Chapter 35:  Paving the Road

Well they say the sky's the limit
and to me that's really true,
but my friends you have seen nothin'.
Just wait 'til I get through because…
I’m bad.
I’m bad.
You know it.

- Michael Jackson

***

There were a few cars parked along the sidewalks.  They looked like they might have been sitting there for years, as native as trees to a forest.  Maple Court was as dead as a baked bone, otherwise.  Not a warm body anywhere - not by sight nor sound nor nose.  The pair of them marched through it like the last drop of blood squeezing down a vein; urgent, yet far too slowly.

As they passed the glass front of the Espresso Pump, Spike scanned the café’s innards, jarred by how unused and perfect it all looked.  Amid its gray geometries, he noted an array of spotless knives on the counter, gently set like roses across a sheet of butcher paper.  He stood to watch them twinkle back for a moment, and decided that wherever Fate had shat them out it wasn’t the sodding Hellmouth.

 “So we’re, what, in the planning stages?” asked Harris, that cyclops eyeball of his already scotching the scene like it was full of tigers.  “Because I might want to, you know, get involved at some point.  Jump on the bandwagon.  Muck in.”

The boy was swerving a bit.  Hadn’t quite lost his mettle yet, but he was fidgety and dangling by the fingertips.  “Planning, yeah,” Spike murmured, more to quiet him than anything else.  “Restfield was west of here.”

 “Yes.  Why? Is that where she is?”

He didn’t feel like answering.  Didn’t feel like much of anything now, it seemed, so he plodded on, boot after boot.   Somewhere beside him, Harris kept up the old gormless prattling.  It soothed him in a strange way as they crossed under the signage of the old Sun Cinema, the blades of her false star looking far deadlier than they ever had in the real world.  Towards the end of a row of shops selling transposable flotsam, the matronly angles of the Magic Box fell merrily into view.

Spike popped the lock with a savage twist and then they were inside.  He roved through the merchandise in doglike circles, unsure what he was looking for.   Xander started asking questions again and Spike heard himself giving vague answers, and that was the size of their relationship at this particular moment in time.  Around each corner he saw more evidence of Ethan Rayne’s genius.  Militant columns of grimoires stood shoulder to shoulder along the cheap bookshelves.  In the alcove next to the old rail ladder, pendulous crystalline hoo-ha’s were strung about like Christmas garlands, looking as though Tara’s gentle fingers had touched them only moments before.  The details were as copious and as exacting as they were unsettling.  Everything looked accurate, right down to the bloody atom, yet not one shred of it seemed authentic.

He pinched a black Seeing Stone between his thumb and forefinger, gazed at it thoughtfully and wondered how in the bloody hell Mr. Rayne was doing it.  The pebble was like a picture postcard of itself, something thawed from a frozen bit of nostalgia. He labored to find the right word for what was missing, finally settling on prana.

Twas an old Yogi term that meant a thing’s vital essence, or some such rot, though if you’d asked Spike how he knew about it he could only shrug.  Prana sounded like yet another expression William the Prat had picked up during the course of his brief and pathetic limp through life, though where or how or why he'd learned it were all facts that eluded Spike the Vampire. 

Much of un-death was like that.  You inhabited a stranger’s mind, wore his memories like a pair of used trousers that were rife with mysterious holes and stains and stitches.  And the upshot was that you occasionally found yourself saying and thinking things you did not even remotely understand.  It was a maddening phenomenon.  At any given time, Spike was never sure if he was feeling a real emotion, or if he were simply miming some old pattern scratched into the wood of poor William’s rotten cerebellum.

Spike used to delude himself that this was where the dreams had come from.  That was horrifying at first, dreaming of her in that way, like a betrayal of every truth his long and savage education had bought him.  He’d prayed at the time that it was just the whelp’s haunted old brains again - that those feelings weren’t any more real than Drusilla’s black thrall, or the jolt from the bloody chip.  Love was not a magic spell.  It did not wake the dead nor bring hope to the hopeless.  That was all just the stuff of bad poetry, scribbled into journals by tossers and poofs.  Best case scenario, love was yet another torture toy; a sweet agony to be endured and enjoyed and then, after the kick wore off, unplugged and tossed back in the bottom drawer.

