Chapter 28:  Fish and Chips

Hungry.

There were six of the goobers, roaming around aimlessly in the little room outside the bubble.  They were all covered head to toe in billowing vinyl outfits, like the World’s Crappiest Astronauts.   Satan-only-knew what they were doing out there, with their charts and their booping gadgets.  Azazel closed all of his eyes.  He pictured himself tearing off one of their little plastic heads and squeezing the gooey juices into his mouth like the world’s biggest Go-gurt.

Hungry.

A long, hammy muscle coiled like a python around his spine.  The electric leash these d-bags had put around him crackled back in protest.  Azazel ignored it, wrenching his body into a U-shape around a washing machine-sized gizmo that sounded like it was generating the beam.  With a grunt, he smushed himself, face-to-booty, and crushed it like a soda can. 

Right on cue, all the geniuses outside proceeded to lose their tiny little minds.  They scrambled helter skelter in a dozen directions, making monkey noises and pressing buttons and pulling useless switches and whatnot.   Azazel just sliced through the bubble and rumbled full speed ahead.  About a dozen yards past the pack of jibbering spacemen he spied a set of big steel doors, and bore down on them like a freight train.

The impact made a dent the size of a Buick, but they somehow managed to hold.   The archfiend flailed windmill-style, mad from starvation and boredom.  A tornado of clawed fists and toothy heads lashed out, snapping and ripping like a pack of ravenous wolves.  He shoved random parts of himself through the holes he was making, every inch pushing and prying until the metal finally gave way with a blood-curdling screech.

In the hallway outside, blaring klaxons and red strobes turned the world into a groovy disco nightmare.  He galloped down one long corridor, then another, then another, panting for the scent of anything remotely non-human.

Starving.

It wasn’t by choice, of course.  Normally, Azazel was a huge fan of the Soul Food.  Their aroma was always so bursting with flavors: that come-hither stench of mammalian B.O. soaked in a French bath of speed-stick and mouthwash and cooking grease and hairspray and perfume and laundry detergent and fabric softener and all those gallons of lovely sweet-and-sour sauce that raced through their veins.   People were fattening, sure, but the Yum Factor was through the roof.

So Hungry.

He wasn’t picky either.  For instance, some snobs only went for virgins.   And not just any virgins, either.  We're talking the sort of doe-eyed, tender young morsels who devil worshipers tied to trees, or set out like screaming, wiggling buffets on the altar of some oh-so-chic Satanic shrine.  Puh-leease!

Not Azazel, though.  He liked all kinds.  Variety was the spice of death, and this latest smorgasbord was no different.  He wanted to chow them all down like Doritos, starting with that little goober who summoned him.  But, thanks to said goober's lame spellbind, the old monster was like a castaway, marooned on an island full of tasty and poisonous fruit, and some lingering shred of sanity kept him nosing for a snack that was a few branches closer on the ol’ family tree.  The kind of snack that wouldn’t get him stranded in this puke-worthy dimension for all eternity.

Moments later, at the intersection of WhereAmI and WhoGivesAShit, he picked up a scent.  It should have been sickening, he knew; that seamy bouquet of Malevolence and Insanity.   But the Hellbeast's hunger was a river, now, roaring in his ears, so he swallowed down his disgust. 

He found the poor, unlucky chode at the end of a prison block.  He was little red dude, with a rubbed raw snout that made him look like a skinned bulldog.   Three snakelike eyes blinked back at Azazel through the cell’s little window.  “Hey,” the creature burped.  “Uh, wha'sup?”

HUNGRY.

Azazel let out a howl so unspeakable it that it even made himself nervous, then slammed his huge bulk against the prison wall. 

Krooooonng!

“Whoa, waitaminute!” the little Happy Meal squeaked.   “Can’t we talk this over?!”

Azazel ignored him.  Flanks shivering, he circled back for another try, this time twisting like a linebacker as he burst forth. In his mind’s eye he imagined the little punk’s innards squeezing outward, slicking his claws like melted chocolate.   

