Chapter 13:   The Wrong End of the World

I said, baby, when you walk you shake like a willow tree
I said, baby, when you walk woman you know you, shake like a willow tree
Why does a girl like you could love to make a fool of me…

- Buddy Guy

“The stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the willow survives by bending with the wind.”

- Bruce Lee

***

Willow strolled across the quad, her thoughts a pleasant muddle of algebra and the farming techniques of 19th century rural Burma.  It was a little chilly outside, but it sure beat the heck out of the cafeteria.  Nothing was worse than being alone in a roomful of people.

She cracked a smile as she dug into her sack lunch.  Sounded all crinkly.

Yay, tuna salad! Nummers …

”Hi!  Willow, right?”

The blonde was standing a few yards away, wearing a sly grin and an oh-so-perfect outfit.  It was somewhere between sexy schoolgirl uniform and preppy caz, broadcasting just the right amount of leg.  Not that Willow was looking or anything.

”Why? I mean, hi!  Uh, did you want me to move?

”Why don't we start with, 'Hi, I'm Buffy,' and, uh, then let's segue directly into me asking you for a favor. It doesn't involve moving, but it does involve hanging out with me for awhile.”

”But aren't you hanging out with Cordelia?”

”I can't do both?”

”Not legally.”

Buffy sighed.  ”Look, I really wanna get by here.  New school.   And, Cordelia's been really nice.  To me, anyway.   But, um, I kinda have this burning desire not to flunk all my classes, and I heard a rumor that you were the person to talk to if I wanted to get caught up.”

Friend Ship alert!

All hands on deck!

”Oh, I could totally help you out!  Uh, if you have sixth period free we could meet in the library?”

”No,” Buffy said matter-of-factly.  “We can’t go there.  Ever again.  Don’t you remember?”

Willow felt a rail of ice slide up her spine.  Something was wrong here.

Just then, Xander popped up behind them.  His goony pal Jesse leapt in like a jungle cat, and suddenly they were drowning in a sea of boy.

”You guys busy?” asked Xander.  “Are we interrupting?  We're interrupting…”  He tossed his book bag to Jesse.

”Hey!” Buffy chirped.

”Hey!” Willow squeaked.

”Hey there,” Jesse winked.

Drat, she thought.  Foiled again.  And I was so close!

She gestured to the two bug-eyed hormone factories. ”Buffy, this is Jesse and that's Xander.”

Xander froze.  “Oh, me and Buffy go waaay back. Old friends, very close,” he said.  A dark cloud seemed to pass behind his eyes.  “Then there's that period of estrangement where I think we were both growing as people.  But now here we are, like old times.  I'm quite moved.”

”Is it me, or are you turning into a babbling idiot?” Jesse quipped.  He was looking a little sick, kinda hollow around the cheeks.  Willow wondered if he’d caught something.

”No, it's not you,” Xander almost whispered.  He was staring at Willow very intently now.  “It’s us.”

Buffy’s body stiffened to stone.  Willow could smell something terrible, old food spoiling in the sun.  Only the blonde’s lips were moving now, like something puppeteered from within.  “Well, it's nice to meet you guys, I think.”

”Well, you know, we wanted to welcome you, make ya feel at home,” said Jesse.  “Unless you have a scary home...” He suddenly looked very pale, and his eyes were ringed with red.

Xander hopped down and unzipped his bag.  “And to return this,” he said, holding out a wooden stake.  “The only thing I can think is that you're building a really little fence.”

”Garden,” Buffy replied, her voice dropping to an arctic drawl.  “It’s for our garden.”

Xander nodded slowly. But he was still staring at Willow, and his eyes seemed to bore directly into her soul.  Run, he mouthed.

Cordelia came running up.  “Are these guys bothering you?”

The smell was overwhelming, now, formaldehyde and putrid eggs.  Willow felt her breath catch.  ”Sh-She's not hanging out with us,” she stammered.