And he would’ve done so, too.  If only she hadn’t kept him in the game, hadn’t kept daring him to linger just a little longer and a little longer.  But she did, and he did, and he jumped and then it was arse-over-tit the whole ride in.  Her storm sent him pitching and yawing between two murky shores, and whether it was William The Prat or The Bloody steering the ship he did not know or care, being split balls to throat in those days and knowing fuck all about fuck all.

 Then, after Africa, he felt that old crack in him slowly close and scar over.   As shagging mad as it drove him, the soul also healed him in ways he once thought impossible.  Before long, it became hard to tell where vampire ended and where wanker began.  The mirror was still empty, yes; but he slowly became less and less of a stranger to himself.

The trousers began to fit. 

The mask became the face.

But that was then.  That was before the fire and the black sun and L.A. and the alley and the sodding deal and the claws.   And now, standing in this faded photograph of Sunny Hell, those old edges had never seemed so real.

Or so sharp, he thought.

Or so bloody sharp…

“Spike?   You’re, uh, scaring your partner.”

The vampire threw the boy a listless shrug, still wrapped up in the stone.  “How’s that?"

“Well, for one thing, when I asked you what we’re doing here you said ‘yeah.’"

“Yeah?”

Xander pointed at him with both hands, as if to say, Exactly.

“Just trying to work it out, is all” Spike muttered.  “And were not bloody partners.  You’re just along for the ride, remember?  Keepin’ yourself fully pulsed while I tend to bits.”

“Well, that’s just great, man.  Awesome.”  Xander began sniffing around on his own, then.  Spike watched him flip idly through an old spellbook, then smash open a glass cabinet and dig out the trinkets.  The gears were spinning there as well, Spike realized.  Despite the vampire’s best efforts, Xander still fancied himself in the game.  He was trying to sort out if there was anything useful to scavenge, some weapon he might use.  Wasn’t likely.  They were both rubbish at magic.  They’d wind up bollixing matters worse than they already were, if that were possible.

Spike drifted towards the window, began to scan the empty scenery.  She was here.  He could feel the Slayer’s presence, padding around in some shadowy corner of the warlock’s diorama.  And despite Buffy’s insistence to the contrary, the girl was her, in all the ways that mattered.  Not some clone or distant cousin, but a branch from the same beloved tree.  And he was meant to be the woodsman, it seemed.  Once more, he felt himself claw down into the black old pits, searching for the Monster.  Knowing he needed to become it, this one last time.

“What’s the other thing?” Spike asked suddenly.

"What?"

“Said I was scarin’ you.”  He turned to question the boy, noticed him shudder again.  “You said ‘for one thing.’  Well, what’s the other thing?”

“You’re kidding, right?”  Spike just glared back, meaning to show him he wasn’t.  Xander’s dark eye beaded at him cautiously, making him look less like a boy by the second.  “It’s your face,” he said.  Chary of each word, like they might bite him.  “Ever since the sign.  When you took that mask off…”

“What about my face?”

“Fangs, man,” he said.  “How come you have your fangs out?”

***

They rode in silence as the car swung south onto Kingston Bypass – also known as Maiden Way, because in England you could never have too many names.  There were five of them now; two in front, two in back, and a mildly singed vampire chained up in the trunk.  Buffy let Giles drive, and let Faith ride shotgun.  She preferred to keep Ethan Rayne company in the back seat, within fist-range.  She recalled the look on the warlock’s face when he stood over the howling face of the Now, remembering how dangerously close it was to glee.  Now, he slept, or pretended to.  Faith remained blissfully ignorant, for her part.   She’d asked Giles a few questions and swallowed his lies.  This made a kind of sense.  Rupert Giles become quite the Master Liar over the years.  He’d gone pro.

As the glum suburban patchwork of central Chessington whizzed past, she started thinking about her friends on the Other Side, and something tugged hard in the pit of her stomach.  Every since they’d left Lorry Street, Buffy couldn’t shake the feeling that they were close to the end of this strange tale, and with it came a gnawing suspicion that she’d never see any of them again.  It was probably a dumb thing to worry about, given the stakes.  But part of her knew: it just wouldn’t feel like an Apocalypse without them.  

“What’s that, Bee?”

Realizing she said that last part out loud, she snapped herself out of it.  “Nothing.  Just, got a song stuck in my head.”

“A song?”

“Rap.   It was a rapping, uh, song.”