He connected with another painful-yet-satisfying bong.  There were a hundred sounds of metal bits crunching and buckling, tiny bindings snapping loose.

The little imp flipped completely out, then.  He started hollering for help, presumably from the same jerks who’d locked him up to begin with.  The smell of his terror was exhilarating.  Azazel kept ramming away like a mountain goat, each assault echoing down the halls.   Sometimes after a charge he’d fall down and lie panting on the floor.  Whenever that happened, the red dude would ratchet up the volume to obscene levels, his delicious screams goading the ancient Hell Demon back to his feet.

Eventually, a troop of soldiers came tramping in from the rear.  White lightning laced into Azazel from all sides.  He roared in agony but kept smashing away, whanging his biggest skull on the cell door.   His tormentors replied in kind, turning up the juice on their boom sticks.  The blasts hurt Big Time.  They were like a hundred freezing snakes, swimming faster and faster through his guts until he just couldn’t take it anymore.  With an aggravated whoosh of his tail, he swept them all to the ground and slithered back down the maze of hallways. 

The sonsofbitches just wouldn’t quit, it seemed.  Their scent bounced down the walls like fresh wolf piss.  It seemed like everywhere he turned, their scheming little footsteps were closing in, heaven-bent on finding him. 

In a moment of pure panic, he realized he wouldn’t be able to control himself when they did.   The old metabolic song was gonging away in his bowels, drowning out all reason. 

Somewhere nearby, a hot wind breathed up from a hole in the floor.  No, it wasn’t home, but a wave of nostalgia swept over him nonetheless.  Blind, running on pure infernal instinct, Azazel shambled towards it. 

It looked like some kind of a mineshaft, drilling straight down through the bedrock in the middle of a dazzlingly lit chamber.  Steel safety railing ringed a mouth the size of a Merry Go Round.  Azazel peered over the lip into the darkness below. 

It looked good.

***

“Well, find it,” Dawn said.  “I mean, duh.”  On the other end of the line, Lieutenant Hoffman started stuttering about protocol or whatever, but Dawn thumbed the “End” button mid-excuse.

Great!  More fun problems…

Needless to say, the first day of the Dawn Summers Era wasn’t going exactly as planned.  The missing-in-action list was growing: Buffy, Faith, Xander, a certain Un-Dead-ed undead babysitte.  And now, Andrew’s Great Big Oopsie From Beyond had flown the coup. 

Oh yeah, and Willow, of course.

And G.

The unease welled up inside her again.  She strode the length of the armory, trying her best to hide it, and spotted a pair of Slayers she didn’t recognize perched near a rack of gleaming swords.  There was a sort of chilling serenity about them; they were so damn easy in their skin it was scary.  They suddenly reminded her of a pair of big cats.  The kind who were lazy and playful right up until the moment they tore out your throat.  

Dawn realized at last that she should be scared, and that maybe everyone on the whole darn planet should be scared.  That whole Girl Power speech had sounded so cool on paper.  “Get ready to be strong” and all that progressive, uplifting, empowering yada-yada.  Like the Love Boat, it all felt so exciting and new.   But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia.

The Chosen Ones weren’t a bunch of neo-feminist metaphors.  They were flesh-and-blood killers, and designed to work alone.  Hanging around each other was breeding a sort of insanity in them, and it wasn’t just Kennedy’s crowd that was affected.  Just as this thought entered her brain, one of the girls flashed her a grin that reminded her more of crocodiles than she cared to admit.

Dawn gave the girl the once-over: the Slayer was sixteen and pretty and slim and fashionable and ancient and monstrous and terrifying.  It was all the same.   She tossed back her best Wise Beyond My Years nod and then continued on to the door marked “Executive Access Only.”   With as much nonchalance as she could muster, she fed the keycard into a black plastic slot, waited for the beep, and walked inside.