”Hey! Cordelia!” shouted Jesse.  The boy had now turned corpse-white.  When he spoke her name, Willow glimpsed a horrible flash of something sharp.

”Oh, please,” Cordelia groaned.  “I don't mean to interrupt your downward mobility, but I just wanted to tell you that you won't be meeting Coach Foster - the woman with the chest hair - because gym was canceled due to the extreme dead guy in the locker.”

“Dead?” asked the blonde, her lips a chilling instrument.  The smell was coming from inside them, Willow realized. For the first time, she noticed the color of Buffy’s eyes.  They were pink, like a thing that lived deep underground. The world blurred and shook along her outline like the edge of the sun.

”Totally dead. Way dead.”

“It’s not just a little dead, then,” Xander quipped.  But his mood was anything but playful. Run, he mouthed again.  Jesse started to giggle.

”Don't you have an elsewhere to be?”

The sky darkened and the wall frosted over beneath Willow’s legs.  The blonde's hair seemed lighter somehow, almost platinum.  Her lips opened again, pulled by some invisible string.   ”How did he die?” they asked.

“Jeez, morbid much?” Cordelia sighed.

“This isn’t right,” Willow cried.  “Something’s not right here!”  Jesse was laughing wildly, now, his mouth full of shark teeth.

“Run, Willow,” Xander whispered.

Buffy’s pretty pink eyes were dancing, a knot of stars spinning in the pupils.  “How did he die, sugar?” she asked again.

“They peeled off all his skin.”

No.

“His name was Warren.  Something…” Cordy closed her eyes, as though lost in thought.

NoNoNoNoNoNo

“Warren Mears..."

“Run,” Xander suggested.

“I don’t know. Some geek…”

“Run!” Xander screamed.

Willow’s nerve shattered like glass.  The world streaked by in a nightmare blur as she sprinted back over the quad. By the time she reached the school, the gray September afternoon sky had turned black.  As she flung the doors wide, she thought she could hear Xander’s voice cry out to her.  It sounded like “Not that way!” but by the time the meaning registered in her brain, it was too late.  They clinked shut behind her, sealing her in.

The place was deserted, but it didn’t feel empty, exactly.  A locker door hung halfway open, like a hand raised to a horrified mouth. She refused to look inside.  A clock mounted high on the opposite wall appeared broken, the hands frozen at one minute to midnight.

The foul odor welled up in her nostrils again, and in the distance a woman’s voice began humming a cheerful tune.  Willow started running, the halls growing darker with each new turn.  The woman’s song echoed off their walls like a requiem.

By the time she reached the library, the world had become a black tomb.  A line of yellow warmth trickled out from the door crack.  It drew her like an old lover, promising that same shelter it had granted them all those years ago.  She took a deep breath.

Opened the door.  Screamed.

The chamber stretched back for nightmare miles, a bottomless well turned sideways.  A thousand steel cages were stacked floor to ceiling, laid out in precise rows like a morgue.  From within, a galaxy of tiny coral eyes gleamed at her.  She heard a chattering noise, the sound of insects mating in a sweltering marsh.  Something ancient breathed her name.

wwwhhhWillllllowwwwwww…

***

“Willow?  Willow!”

Soft fingers smoothed back her hair.  The voice that spoke now was a tender flute, the soundtrack of Willow Rosenberg’s most beautiful and painful dream.  Slowly, she opened her eyes.

The girl’s face glowed amber through the darkness.  Willow traced each delicate lip, danced across the round smile of the brow.  She saved the eyes for last.  They were sad and haunted, with just a glint of backwater wisdom simmering underneath.

Where did we go?

“Welcome back, stranger” the ghost murmured, wringing a cloth over a foaming lobster pot.   She looked like a plate from an old religious text: the Angel bent to earth.

“Tara,” Willow whispered.  “Oh, Goddess.” She tried to sit up. A deep wound in her belly objected, shocking her awake.