“Uh huh,” Faith drawled.  “Ya know, gotta hand it to you two.  Even when you’re lying your asses off, you find a way to let your freak flags fly.”  Buffy exchanged a wary glance with Giles in the rear-view.  Even Rayne permitted himself a peek, his lidded eye full of glittering alarm.   “I mean, I’m cool,” the brunette continued.  “Whatever, yo.  It’s not like you can hide it for long.  Frankie’s got me on the starting lineup these days.  Y’all are just warming the bench.”

“I think we’ve heard quite enough about Frank Bloody Grange,” Giles said.    “And as for liars, Faith, why do stones and glass houses suddenly spring to mind?”

Faith laughed.  “Hey, I’m not the one with the Queen of the Damned locked up in the trunk.  Can’t wait to hear the ‘reasonable explanation’ for...”

She would never finish the sentence. 

The scenery outside the car had faded to suburban golf greens a few minutes back, which meant the Council HQ should’ve been nearby.  But the pair seemed hypnotized by a sight on the road ahead.  Buffy wriggled up between them for a peek.

A few miles up the road, in the place where the headquarters should’ve been, something had bitten out a chunk of the world.

Just like in Rayne’s basement, the shape seemed to have no color at all, all light vanishing into a hue so utterly black that it seemed paper-flat compared to the trees and the grass and the sky along it’s edges.  It was as if someone spilled a jar of ink onto the canvas of the universe.

“Giles?”

“I know.” 

He eased the car onto the shoulder.  They got out, Buffy hauling Ethan by the scruff of the neck.  The old warlock tried to stifle a grin, but the Slayer caught it, and let him know she caught it.  The four of them stood staring at the black dome for a long time, no one daring to speak.

“Well, fuck me with a spoon,” Faith muttered.

And that just about summed it up.

***

There was a hiss and a grinding of gears and then the secret passage slid open, Violet’s head poking out into a circle of white light.  “Dawn!  Thank God...”

Dawn Summers dispensed with the pleasantries.  The Commons was filled with the screams of the wounded and a cacophony of shouted, unintelligible commands. Dawn elbowed her way through the scrum and headed straight for the Emergency Command center, dragging a tail of panicked Chosen Ones and their not-quite-so-Chosen-y Agency allies in her wake.  As she went, she glimpsed an ominous sight; through the building’s glass front, she saw one of Kennedy’s lieutenants leading a platoon of large gray demons in their direction.  The eyes of the monsters were horrible in the morning’s red glare, full of blank, pitiless hatred.

When the reached the command center, a smattering of Slayers were standing guard there, looking weirdly young and fragile despite their gleaming arsenal.  There didn’t seem to be anyone in charge, anywhere.  Even the reliable Vi Singer seemed a little out-of-it, her eyes moon round and distant when she ordered the squad to go help barricade the Commons, coming off more like a half-hearted suggestion than a command.

Dawn waived off the techies and manned the main console.  With the doors closed, the soundtrack of the battle raging outside filtered weirdly into her ears, like something happening underwater.  For one crazy second, she considered rushing back to join them, and maybe swashbuckling her way to some kind of glorious, Buffy-esque death scene, but she knew she had bigger, more important fish to fry.  So, she went to work, her fingers dancing across the keys like a concert pianist as she navigated the maze of passwords and firewalls.  The giant monitor pulsed back at her, tattooing the room with strange symbols sketched in green and orange light.  An old ghost whispered to her.

‘The woman you’ll become…’

‘And she’ll be beautiful.  And powerful.”

Vi leaned over her shoulder, looking anxious. “What are you doing?”

“Locking up,” said Dawn, fingers still fluttering.

"Kinda think we have bigger problems right now."

"It's what they're coming for, Vi.   The Council Archives, the Agency records.  Information is power..."

"Dawn, I just don't think–"

“Listen to me."  Dawn stopped typing long enough to give Violet a certain, practiced look, one that said This isn't a request.  "You need to get on the com and issue a evacuation order, code-delta.  Get as many as you can onto the underground rails and then get out of here.  We'll rendezvous in Ipswich.”

“And give up HQ?  To Kenny's psychos?  You know what kind of dangerous stuff we have in here?”

Dawn hammered her way through the final security checkpoint, sighing hard when Rupert's lame-o Red Falcon logo finally blinked onto the screen.  “Twenty minutes.  As many as you can get.”