The office was way shabbier then the one Frank Grange was currently nesting in.  This one looked like Giles hadn’t used it in years, and there was very little in it that reminded her of the man.  A bookshelf sat mostly bare, with just a few technical manuals and an old manuscript of Yogi Mysticism left to stand guard over a bay of fancy computer equipment.  From what Frank could ascertain, the Watcher had mainly used the place as a “clean room” to test out the latest versions of his creepy WatcherNet stuff. 

WatcherNet.  That whole mess was still impossible to wrap her brain around.  All that hi-tech blah-diddy-blah seemed so totally out of character for an old English dude who could barely work an iPod.   He’d hired an army of private contractors to design the crap, all paid handsomely from the Council’s seemingly bottomless trust fund.  M.I.T’s nerdiest dropouts toiled eighty hours per week to bring the Watcher’s digital monster to life.  She still recalled that final, chilling day.  He’d gathered them all in the well of the engineering bay for a champagne toast.  When Dawn arrived on the stage, the witch Delilah was standing by his side like a dutiful Senator’s wife. 

A small incantation later, and the whole team was staggering out of the room in a dizzy, bewildered horde, months worth of their memories scrubbed as clean as a summer chalkboard. 

It all seemed so wrong.

She settled into the Aeron chair in front of the biggest monitor and thumbed the power button.  The desktop blinked awake with a long musical tone. Its wallpaper was a cruel taunt; an old scanned photo of Buffy’s 16th birthday party.  Almost everyone was there.

Almost.

Dawn talked to the machine, in the only way she knew how: one hand gently dragged the cursor, the other fluttered over the keys.   Willow was a maestro when it came to these things, full of the kind of spontaneous and brilliant artistry that would make any uber-geek slobber.  The Key was only competent by comparison.  But she was a fast learner.  That was by design, Dawn guessed.  She hammered her way through a maze of passwords, hosing down one mighty firewall after another until, finally and mysteriously, she found what she was looking for.

The folder was named “Fox Kestrel.“  Ordinarily, those words wouldn’t have meant squat to her.  Tonight, they set off a ten-alarm fire.  Somewhere down in that supernatural nook of her brain that processed language, she knew she’d stuck gold.  

But as she pored through the small collection of files inside, she could feel something like a cold switchblade ramming into her ear, over and over.

The Plan. 

It was all so ridiculous.  And considering the summary of Dawn Summers’ life so far, that was really saying something. 

Figures, she thought.

Nobody ever tells me anything.

***

“Ohhhh, I get it now,” Xander said.  “Except,” he added, “okay, no.  I still don’t get it.” 

He was contemplating yet another left turn, trying to get his bearings.  London was still a total mystery to him.  The streets were the sort of chaotic spiderweb you always find in these older ‘bergs.  After a few hundred years, a city wasn’t so much planned as it was piled up.   He remembered reading somewhere that London cab drivers were among the most highly paid workers in the whole damn town.  You had to go to school for, like, four years to become one.  As he passed a pair of signs that each seemed to say he was driving on a different street, it occurred to him that four years probably wouldn’t be enough.  Heck, it took him almost two just to remember he had to drive on the left.

“Willow’s trying to kill me,” Buffy said again, her voice filled with infuriating cool.  “And we need to help her do it.”

“Yeah, see, that’s really the heart of the Not-Getting-It deal.”

Buffy racked the crossbow taut, a steel bolt thunking into place.  “When you brought me back,” she explained.   “You cheated.   I was supposed to be, like, Dead-dead.”

“Not just a little dead, then?“

“Turn here,” she commanded, “and find a place to park.”   The tone was spooky familiar.  In fact, everything about her was spooky familiar, ever since they left the Dauphin’s underground Google Palace.  He wasn’t sure if this was a good or bad thing, but the dose of Vintage Buffy Summers was somewhat welcome given the circumstances.  He backed the car into a slot at the west end of Lorry Street and cut the engine.

“Buffy,” he said again.  “I know the whole getting ripped out of Heaven thing was hard on you.  But this is just-“

“This isn’t about that,” she said, matter-of-factly.  “It’s about Willow, and what she did.  There are all these rules.”

