. To this day, I can’t give a real good explanation for why I just didn’t marry her, and had I known how short life is or what would happen to us, I would have done things differently. But I didn’t know. What I do know is that we were good together and we were terrible together and she had a way of commandeering everything that made me crazy…”
“Her name’s Anya,” Maya said, quietly.
Xander blinked. “How do you…?”
“The ghost in your kitchen. I thought she was a suicide case, you know? A nurse from the time this place was a convalescent home, maybe. She wore a candy striper’s uniform, so I just figured,” Maya said.
“Is she still here?” Xander asked.
“No. But she was. And she loved you. That’s what we all felt in the kitchen – that warm buttery, cinnamon-y feeling in the kitchen. That was her, loving you,” Maya said. She smiled. “I think she forgave you, Xander.”
“She shouldn’t have…”
“Maybe you should forgive you, too?”
Xander shrugged. He couldn’t look Maya in the eye.
“C’mon,” Maya said. She took him by the hands and guided him toward the dining room. “We’re supposed to be celebrating Día de los Muertos, and it's all about remembering and honoring the dead, not mourning them.”
“Really?” Xander said.
“Well, it’s not until tomorrow, officially. But there are no hard rules against starting early. It’s meant as a
happy occasion to commemorate the lives of our loved ones,” she said. She took his punch glass and refilled it from the cauldron of witch’s brew. “Between you and me,” she went on in a whisper, “Ghosts really hate it
when we’re somber.”
Xander raised his cup in a semi-toast. “To… honoring the dead,” he said.
Willow lifted her glass as well. Giles was saying, “All of the world’s religious fundamentalists believe that last week’s phenomenon was, in fact, some kind of…” When he realized there was a toast in progress, he trailed off.
“Right,” he said, raising his glass to join them.
“Cheers,” Oz said. All around the circle of the dining room table, everyone quietly raised a glass.
Buffy didn’t have a glass for toasting. She looked around at her family and friends – Dawn, Giles, and Willow, Faith, Oz, Anjelica and MK, Lorne and Connor, Xander and Maya and Andrew. They had survived.
Short list, really: Save the world… don’t get killed. And they’d managed once more to make it through.
And yet, something was missing.
When the moment passed, and everyone returned again to their sundry conversations, Buffy slipped away.
Buffy opened the back door to find William outside, sitting on the ledge of the patio. Upon hearing her, he
hid something in the folds of his coat. He half-turned, trying to conceal his look of total suspiciousness.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked. “Party’s inside.”
“Yeah, about that…” he said.
“Not much in the party mood?” she said. She took a place beside him. “Me neither.” She stared hard at him.
“Seriously. What are you doing out here?”
William pulled a speckled composition notebook from under his coat.
“You’re writing?” Buffy laughed. “I thought you were hitting the hooch. Little one-man party of the pity
going on.”
“No,” William scoffed. “Not this time, at least.”
“Can I read it?”
“What? No.”
She grabbed for the notebook. He held it far away, but she tussled with him. “Come on, William. I wanna read it.”
“No! It’s not finished,” he said. She shoved him and they tumbled onto the grass. “Buffy!”
He held the notebook at arm’s length above his head. They rolled across the dewy lawn until she finally got the upper hand and pinned him. William put his hand over her face, playfully thwarting her attempts to wrest the book from him.
“Let me read it,” she said. The words came out muffled.
“What? I can’t understand you. You have a hand over your mouth.”
Buffy bit into his palm. But she felt, clearly, that he liked that way too much. So she licked between his
fingers.
“Geh! Stop that,” he said, withdrawing his slobbery hand. “You’ve got the tongue of a sodding cow, you
have…”
“Oh, like you mind,” Buffy said. She was smiling so hard her face hurt, and with the porch light setting her
hair aglow, William thought she might could pass for an angel, cow tongue and all.
“I don’t, for the record,” he said. But he raked his hand many times through the wet grass, just for show.
“Here,” he said. He passed the notebook to her. “It’s nothing. Really. Just words.”
Buffy slid over to sit next to William. She opened the notebook to the second page.
It was scribbling, mostly. Much of what he had written, he’d scratched through, and what remained was written in his loopy left-handed script, so she had to read it twice to make sense of it. Even then, she wasn’t sure she got it.
She read what she could read out loud:
“Before… love was a kind of grieving:
A gnawing knowing
That the world beyond your reach
…is glowing”
Buffy’s brow creased. She looked up at William. “Gnawing knowing?” she asked.
“Give it,” William growled. He swiped the book from her hands, closing it with a heavy snap.
“Wait,” Buffy said. “I’m not… poetry girl. I just…”
William made a pained sound.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
He sighed heavily and looked up at the sky. “It means,” he began. Stopped. Started again. “It’s about Angel. About the way vampires are. Were. I don’t know. I said it wasn’t finished.”
“Love is a kind of grieving,” Buffy said, nodding. “That was how it felt.”
William drew a deep breath and held it. “Yeah. Like we knew what was missing. Like, knowing love by the
absence of...” He exhaled sharply. "It's hopeless."
“Will,” Buffy said. “Angel said something. Before he… He said that this world is already dead, that humans have used up all of their chances and ruined everything.” She stared into William’s face for a long, long time, trying to puzzle out what she needed to say by looking into his dreadfully vulnerable eyes. Finally, she said, “What if he was right?”
“Don’t you believe it,” William said. He plucked a blade of grass from her hair, then traced his finger down the edge of the scar Angel had made with his cursed dagger. It was a white twisting mark that cut across the much beloved lines on her temple. By rights, that wound should have killed her. But it did not.
“What if I do?” Buffy said softly. “Thellian would never have gotten so far as he did if humanity hadn’t let
him. All those powerless, forgotten people fell prey to him because they were powerless and forgotten. Now all those people are dead, but we’ll just keep on as we always have because the lesson is always lost. And we’re gonna to bring a child into this world, William. And it’s not safe. We can’t make it safe, and it's not getting any better…”
William took both of her hands in his. “Buffy, you listen to me. When I was a young man, things were worse. Children were chimney sweeps. Women like my Mum couldn’t hold property unless their was a male heir. There was rampant disease. Poverty. Rats in the gutters. Alleys full of rubbish. Everything was sooty and dark. The food was bad. People were lousy…”
“I’m sure some were good,” Buffy offered.
“No. I mean, they had lice,” William said.
“Oh.”
“Point is, grooming and hygiene included, things have improved. You young people can’t see it, but it's
there: the long, slow crawl toward better things. Angel believed it. Else he wouldn’t have offed himself to save it all,” he said.
Buffy swallowed. “Really?”
“Yeah,” William said. “Yeah.”
Buffy laced her fingers in his. "Willow's going," she told him. "With Connor."
William stared at her, speechless.
"Faith, too," Buffy continued. "And, Oz and Anjelica."
"That a fact?" William asked.
Buffy felt a flutter inside, like a cage of butterflies released. She was afraid for them, and knew it would
probably be a long time since they would return.
William inclined his head toward her. "Mind if we sit this one out?" he asked.
Buffy smiled. “We can’t waste what Angel’s given us, William.”
He looped his arm around her shoulder and she nestled in beside him.
“I know it,” he said. He kissed her on the top of her head. “We won’t.”
When they parted their kiss, William ventured a look up into the sky. His breath caught at what he saw.
"Buffy... Look," he said.
She lifted her eyes skyward. She lay her head on William's shoulder. "Oh my God," she said quietly. "It's snowing."
The End.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This is the final chapter to my very long Buffy saga. If you've stuck with me this long, I just wanna say thank you so much! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it.