Violet gave her a long, sullen look, perhaps remembering there wasn’t much more point in arguing with a Summers girl when her mind was set.  “And what about you?”

“Gonna finish up here,” she said, “and then I’m going back for Frank.”

***

It was beautiful.

The sun was cresting along the western fringe of the Forbidden Forest, sending slender fingers of twilight radiance out over the grandstands.  The crowd there sent up a roar of approval as Andrew guided his broomstick out to the center of the pitch.  Across the long green turf and sky, the Ravenclaw team went white with dread at the sight of him gliding triumphantly into the Seeker’s position.

“Andrew!”  Spike barked.  “Thank heavens you are here!”

“We thought that Furnunculus spell had you down for the count, man!” Xander exclaimed.

Buffy zoomed over to meet them.  The golden haired beauty was beaming, the happiest Andrew Potter had ever seen her.  “Look guys, it’s not important how Andrew got here.  As long as he’s here.”  She shot him a soft yet inquiring eye.  “And as long as we can win.”

“Oh, we can win,” Andrew assured them.  “Isn’t that right… Willow!”

The crowd sent up another cheer as the redheaded wizard soared into the Keeper’s zone, waiving and smiling in that gentle way of hers.  Andrew chuckled to himself as she did a lazy loop-de-loop though one of the goals.  Willow was a show-off, for sure.  But she always had the goods when it counted.

The referee’s whistle pierced the air like a dragon’s scream.  Andrew was just about to sail in for a classic Porskoff Ploy when he suddenly heard something very strange.  It was a girl’s voice.  It sounded like it was coming from inside his ear.

"Come in."

"Come in, Andrew..."

"ANDREW!"

He awoke down on the dingy floor of the prison deck.  The generators were still gasping out their strange song, and they were joined now by something much worse.  An unearthly moan echoed through the maze of steel bulkheads.  It was like the sound of some big, wounded animal that no cryptozoologist had ever dared to name.  A girl’s voice was shouting into the headset, too, and the three entwined noises were suddenly terrifying to him.  He groped at his scalp instinctively, the fingers trembling as they probed for damage there.  “Dawn?  Is that you?”

“Andrew!  Where are you?”

He wobbled to his feet, gave his surroundings a wary once-over.  “I - I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” 

“I’m in the ECU,” he said.  “They’re gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

He wheeled around.  “Everybody.”

“Andrew, listen to me.  We’re under attack.”

“Attack.”  He found some bloody fuzz on his head and stared at it, trying to understand what it meant.  “It’s my fault.”

“What?  Andrew, it’s Kennedy.  Look, you can’t come up.  She’s got people everywhere.”

“People.”  Nothing sounded right.  The words were all strange and slippery, like handfuls of hair.  “Can’t go up,” he heard himself whisper.

“You need to get to the Light Rail hub as soon as you can.  Find Violet’s team and get out of here.”

“The whuh?”  He started walking through the darkness, his senses returning bit by bit.  “I, uh, don’t know where that is.  I don’t know how.”

“It’s okay.  I’ve reactiv… the Watch.. Net."  The voice was fuzzy.  Washing out.  "Just, foll.. the… on y…r GPS.  You ha… to hurr...”

“My fault,” he confessed.

“Andr-“

The headset died completely, leaving only the hot electric hum and the ghastly wail. 

Then, a single voice emerged from the chorus.  It was almost mournful, not so much frightening as it was sad and lost. 

And familiar.

“Owwwwww,” it groaned.  “Duuuude ohhhhhhh… ”

Andrew jogged the last fifty yards or so, weaving through columns of red and black.  When he found Melvin, the monster was piled in a corner like a mound of rotten fruit, making it hard to tell where he began or ended.  There was no sign of the other creature - the demon who pretended to be his friends.

As Andrew crept in for a closer look, a knot of heads bayed and snapped at the air. The creature was rambling feverishly.  The voice seemed much smaller now, and was shaking with panic.  It was somehow more unsettling than ever. 

“Help,” Melvin cried.  “Please…  help… Subsidium… dolor est mortificati…  With motherfucking bows on it!”

“It's okay”  Andrew said.  "I'm here."