“Rules?”

She nodded.  “How everything works.  How it all fits together.  I can’t explain it, really, but I understand it, now.  So does Will.  She broke something, and when it broke, it started this kind of storm.  It's like a big swirly nothing that’s swallowing up reality, piece by piece.”

“A nothing?  You mean, like, a black hole?”

“Nancy called it the Now, when she was inside of me.”

“Uh huh,” he said, pretending to have a clue.  “So this, uh, Now thing.  You’re saying we made it, and it’s going to destroy the world?” 

“Yep.”

“And so Willow is trying to save the world from... Us?”

“Pretty much.” 

“By killing you.”

“A me.  Not the me.”

“Because she brought you back.”  He was shaking his head again, still blown away by this particular factoid.

“That’s the thing, Xander,” she said.   “You can’t just ‘bring people back’ all willy nilly.”  Buffy was staring out the window at a drab four-story townhouse across the street, probing it with her steely Slayer eyeballs.  “There was supposed to be a sacrifice, but Willow didn’t have the guts for it.  She tried to hack her way around it. Thought she was so darn smart.”

 “Fine.  Okay,” he said, giving in.  That was also an eerily familiar feeling.  He only had so much fight in him when it came to the Slayer and her wacky schemes.  “So, how do we find this Mean Buffy she’s trying to ice?  Does she have like a facebook page or something?”

 “She’s not here.  Not in our world.  The one she’s from is not so nice.  There’s a war going on, and she picked the wrong side.”  When she said it, there was an almost savage gleam in her eyes that gave Xander the heebie jeebies.  “At least, as far as Will’s concerned she did,” she added resentfully.

“Well, then how are we going to help, you know…”  He trailed off.  He wanted to tell her to screw all this hocus pocus, oogy boogy crap.  The thought of killing any Buffy, anywhere, wasn’t exactly a club his brain wanted to join up with, college applications be damned.

“There are these doors,” she answered.  “Places where all the worlds intersect.  I saw one of them up close and personal, the night I died.  Saw one the other night, too, when Nancy stabbed me with a needle.”   The way Buffy said this was so deadpan you would’ve thought she was bored by the idea.  And maybe she was.  She seemed fixated on the house outside, turning something over and over in her mind.  The lights were all off, but Xander got the sudden, unsettling feeling that something was home, and maybe looking back.  “If I can reach into my other self, I can maybe trip her up, somehow.  Give Willow a fighting chance.”

The way she made it sound was all very reasonable.  Fucked up beyond all possible recognition, but, you know:  Do-able.   “And Giles?” he asked.

“Giles is...  Ugh.”   The look that crossed her face was hard to get a handle on; a stew of unrelated emotions that would make Doctor Phil blush.  “Xander, believe me when I say he’s the most screwed up part of this whole mess.“

“Oh, I highly doubt that.”

“He’s trying to help,” she murmured, still shaking her head.  “In the weirdest way possible….”  She drifted off again.  Xander had never seen the woman with this much on her mind.   Whatever deck of clues the Dauphin dealt her seemed too big to fully process.    “He’s got some sort of big, crazy plan. I don’t know.  He can help us.  But for some reason, I get this feeling he can’t help me.”

He made the conscious decision to let this last almighty riddle hang.  He felt like if he talked about this stuff for one more second, his brain would Jiffy-Pop right out of his skull.    “Got it,” he lied.   “Screwed up.  No sacrifice.  Black hole.   Willow fix.  Kill Evil Buffy. Giles weird.  Open door.  Fighting chance.”   He leaned back heavily in the driver’s seat, and realized that he kinda-sorta did get it, after all.  Of all the crazy crap they pulled off back in the old days, the resurrection had always creeped him out the most.  It just seemed too easy, in the way that all the worst things are.   “And how do we find one of these Door Thingees?”  She was still staring at the townhouse, and, suddenly, Xander found himself staring at it too.  “Right.  Gotcha,” he said.  “So, what’s the game plan, boss lady?”