Willow’s brain suddenly started making sense of time again.  A dozen crazy images flashed through it.  The bridge.  Broken glass on snow, like shards of ice.  Buffy’s knife, gleaming red under a floodlight.

Then, the growl of tires on blacktop.  A pair of familiar voices shouting.

“Please,” Tara whispered.  “Don’t try to move. It’s not healed, yet.”  The woman’s hand glowed green for a moment, hovering inches over Willow’s punctured side.  She suddenly realized that she was naked.  Sorta.  A white towel was draped across her for modesty.  It occurred to her to wonder why she needed that.

“She awake?” hollered a gruff voice.

“Yes!”

Sound of stuff breaking, Dammit Footsteps.  Then another old face, careening into view. The two people peered down at her, side-by-ridiculous-side.  It was so crazy that Willow almost chuckled.  But it would’ve hurt to chuckle.

And besides, it really wasn’t all that funny.

“Hey,” the man murmured, nursing a wry stoner’s grin.  “You okay?”

“My head feels.  Kinda big”

“Nah,” said Oz.  “It’s head-sized.”

***

Colors.

There were colors, but no light.

Color don’t happen without light. That’s impossible, woman.

Impossible Woman?

Who’s that, sugar? Superman’s gal?

She remembered the colors. Blood orange tides flecked with gold and sliver, swimming across the black landscape of her eyelids. Instinctively, she reached for the soiled sheets to bunch up over her head. The colors meant she was back in Georgia, curled asleep on her shopworn mattress near the foot of Hunt’s Creek. They meant she’d pulled another dumb-dumb and left the window shade wide open again, and that her archenemy was now prowling on the other side, whistling down her sweet, yellow poison. In another moment she would open her eyes and feel the peeling red wave wash over her body. The burn would last for weeks.

Slowly, her eyes fluttered open. She was biting her lip, bracing for the anger of the dawn. But it was an illusion. The colors were gone, and that violent old star was off napping somewhere on the wrong end of the world. She tasted a bitter tang in the back of her mouth, and gulped it down.  She was outdoors, lying on the grass.  Waiting for the monster to arrive.

It was still midnight in the Garden.  The biennials were in full bloom, each column and row painstakingly sketched with sun-bleached yarn and long wooden stakes the color of new corn. Pale bouquets of umbels trembled like children under the blind, haunted eye of the moon. It’d been twenty-six years since she’d been here. Nothing had changed.

The ramshackle RV park hugged the tattered western fringe of Dexter County, a mile south of where Route 17 shattered into a jumble of jagged dirt paths and deserted barns.  Its name appeared on no map or sign she knew of, but all the folks who had ever lived and died there called it Bride’s Folly, and so Nancy called it that too.  Home was a rundown 56’ Stentwood trailer that Daddy Stark had bought off a colored carpenter for seventy-four dollars in the year she was born.

A generation had passed since Nancy had laid eyes on her Garden’s pristine square. She lay flat on her tummy in a patch of high weeds a few yards out, marveling at the coolness of the soil. Her bare toes dug into the dirt, absently testing a shard of beer glass there.

The sensation suddenly reminded her of the world behind, of torn patch dresses and late night stumblings in the dark.  Somewhere south of Nancy’s toe, men breathed whiskey out of paper bags and flung out their knotted fists at sins both real and imagined while women cackled drunkenly through broken, brown teeth. And everybody – absolutely everybody – was afraid of the sun tonight. Their animal souls cried out, knowing full well how the new day was already curling around the edge of the earth, slowly shining it’s flashlight on the wreckage of their lives.

Their Saturday night was getting shorter by the second, and Sunday would bring with it a hundred bright miseries and sober recriminations and the slow death that those things marked. But, for now, all Nancy could see was her Garden and their children, gently quavering under a healing dome of midnight.