“Somebody help.   Or, help somebody.   We all fell… No, I don’t know how!”  An eye like a big red beach ball popped out of Melvin's side, and scanned up and down nervously.  “Oh… You’re here… Oh thank Lucifer…  Or the other one…  Thank someone…” 

Melvin convulsed in agony, his vast bulk shuddering like pond water.  Andrew suddenly realized just how big the demon really was.  Its bloated carcass seemed to cover up half of the wall, a king-sized heap of horror from a land of shadows.  Melvin Peterson was both the One and the Many at the same time; a stew of tortured monsters, all glued together by an old and terrible willpower.  

And you pulled it through, Andrew thought.  He knelt near a pair of big, scabby lips, letting the gusts of hot breath sting his skin.  “What happened?” he asked.

“Ohhhhhhhh…. She looked okay,” Melvin whined.   The red eye rolled up at the Summoner, leaking a milky substance that might’ve been tears.   “Didn’t smell funny or nothin’…  Tasted fine…  How could I know?  Tasted like chicken.”

Andrew thought and thought about this, trying to make sense of it.  “Uh.  You mean… you ate her?”

The monster bellowed again as another invisible bolt tore though him.  A long tentacle curled around Andrew’s leg and trembled there for a minute, waiting for the tremor to pass.  “How could I know?” Melvin asked again, sounding weirdly sincere.  “We all fell…  It was a long time ago.  Y’all weren’t even around back then.  No monkeys, even.”

“I’m sorry,” Andrew whimpered.  “I don’t know know how to help you.  You’re not making any sense”

“She wanted you baaaaaaad, duuuuuuuuude,” Melvin gurgled.  “You musta done something, I guess.  Musta messed up pretty huge, huh?”

That’s when it dawned on him.  When several things dawned on him, actually, all of them making sense at once, just like at the end of Episode #408, Future Imperfect, when Riker was out on the ridge, having just escaped from the Romulan interrogation facility and…  

And, never mind, loserface.

Polly had called the creature the “Fury.”  He’d never met the thing before, but it still knew Andrew, better than anyone else in the world.  It had lived inside Andrew’s heart for years, rummaging through him like a bag of old laundry.  And now, it lived inside Melvin – literally lived inside him, twisting through the Hell demon’s rotten old guts like a bad burrito.

Andrew reached up to touch his head again, not wincing this time.  “Yeah,” he said.  “I killed somebody.”

For a long time, Melvin just laid there, sobbing and breathing kinda funny.  Finally, he lifted one of his creepiest heads up off the ground, the one that was almost human except for the snowman’s coal-black eyes.  It regarded Andrew with a mixture of misery and disbelief.

“And?” it asked.

“And what?”

“I mean, that’s all?  You killed somebody?’” 

“Yeah,” Andrew shrugged.  “Or, maybe two.  You know.  Technically.”

“Oh,” said Melvin.  “Well, I guess I’m in deep shit, then.”

***

Blah.  Blah.  Boring.  Blah.

Anya kept on swinging the sword, and the imps kept coming, jogging out of the shadows on their chubby little toes.   They almost seemed to enjoy their deaths, smiling ear to gross, warty ear as she chopped them into sushi. 

She didn’t mind it at first either.  Despite TV campaigns and popular slogans to the contrary, violence was actually a whole lot of fun.   There was something wonderful about squeezing the last breath out of something, and watching the light go out of the eyes as it abandons all hope.   Still: a little of that went a long way, and it wasn’t even like Rupert’s latest Secret Weapon-y Attack Squad was putting up much of a fight.  

So, she kept going, mechanically hacking her way down the corridor.  She was about halfway to the turn when she heard the girl’s voice.  It tickled a spot behind her nose in the usual, irritating way.

Anya, can you hear me?

“Well, duh,” she said, and skewered another gibbering goon through the throat.   “Like I always say, it’s the not-hearing-you part that’s hard.”

I’ve got a fix on the Slayer, Tara continued.  We’re on our way now.

“We who?”

It’s… It’s complicated.

“That’s nice.  Just a sec.”  A big, fat, furry freak was wobbling out of the darkness, now, reeking like old onions.  They embraced for some hot demon-on-demon action, bouncing along the walls.

All that flab turned out to be hiding a mass of surprisingly hard and rubbery muscle, and as she tried to twist her sword arm free the mutant slammed her against the rib of an old black archway, its fangs dragging across a cheek in between hot, sickening breaths.  Anya felt her fingers scramble down the loser’s matted beer-belly until they found a hunk of something soft.   She squeezed.  