“Let’s start by knocking. Worked so far tonight.”

“Yuh huh.  And when that plan utterly Fails At Life?

Buffy shrugged, slung the crossbow over one shoulder. All Annie Oakley-ish. “Guess we’ll play it by ear.”

***

“BOLLOCKS!” Spike yowled.  “You’ve gone ‘round the twist, mate!   Sixpence short of a bloody shilling!”

  It’d only been a dozen minutes since they’d nicked the ride, but it seemed clear to the vampire that the world and everything in it had since gone bright, sparking mad.  Outside, dreary old Londontown slid harmlessly by, oblivious to the carload of dangerous lunatics prowling her veins. 

He studied Dru again.  They’d trussed her up in one of the doc’s old antique straitjackets, iron chains crisscrossing her like a treasure trunk.  The wardrobe change, while fitting, hardly seemed necessary.  She hadn’t so much batted a lash since the whole Mirror-Mirror gag.  Spike found it deeply unnerving to see her like this; slumped like a big broken doll against the rear passenger window, eyes held captive by the reflection of a woman playing across the dark glass. 

“Gotta hand it to you, Watcher,” he muttered, almost to himself.  “Bein’ the fruitiest loop in this bowl is no mean feat.”

Rupert sighed again.  The old buzzard was perpetually exasperated of late – a fact which seemed bloody ironic, given the tsunami of blithering nonsense that had just poured from his throat.  “Spike,” he chided, striking a professorial tone.  “Look, I’m not sure how else to explain it to you.  I’ve tried my best.”

“Try harder!”

He could see the Watcher’s eyes in the rear-view.  They flashed towards the empty seat beside Drusilla, then fluttered uneasily back to the road.  Spike was as invisible to the glass as ever.   And sitting alongside her he suddenly felt all the more monstrous for it.  “Three years ago,” Rupert explained,  “I decided to save the world...”

Here we go again. 

It had all started back at the late Doctor Nick’s flat.  No sooner had Dru’s brain buggered off down the rabbit hole when the Watcher started in with his tale; some risible gobshite about universes and accidents and bloody time and bloody space.  At first, Spike was content to just let the poor sot prattle on uncontested.  After all, he was preoccupied with the immediately Pressing Fucking Issue of his suddenly-souled, rigidly catatonic and highly reflective old mum.   But, once he’d finished cinching the old monstress up, when he went to go fetch Faith from the basement, that’s when the bastard went the full hatstand. 

We can’t get Faith, Spike. 

Well, why bloody not?

Well, ‘cuz that’s not part of the bloody plan.

The Bloody Plan!  Best as he could stitch it together, it went like this:

So, apparently, while Spike was off in L.A. playing mail-order Marley to Angel’s Scrooge, Rupert Giles arrived at the stunning conclusion that he and Big Red had rather copiously bollixed up the world.   Seems Willow had neglected to read the fine print on the whole “one girl in all the world” business.  It turned out those old sorcerers had a sodding good reason to queue up the Slayers the way they did.   Fancy that.  Spike could’ve told him that two Slayers was mess enough, nevermind a vast horde of them.

So what did they intend to do about it?  'Nother bleedin’ spell, of course.  After all, that tactic always came up aces!  

And not any old spell, mind you, but The Spell.  The very same those crackerjacks in the cave conjured, all those centuries ago.  The way Giles and Rosey figured, they was gonna start over from scratch, suck all those Awakened little birds drier than nun’s cabbage.  Not just Kennedy and her skank brigade, mind you, but Faith’s Londoners as well, and Xander’s foxtrotters over in Ipswich, and the reservists in Chi-Town, and all of them, and everywhere.  Tabula Rasa.  Rupes meant to pull the plug on the whole bloody works, and then put the power back in Buffy's hands, where it belonged.   Set the world right.  The deranged lunacy of it aside, this last bit had sounded proper enough to Spike. 

And the way the Watcher told it, he was damned close to pulling it off, too.