They’d survived six summers together since that strange, vanished evening she’d discovered it.  It was worn-out whore of a thing then, a weedy patch on the far side of Murray’s Hill that was thick with matchsticks and ciggy butts and rotting aluminum cans. She’d spent that entire first summer nursing the soil back to health.

The book she’d used was pure prose, a hard monochromatic block of science from the county library that she followed down to the letter.  Nancy Stark dug deep, tilling with hoes and hands and yanking deep yellow weeds like hairs from a lion’s skull. She stirred the soil with stolen dung and potassium extract hauled seven sweltering miles from John McNamara’s family farm.

Since then she’d seen dry spells flatten the wet, succulent petals into brown paper, battled swarms of caterpee who chewed the rosette leaves so full of holes that by mid-July that they resembled the merciless symmetry of Rorschach tests.  The Garden had grown invincible through the years, tempered by fire, salt and the thousand murderous intentions of mice.  It had become an eternal shape on the horizon of her young life, a masterpiece even by the standards of those rich snoots up in Sylvan Hills: the sort of red-faced hens who bred gardenias and clucked over ten-penny ribbons at county fairs.  Of course, that kind would never come to see it. No kind would, and that was just as well. The Garden wanted only one lover, and that one was as pale and as poor as fistfuls of rice.

It had been a crop of Imperator carrots this summer, her first attempt to generate the brawny, orange root.  Each seed was a handpicked champion.  She remembered the day she’d found them, how she strolled like a Sunday lady up and down the rows of McGrudy’s Nursery, the wide, white brim of her hat slung low on her forehead to defend against the sunset.

Soon after, the healthiest forty were lined up like soldiers along the windowsill, where she drew surgical slits in their mericarps with Daddy Stark’s old hunting knife. Later that same night, she would steal out to her secret clearing at the edge of the park and plant them in shallow graves of crumbled cowshit and rich Georgian dirt.

Her work had paid off in late June. The growth factor had been shocking; a pubescent spurt that sent the leafy stems shooting up like the grass on a giant’s lawn. By August the umbels were brushing the tops of her budding bosoms.  She’d pulled up a handful, then, to prevent the taproots from squabbling over water.

Each had been a miraculous specimen, unaccountably plump and vibrant for something grown in the Folly’s hardscrabble womb. She remembered how good they’d felt in her hands, those hard lengths of tapered orange wood that begged to be tested against fingers and lips in the cramped, shadowy vault of her bedroom.

Now, the muck ringed under her colorless nails and stained her cotton dress with dark, earthy fingerprints. The nails would go unnoticed, but the dress would earn her proper ass-whuppin’ tomorrow. Daddy was a terror in the summers. With no work to be found, he would set about raising his daughter with a fervor that was downright biblical. Years later, she could sometimes still hear the dreadful, lonesome sound of that old trailer door slamming shut.

Tomorrow, he would command her to strip down to the raw, his shrill voice salted with malt liquor and bummed cigarettes. “All’it, girl,” he would shriek. “Every goddamn stitch!”  She would peel down, quick as a Friday night dance step.  Daddy would pace like a jungle thing as she bent spread-eagle over the kitchen table, the old leather belt a writhing, snapping viper in his hands.

The unspoken ritual. He’d wait for her to cry before he laid in, beg him for a mercy that could never, ever come.  Hot tears would glue her cheek flat to the cheap green vinyl, a sparkling shame ringing though her like a psalm.

She would cry and think about how goddamn shitty she was, how shitty the both of them were. Trash, trash, trash of the worst, whitest kind. To the world they were less than nothing, a handful of dog-eared polaroids and misdemeanors and old incest jokes. The Folly was a graveyard for a more polite, modern age; a place where the dead clung savagely to the edge of consciousness and the living mourned them with offerings of canned Thanksgiving peas and all the shapeless, stainless hand-me-downs of blond, middle class goddesses.  Nancy would think of those girls when the old man’s belt finally came slashing home, biting into her narrow, milky frame.  She would squeeze her eyes shut and conjure them, imagine violin lessons and marijuana picnics, sweet sixteen parties and blue, blue swimming pools the color of the sky.  She would ponder their football boyfriends with those thick, dazzling smiles, and the sloppy, monogrammed hearts scratched onto their Geometry textbooks.  She would dream of an endless line of them gliding down staircases in clean cotton dresses, smiling like movie stars as they descended into the air-conditioned paradise of their lives.