The beastie made a long and sad sound, like a beautiful sonata.  Anya paused to listen for a few beats, and then drove two feet of cold steel into its eardrum.

“Okay!  That’s better.  You we’re saying?”

We need to get this over with, said the Witch.  We’ve already given Giles too many chances as it is.

“Hey, no prob.  Shoot me a few breadcrumbs, Gretyl, and I’ll teleport right on over.”

She stopped for a breather, waiting for Tara sink her mystical fishhooks in.  While she waited, Anya thought about how good it was to have Willow back in the driver’s seat.  Sure, Tara was okay and all.  Ever since Buffy killed her bosom buddy, she'd slowly but surely gotten with the program.  Like Anya always said, there was nothing like a little revenge fantasy to get your motor running. 

But Willow Rosenberg?  She was always the real deal, straight down to the bone.  That was important, the whole being-straight-to-the-bony.   You had to be a natural, in times like these, and learn to never second-guess yourself.  This was easy for creatures like Anya and Harmony.  They were natives to the territory.  But mankind?  Not so much. 

It was always that way with humans.  Very few of them are actually born for it.  Poor Xander certainly wasn’t.  It was always a struggle with him, right up until the bitter end.  Even Spike, the Slayer of Slayers, was a headcase most of the time.  A demon with a crisis of conscience was almost an oxymoron.   But Anya understood.   When you swim in the homo sapien soup long enough, things tended get a little bit blurry.  There were always a few like Xander and Spike wandering though the ranks, bellyaching and dragging their feet and fretting about the Meaning Of It All.

And sometimes, you even loved them for it.   You loved them, even though you knew that, in the end, they'd have to pick a side and stick with it.  And you knew that when they did, they'd lose a big piece of what you loved about them in the first place. 

But it was different with Willow.   She was all fish-to-water and bird-to-air about it.  Anya figured you could go back over a thousand years and not find a better contender.   All that one ever needed was a teeny little tug.  

And a tiny little taste.

That was the main thing about Evil, Anya thought, as she felt the strands of Tara’s locater spell finally lasso around her.  You could talk the talk and walk the walk, but at the end of the day you really had to like the taste of it.

***

The antechamber opened into a large onyx temple.  The same strange glyphs and sigils covered the walls inside, emanating a kind of power Willow hadn’t felt since the old days.  They were wards, she realized, probably set in place to slow her down.  The Watcher sat in a cheap folding chair in the center of the sanctum, humming to himself and casually flipping through a book.

Not a spell book.   Like, a paperback.

She stood her ground for a few seconds, trying to decide whether or not to make the first move.   The two of them had played this game once before, of course.  That was years ago, in her world.  She’d made the first move back then - a pretty good one, too, from what she could remember.  The memory was a little fuzzy, what with the raging evilness and all, but she definitely had gone all Pat Benetar on the guy.  Hit him with her best shot.

And the bastard still beat you, she thought.  Beat the pants off you...

“He who hesitates is lost.”  The Watcher’s voice rang out like a clarion, hollow and huge.  “Or she, I suppose.  In this case.”

She glided towards him in a shallow arc, paying close attention as he casually licked his thumb and turned another page.  A dozen yards behind him she glimpsed the mouth of a stone stairwell and felt something prickle inside her.  She knew there were no more secret paths to discover or doors left to open.  "Skaya" was down there.  And Xander, and Spike too.   And the only thing that stood between Willow and them was as cool as a cucumber, thumbing through the pages of some cheesy Dan Brown novel.  He hadn’t bothered to so much as glance at her yet, and seemed filled with an unnerving calm.   It was super annoying.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well what?”

She clenched her fists.  “Aren’t we going to… you know?”

He smiled up at her, blue eyes glittering.   Uncrossed his legs.  “Fight, you mean?  Oh dear heavens, no.  I’m getting far too old for that.”

Willow grit her teeth, sickened by this final lie.  “Maybe I’ll kill you anyway," she said.  "Whether you fight back or not, I’m putting an end to this war.  Tonight.”

The Watcher laughed at her.  “Ah, is that why you’ve come?  To save the world?  Last I checked, that’s not your department.  In point of bloody fact, it happens to be ours.”

“Who? You and Ethan?”