The puzzle pieces were mostly of the standard variety.  A few musty baubles needed collecting, most of which had been smuggled off to the ends of the Earth for safe keeping.    They also needed the poem itself, of course; the parchment that would serve as Willow’s bloody teleprompter for the Great Sodding Magic Show.  Some things never changed. 

There was something else, though.  A catch.  Turned out they were clever, those cave wankers.   Knew they’d let something very dangerous off the leash; a creature quite a bit closer to Spike’s kind then any old “Watcher” would’ve liked to admit.  Spiritus, Animus, Sophus, Manus.  Bunch of rot, that was.  This Slayer business was no Hippie Granola Momma Earth Sex Magick.  It was a curse; black and unrepentant.  Plagued by devils, those old wizards conjured forth a devil to defend them, and trapped it down in the body of a girl.

But, strong and clever though they were, they couldn’t do it alone.  So they cut a deal, instead. 

With an angel, of all soddin’ things.

An angel, Spike thought.  Now, there was a commodity in short supply these days.

Gatherin’ up the baubles and scrolls and scripts and whatnot - that was all child’s play by contrast.  Can’t just waddle off to the nearest cathedral and pray for one, no, no.  That’d be too fucking easy, after all.  Got to have yourself  a direct line.  Got to have a conduit of sorts, and that didn’t mean doddering old wankers in gowns and funny hats.  People were born with that sort of power.   Joan of Arc was born with that sort of power. But she’d been dead for six hundred years.

Drusilla, on the other hand, hadn’t been dead nearly that long.

Spike spun the thought in his brain as the car rumbled north up Hampstead.  Out the window, the Gardens of St. James whizzed by like a cold and soggy shudder.  He thought of the year he and Dru spent there.  It was only the pair of them back then; snug in a little tomb-for-two, nestled amongst the graves of powdered old barristers.  A big buggering hotel stood there now; the sort of ripe hive that catered to the pied-à-terre crowd.  Not so long ago, they might’ve stopped in for a snack.  But as he stared at the image of his old lover, peering at her reflection in chlildlike wonder, “not so long ago” had never felt so bloody long ago.

Dru.

Rupes was well off his nut, dragging her into this.  But The Plan, such as it was, turned out to be madder and madder still.  Turns out that when it came to the Gift of Celestial Gab, his dark mistress put ol' Joanie to shame.  Once upon a time, angels were ringing Drusilla off the hook.  Only problem was, Angelus and Darla cut that cord well over a century ago, when they murdered her.  What remained – that tortured shard of dire prophecy – it was but an echo of her true powers.  The Vampire Drusilla was like a master’s instrument haunted by the final note plucked.  He wondered if Angelus and Darla ever truly understood the scope of their evil that night, when they turned a Saint.

Saint Dru.  Immaculate Matron of Gory, Dripping Entrails.  Spike imagined whole bookshelves of bibles bursting into flames.

Giles did the homework, though.  Learnt the full score, knew what had to be done.  Lure the harpist back to her harp.  Get her fire going long enough to duplicate the Slayer’s curse.   Then he and Willow could do their little ditty, and rattrap the world all over again.

No, he didn’t ask.  A thing inside him howled and keened like a dog in the rain, but with some effort Spike was able to shut the door against it.  How the Watcher did it – how he souled her – was a matter best left for another time.

If bloody ever, mate.

Plan, plan, plan.  Rupert had stalked Drusilla quietly over the course of a year, finally tracking her to a tomb in Prague.  She’d languished in mourning there, to whatever degree was possible for a devil like her.  Darla was motes of dust.  Angelus was lost to her forever, drowned by the Grand Pufter in a sea of penitent tears.  But it was Spike who struck the deathblow himself, he realized.  William the Bloody was her creation; her child and masterpiece in every way that mattered. To see her greatest work so utterly vandalized by human sentiment was more than she possibly endure.  No, Drusilla did not - could not - love Spike.  But she prized him above all other things.  The despair must have been staggering: two families lost in the course of one lifetime, mad and alone in a world of black visions.