Daddy Stark was usually too drunk to count, and tomorrow would be no different. Tomorrow he would beat her and beat her and beat her to the point where her skin was a torn, stinging flag of red and white, until she had no more wind left to scream with.

He would be the one to cry, then; to cry and rant and ramble about Nancy’s fat, spiteful jezebel of a mama.  Cry and curse the governor and the president and the country and the whole rat-shit-eating world and the God who runned it.  This was the key part of their ritual for him: seeing her frail body slumped over the crooked kitchen table like so much spilled milk, shouting and cussin’ at the welts.  Calculating whether they were deep enough, whether he was spoiling her.

When he finally left, she would grab a tattered dishrag and a handful of ice from the freezer and limp gingerly back to her room to nurse her wounds. Wincing, she would stretch lengthwise across damp polyester sheets, her head and shoulders dangling over the foot of the mattress.

She would reach underneath there with both hands and feel for the cool, soothing texture of her dearest friends.  At fifteen, Nancy Stark no more had a teddy bear to hug than a pot to piss in.  But she had the books.  She had the words and the pages and the glossaries that mapped them all out in sterile white rows. Each one was a flat, perfect world of its own, singing the whos and whats and hows in the remote, soothing tones of science.

Tomorrow was the day her books would sing about chemistry. Tomorrow was the day that everything would change.

But that was tomorrow, and at this moment, lying in the dirt on the far side of Murray’s Hill, the side you couldn’t see from the road, it seemed like tomorrow might never come.

As far as Nancy knew, it would be midnight in the Garden forever, and this midnight in particular had belonged only to Nancy Stark. This was the night she would slay the Beast.

It had left all the telltale signs. The southwestern quarter was littered with red, half-eaten corpses and black pebbles of scat.  It was as though the thief intended to mock her with a display of almost human wastefulness.  This one was likely a lone male, out scavenging for a final hump before the autumn chill set in.

It had been precisely at midnight that Nancy had caught her first glimpse of movement along the ranks.  And she was here again now, pressed flat to the earth, her entire body as pale and as still as a cadaver.  She slowed her breath down to a trickle and scanned up and down the rows, her finger sagging heavily against the trigger of Daddy Stark’s air gun.  Nancy had laid the bait at sunset: a plump, sacrificial virgin with a woody taproot the length of her calf.  She’d done the Beast’s dirty work for it.  All it had to do now was chew.

There was another hard rustle. Then she saw it. The thing came loping out of the darkness in the distance, elongated haunches sawing mechanically under a tattered grey pelt. Its eyes were huge, alien orbs that gleamed white with the reflected radiance of the moon.

Nancy detected the thing’s soul in them: a cowardly, clockwork wraith of greed and letchery. The world loved him, in its naiveté. It worshipped his gentle bearing and his soft down, mistook his vegetarianism for morality. She knew him better. A tattered old book told the tale. He wore old voodoo charms for shoes and lived in the hollow filth of the world, hiding from the same yellow sun as her.  She knew he bred like an insect and that, like his brethren, he spent his nights stealing whatever wasn’t nailed down, and leaving the rest to rot.

There was a dark ancestral instinct at play in him, something no book could hope to describe. The rabbits of Bride’s Folly were like any other thing that walked or crawled there: the mothers would feed what young they could for as long as they could be bothered to do so.

The rest of the brood – the weak and the lame, the odd of pelt – were left for the buzzards. It was a very old rule, one that the Beast had learned young and well.