“Me and Buffy.”  As he said it, an air of quiet bemusement escaped him.  And the tiniest smile. 

Fucker.   “Is that a joke?”

“Is it?”  He was studying her eyes, now, filled with grim curiosity.  She allowed for the possibility that he had somehow figured it out, realizing that this Willow wasn’t exactly who she appeared to be.  “I seem to remember something about a calling,” he continued.  “One girl in all the world, it went.  And I don’t seem to remember that being about you, my dear.”

“People change.”

“People do not change,” he scolded.  “Hairstyles change.  Governments change.  But people stay exactly who they are until the day they die.  Like you, Willow.”

She made a conscious decision to let the bastard talk, let him think whatever he wanted.  She kept moving, circling like a boxer towards the stairs.

“No,” he said.  “You’re the same sad, twisted little dilettante you always were.  Self-indulgent and self-righteous and weak.”

The stairwell was close.  Willow could’ve just kept walking.  It would’ve been a cinch.  It would’ve been easy-peesy.   But she just couldn’t let it go.   “I’m strong enough to kill you, Giles.”

“Oh, yes, I’m quite sure you are,” he agreed.  “After all, what’s one more corpse?  Fuel for the solstice bonfire, I suppose...”

“I didn’t start this war,” she spat.

“No, of course not,” sang the Watcher.  “You’re the hero.  Willow the hero!   That has a lovely ring to it, don’t you think?”

Something began to vibrate down in her breast.  She was shaking her head, trying to get rid of something inside it.  “I... I read the records.”

“You saw what you wanted to see.  You always have.”

“I did what was necessary…”

“You made a choice!” he corrected.  The look in his eyes was familiar, suddenly.  She thought back to that night in the Magic Box, where the two of them had once debated the subject of power through bloodied lips.  She remembered a moment, during those last days in Sunnydale.  It was Kennedy who’d asked her.

How’s it taste?

How does evil taste?

A horrifying idea occurred, the weight of it staggering her.

“It’s who you are, Willow,” said Giles.   “We both know that.  There’s no reason to hide it anymore, least of all from me.”

She felt the gravity slide out of her body.  The dark blood leapt up in her veins once more, clawing at a soft wall of skin.  “You’re wrong.  You’re...”

“It must’ve felt so wonderful.  After all those years…”

“Shut up.”

“…living in her shadow, the shrinking, bloody violet…”

“Shut!  Up!”

“…and then, so much power!  But it wasn’t enough.   It could never, ever be enough.  Not for a clever girl like you.”

“Like you’re so fucking innocent!”  She was shaking all over now, the blood racing like snakes behind her jet black eyes.  “Last time I checked, you’re the only one here who murdered somebody tonight, Rupert.“

“Murder?  Harmony?”  He rose from the chair.  He was still calm, but something about him seemed to be ticking now.  “Harmony the vampire?  Oh no, my dear.  I merely destroyed her.  You see, in my business we reserve words like ‘murder’ for real people.”

“And Xander?  Did you and Buffy destroy him too?”

“Xander chose the wrong side,” he said.  “The side of evil.  Your side, to be precise.”

“So who are the good guys, Giles?  Your side?  The side of bigots and traitors?”

 “The side that was intent on stopping you.”  He took off his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket.  His eyes gleamed like two dagger points.   He had that look about him that seemed almost genetic with Willow's friends.  Giles was ready to die, to sacrifice himself.

The bad guys... 

They never had that look. 

“You see, Willow, people like Buffy – people like me – we were put on Earth to stop monsters like you.”

She cried.  She screamed.

It started so slowly, the seconds passing like days.

She watched the bolts of dark mana steam out from her fingertips, every one of them a sure kill.  The Watcher stood his ground, smiling ferociously as the streams fizzled and died across his chest.  He flung out his hand, and she felt huge, invisible fingers close around her waist.  She was still trying to scream “Libero” when the ghost hand plucked her up and sent her smashing headfirst into a column of stone. The force of it sent shockwaves up through the temple’s spine, and loose stones showered down all around her.  

Giles was talking, already weaving his next attack.  Willow clambered to her hands and knees in time to unleash a second blast of energy, this one roaring out of her mouth like an anthem. 

And Rupert Giles strolled right through it.   Like it was a warm and lovely ocean breeze. 

“What’s the matter, little girl?” he asked.   “Whatever could have happened to all that strength?”