Perhaps, Spike mused, that’s why it hadn’t taken so much convincing.  The arrangement was simple enough; together Rupert, Willow and Dru would wipe the slate clean.  Surely, the opportunity to defang an army of Vampire Slayers was a large deciding factor there.  Drusilla loathed them in a way that even bad, old Darla could not understand.   Still, something whispered to him there was far more to it than that.  Perhaps she thought if she hitched a ride aboard the Soul Train, she might at last be reunited with her two favorite toys.

Anyway, the whole works went reliably arse-end. 

The spark had scalded Drusilla, of course, and sent her jibbering into the wilds.  And if that weren’t enough, the Witch buggered off to New Orleans and got herself swallowed up by a hole in the world.

Yeah, bloody shocking, that, Spike thought.

Rosenberg was the Wile E. Coyote of the Black Arts, always falling off one cliff or another, but with her out of the picture the already-slim odds of pulling off their Mystical Switcharoo dwindled close to nil.  Meanwhile, the Slayer Nation grew ever more fearsome and fractious by the day, and Giles noticed Frank Grange and his soldier boys had begun to sniff around the yard.  It was an odd contest, to be sure; Grange was bent on capturing the crown, while the Watcher was trying his damnedest to shatter it forever.

And that, dear friends, is when our tale begins to go bug-shagging bonkers.

A preface, for the sake of context:  Spike the Vampire liked the telly quite a bit.  Big, big  fan.  He’d watched all sorts over the years: game shows and soaps, sports and murder mysteries, cop-and-robber bits, musicals. There were even a few shows he pretended to himself he didn’t like, but quite sadly did.

One item he’d never been a fan of was ‘Science Fiction.’  It was rubbish.   All them rocket ships and tin ‘bots and ‘puters and bumpy-headed space wankers.  The writing, in particular, was all shamefully bad.  Twas all plot, plot, plot and no bloody heart.   Their stories were too clever by half, and the true world was far stranger and more terrifying than any of those spotty, virginal poofs who wrote them could ever possibly imagine.  But the tale that Rupert Giles had spun out over the past twenty minutes made that least of them seem like a starched and stoic BBC documentarian.

“You’re tellin’ me,” Spike started, stifling a bitter laugh.  “You’re tellin’ me, you chipped yourself?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Giles ruefully agreed.  “If that’s how you insist on putting it.”

“Well, how else would you bloody put it?!”

“It was too risky,” he explained.  “Faith and the others, they would have never understood.  Power like theirs tends to have an addictive quality.  You don’t give it up so easily.”  With that, the Watcher swerved the car onto Mornington Crescent.  The ride’s bald tires squealed their approval, as though sensing a destination was close at hand.  Spike could detect a giddy excitement in the man, pouring off in red waves now.  “I had to conceal my true motives, you see.  Even from myself.  What other choice did I have?  In a world full of bloody witches and psychics and spies...”

“So the, whoositz?” Spike scoffed, “the soddin’ Watcher’s Web.  An’ those Eye blokes-“

“The Watcher-Net program,” he nodded.  “The satellite, the implants.   The whole bloody works.”  He was smirking now, too clever by half.    “I mean, you don’t really think I’d toss away billions on something so utterly daft and useless, do you?”

“Yes!  I do!”   

The Watcher shot him a sly glance.  “It was all rubbish, a smokescreen to mask my true purpose.  I programmed my instructions very carefully, buried them deep at the bottom of my subconscious mind.  Had to remove myself from the equation, you see, convince them all I was out of the game.  Make sure they’d never see it coming.  I’m quite certain that’s something you can relate to, Spike.”

“And the platelet,” Spike fired back.  “And Soldier Boy's little coup d’etat!  You’re tellin’ me you planned the whole sodding package?  An’ that you’ve been, what?  Flyin’ on autopilot all this time, tryin’ to get yourself sacked?”

“More or less.   It was fait accompli, no?  Once Dawn and Grange captured the Council and unplugged the satellite, it would all come rushing back to me, and no one would be the wiser.”