An ear so long it could hear a sinner’s thoughts pricked casually in her direction, correcting for a hundred hidden velocities as its owner limped gamely down the row.  Nancy watched it pause at the foot of the root, saw it rise suddenly to its hind legs. Its breath shot out in rapid, violent pants that convulsed every part of its body from the neck down.  Nancy leaned in with the rifle, drawing a bead on the monster’s miniature heart.

She hesitated, but only for a moment.

The air gun’s metal grip buzzed in her fingers as the pellet thumped out. The sound was small and hollow, barely distinguishable above the nattering of the crickets.

It was a true shot.  But, in the time it took for the sound to twist its way into Nancy’s human brain, the Beast was already gone, bounding safely back into the warm, dark void.

It was the Devil’s ear, she realized. It was long enough to eavesdrop on the future. Long enough, even, to hear the confessions of a bullet.  Nancy could wait a thousand nights and fire a thousand shots, and the result would never change. The gun would never kill it.

Poison, then, she thought.

Tomorrow, it’ll be the poison.

***

The jeep was toast. Xander stared gloomily at the burnt, black engine, silently praying that Sergeant Rock had managed to squeeze in an auto-shop class in high school.

Nah, he thought.

The guy was probably too busy getting laid.

He flapped the hood shut with a groan.  The bunker was a good ten miles out from the Romanian Border.  It was a broad, dreary hunk of Soviet era architecture that he thought could make a pretty compelling museum of Glad-We-Won-The-Cold-War-ness.   In a facility built to house sixty or so Commie Super Soldiers, there was only one toilet, and it was broken.  The walls were gray concrete slabs designed to bleed every last drop of warmth from the human soul.  Xander had seen cozier tombs then this.  Literally.

There was still no sign of Kennedy’s crew.  He allowed himself to toy with the notion that Andrew’s mystery pet had already gobbled them all up.  On the other hand, the gals were packing some serious firepower back there, and he kinda doubted they’d miss twice.  He didn’t get a clear look at the demon, but it seemed like a pretty big target.

Andrew.

I’m sorry, man.

A strange, foreign substance leaked out of Xander’s eyeball.  He dabbed it with a spare finger as he stormed back into the main barracks.  There was still a ton of work to be done.  The jeep may not have come with a how-to manual, but Dawn’s relay did.  Of course, he had no clue what it would do or who it would call when he turned it on, but he supposed anything would be better than just waiting around to get massacred.

In the Captain’s quarters, Giles was sitting under a pool of electric light that hummed down from a single overhead bulb.  Xander had managed to get the generator on-line pretty damn fast, and now he was regretting it.  He’d been amazed at how much the last five years had seemed to age the man, but tonight the Watcher seemed positively ancient.  Loose piles of wrinkles cascaded down his forehead, almost hiding the bare blue eyes that stared directionless into the darkness.  The vaguely Irish twinkle was gone from them now, replaced by a weight that was almost magnetic, like the gravity of moons.

“Hey,” Xander said, knocking on the open door.  “Sorry to interrupt this whole Brooding Mastermind thing you got going.” Giles didn’t budge.  He was doing something strange with his hands, wringing the palms over and over. “Any luck yet with the... you know?”  Xander tapped his ear.

Giles answered without looking up.  “No. The network is still down. Some kind of interference. From the mountains, perhaps.”

Xander nodded dully.  He never really understood the whole “WatcherNet” concept. When they rolled it out last year he had steadfastly forbidden anyone on the Ipswich ‘Mouth to join up.  It wasn’t the spooky brain implants that bugged him.  Well, it wasn’t just those, although they were pretty damn skeevy, too.  After all the gang’s experiences with mind-control rays and chipped vamps in the old days, one would think that Giles would have learned that monkeying around inside people’s skulls is pretty much the definition of Major No-No.

But, all the tedious ethical issues aside, the idea just seemed a little.   Well.   Insane.  These days, the world was already bathed in so much radiation from wi-fi and cell phones that all their kids would probably wind up with fourteen toes.  But retinal cameras and bionic earlobes seemed like the worst kind of campy sci-fi crap to him, and that was coming from a guy who’d once been turned into a giant, two-legged hyena.  And then, of course, there were all the lame puns. Like, suddenly everything had to have the word “Watcher” in front of it.  WatcherVision and WatcherWiki and the WatcherMobile.  It all made him wanna WatcherPuke.

As Xander entered, a shape stirred in a dim corner of the office.  Leaning through the darkness, he glimpsed a small form writhing on a cot.  He stood dumbstruck as a grey woolen blanket slid casually to the floor, revealing an unbroken line of bare flesh.  For a fleeting moment his eye moved on its own, tracing every forbidden curve.

A hundred simultaneous emotions ripped through his brain.  For some reason, Xander picked Rage.

“Nuh,” he shouted, blushing like a bandit and jabbing a finger at the Bad, Bad Man in the chair. “Nuh. Naked!” Giles glared back at him as though he’d just lost his marbles.

“What?”

“Why?  She?”  The thought turned to scrambled eggs as his eye drifted back to the bottle-blonde goddess in the bed. “Naked,” he finally yelled. “Naked HER!”

Giles glanced in Buffy’s direction, and something seemed to rip apart inside him.  Xander flinched as he watched the man rise and shuffle slowly towards her.

“No!” Xander roared.  “You. Stay back from. Naked!”

Giles kept going, limping to the foot of her makeshift bed.  Without making a sound, he knelt down and replaced the fallen bedsheets, tucking them into the soft crook where the woman’s neck met the curve of her shoulders.  He watched in awe as the Watcher smoothed a mop of yellow locks from Buffy’s face, his brow knitting sharply to crush back a tear.  Xander’s face reddened all over again, recognizing his own stupidity.

“Is she… Is she alright?” he asked.

“No,” said Giles, his voice ground down to a hard whisper.  “She’s not.  She has… some kind of fever, I think. And her... her... head.”  He trailed off, strangling a sob in his throat. Xander watched in awe as the librarian stiffened, his fingers tenderly grazing Buffy’s pale cheek.  His shoulders were shaking, head trembling like a stroke victim who was trying to speak one, final word.  The old bastard was fighting two battles at once, Xander realized, and losing both of them.  He thought it was very British of him.

When Giles finally broke, things got ugly fast. Ninety percent of the time, Rupert seemed to be the world’s most lifelike robot, a wind-up toy of mystical factoids and parched English wit.  But he was different with her.  Everyone was different with her.  She had saved the world ten times with her bare hands, but Xander knew her real powers appeared in no dusty old tome or legend.   She could turn monsters into men with a sideways glance, raise the dead with a kiss.  For her alone, the Watcher wept.

It was horrible to watch; the white jaw working silently on its hinge, tears funneling down through the broken cliffs and valleys of his face as he fought for every breath.  Near the round hump of her shoulder, his wrinkled hands were clasped so tightly that Xander expected to see blood trickle out between the fingers.

Is he praying? Do people still pray?

Xander felt a cool wind rustle through him.  He tried to imagine himself going to his old friend to comfort him. He would tell him that forgiveness was real, that he’d felt it happen and that it was more powerful than a whole library full of magic tricks, more intoxicating even than love.  He would tell him that, or whatever other crazy, impossible lie popped into his head.  It’s what families did, when the chips were down. And their chips were most definitely down.

A kinetic urge swelled inside his chest.  He suddenly wanted to kneel too, to beg the stupid Commie concrete ceiling for a second chance.  He wanted his family back and he was willing to pray for it. And if he thought he had the strength, or the right, he would have.

Instead, Alexander Harris quietly turned, stepped out into the hallway, and closed the door behind him.