“Balls!  Ain’t buyin’ it.  Too bloody perfect.”

“Hardly," said Rupert.   "Frankly, I’m shocked the enterprise hasn’t gone entirely up in flames.   Ironically enough, you’re about the luckiest stroke to come out of this whole bloody catastrophe.  If it wasn’t for you, I might have never drawn Drusilla out of hiding.”

“Look, you really ‘spect me to believe all this rot?  As I recall, we’re not exactly in the Trust Circle, Rupes!”

“Not really, no,” Rupert agreed.  “Which is precisely why I’m going to show you.” 

They pulled to stop at the end of a residential street.  A drab townhouse loomed like headstone before them.  The Watcher grabbed their gear and practically leapt to the sidewalk.  Spike just sat goggling at him.  “Well, come on, then,” the old wanker yipped.  “We haven’t got all night!”  Against all better judgment, Spike kicked the door open and scooped Drusilla into his arms.   The three of them collected under the glow of a porch lamp.   Drusilla’s body sagged like wet dough in his arms.  He corrected her on reflex, pressing her face up to his neck.  She nuzzled there greedily, a plaintive little sigh escaping her throat.

Madness.

“Look, Watcher, if you’ve got yourself a bird tucked away here, you better fess up now.  Not exactly of a mind to play your wingman, tonight.”

Giles fished the bauble out of his pocket again, face set in stone.  “When Willow departed this plane of reality,” he said, “I had to recruit a suitable replacement to perform the Slayer rite.  And, just as I had to mask my motives with the chip, I required an ally who could similarly operate under the radar, hidden from whatever forces might oppose us.”

“Right.  Well, then you mind tellin’ me what we’re doin’ here?  ‘Fore the bobbies come to bag us up, I mean.”

Giles was waving his key over the doorknob now, as though jiggling some unseen tumbler.  “I suppose you could call it a safehouse of sorts.  Our host has placed a very ancient protection spell over it, immune to almost every known form of magical energy.”

“What, this dump?!”  Spike eyeballed the place skeptically.  Looked like a rooming house for old librarians.  And, considering the present company…

“Don’t judge the book by its cover, Spike,” the Watcher warned, brow knitting as he fought with the lock.   “This ‘dump’ happens to be home to the second most powerful witch I have ever known.   It is practically unassailable by all conventional and metaphysical means, and its whereabouts have been rendered invisible to even the oldest and mightiest of Gods.”

“So you’re sayin’ it’s, like, what?  Buckingham for the Oogy Boogey Set?”

“What I am saying” the Watcher intoned, “is that this house is immune to every form of divination and prophecy known to man or demon.  That its existence is hidden from the very Fates themselves.”   Something clicked down by the man’s hand, and tendrils of mysterious blue light spilled out along the surface of the door, pushing it slowly ajar. “What I am saying, Spike, is that tonight, this dump is the most closely guarded secret in the entire bloody universe.”

The tendrils melted to ether as the door swung wide, revealing a…

Dowdy little parlor.

Two-and-a-half sets of eyes blinked back at them from within.  Their owners were arranged neatly on a leather chesterfield the colour of sunburnt oak.  The Harris boy wielded a dainty teacup, American fingers despairing at the handle whilst a wanker Spike didn’t recognize poured him a fresh spot.  Apart from a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff, the bloke was wholly unremarkable.

The girl, on the other hand, was as remarkable as sodding ever.  Her gaze fluttered from him to the monster cuddling his neck and back again.  The vampire braced himself for the worst, but whatever reaction he'd expected never materialized.  Buffy just kept looking and looking at him, calm as a wick.

Top Secret, my arse.

“Ah,” the Watcher strained, his face turning three shades of crimson.  “That is.   I mean.  Erm…”

For a long time, no one moved a damned muscle.  Somewhere a clock was patiently ticking off every futile second of their lives.

“Well,” Spike said, fucking-finally.  “Someone gonna invite us in or what?”