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English
Series:
Part 2 of All Things Proceed from Passion
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Focus on Female Characters, Friends to Lovers
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Published:
2014-03-21
Completed:
2014-06-27
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308,480
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19/19
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54
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Who Do You Think You Are?

Summary:

The Follow up to Lady's Choice.
The hardest thing about choices is to live with them.... Even unto the third and fourth generation.

Notes:

To porkwithbones, because of a conversation at McDonald's.

“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

Book Two picks up within minutes after the end of Book One: Lady's Choice. It is broken into Three Parts. Part I: "Motherless Child" (Chapters 1-5), Part II: "The Lesser Light" (Chapters 6-12) Part III: "Where the Heart Is" (Chapters 13-19)

For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Shift

Summary:

As Buffy and Giles wake up to the reality of their new life together, other Sunnydale couples are struggling with their own weird and tricky problems while Spike copes with Drusilla's death by plotting revenge against Buffy. Meanwhile Joyce begins to realize what it means to be the mother of the Slayer... and a few other things, not that she is the only ancestor having problems with the new reality.

Notes:

Part I: Motherless Child

Chapter Text

Sunnydale, CA. March 7, 1998

 

“Drusilla!” Spike called cheerfully, grinning from ear to ear, “Honey, I’m home!” The sanctuary was empty. “I’ve got a surprise for you!” he all but sang, careening through the door to her makeshift quarters, casually dragging his chain of a dozen weeping bedraggled girls behind him. At the other end of the chain, Edwards had to move smartly to stay on his feet.

Her room was empty. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. It dented Spike’s good mood, but only just. So she was with Angel. Angel was a withered husk. Spike was a conquering hero. They strolled into the cloakroom that Angel had been sharing with Zanya ever since Edwards had moved down to the pump station. Both vampires stood shoulder to shoulder now, dragging their loop of captives. Zanya’s hollow eye stared through them out of her melted face for a moment then focused on Edwards. She said something grave and incomprehensible before looking back down at the charred remains that shivered on the pile of cushions next to her.

“Where is Drusilla?” Spike asked with a sort of tense, forced cheerfulness. Zanya gave him a sad, worried look. Then turned her eye to Edwards again, speaking briefly but urgently.

Edwards looked at Spike worriedly. “Speak English, Sweetheart,” he admonished Zanya gently. “We can’t understand you.”

With a loud, inarticulate human cry of rage and frustration, Spike dropped the end of the chain and advanced on Zanya. “Where! Is! Drusilla!?!” he shouted, his features still eerily undemonic, contorted with desperate, angry fear. Zanya stared at him: calm, still, silent.

Dropping his own end of the chain, Edwards rushed between them. Roaring, vamping out at last, Spike struck Edwards a fierce blow to the face that would have swatted a human like a fly. Edwards staggered, but kept to his feet, blocking the immediate follow on blows. Less than one hundred percent of the chained captives decided to run for their lives. Ignoring the screaming chaos of old steel and young flesh that imploded in spasmodic, futile motion behind him, Edwards tried at once to get in a jab to the throat and a word of reason. Neither landed. Spike’s next blow knocked him to the ground. The tangle of shackled virgins engulfed him.

“Now,” said Spike, relatively cool and menacing, rounding on the still oddly serene Zanya, “I’m going to ask one more time and then I’m going to get angry. Where is Drusilla?” Zanya looked significantly at the ceiling. Edwards bit and clawed his way free in time to see Spike heading briskly for the tunnel to the school basement. Hesitating only a moment, he secured the girls’ chain to an iron ring on the wall and went after him.

No attempt had been made to re-cover the tunnel entrance on the basement side. The door at the top of the stairs stood wide open, leading into the main hallway. Spike went up. He knew that something was terribly wrong the way old people know the weather is changing without knowing how they know. He had a lot of experience with terrible wrongness. He sniffed the air for Drusilla’s sent and followed it up another flight to an open door festooned with yellow tape and stinking of blood. The site of yesterday’s shooting. Inside the room, the smell of blood was laced with a certain mixture of dust and ash that every vampire of any real age came to know too well.

Even among the scents of a hundred or more human’s, the smell of the Slayer was unmistakable. ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum.’ Spike laughed madly. He screamed. He howled. He snarled. He wept. He raged through the room throwing and smashing furniture. The world was turning inside out. It wasn’t his beanstalk any more.

 ***

“So what does this mean?” Xander whispered into the phone, “Are we cool? Are we in charge now?”

Cordelia laughed. “Not quite. We’re... eligible to compete for cool. We’re available to be invited to places and events where it is possible to become cool.”

“So who’s in charge?”

“Nobody... yet,” Cordelia explained. “Harmony’s disgraced herself and Tiffany’s failed to capitalize. No surprise there. She never really had it in her and most of her hangers on just wish they were cool. So there’s a ... diffusion of power. Multiple centers of cool. There’s cheerleaders, which I am. There’s rich kids, which I am. There’s brave, interesting people, which you are. There’s good-looking, well dressed people, which we both were tonight. And then there’s athletes and musicians and maybe a couple of other things, which we’re not, but all in all, we’re pretty well positioned. All we need is to make the rights moves and to have a little luck. You were amazing tonight, by the way,” she added.

“No you were amazing!” Xander shout-whispered.

“No you’re amazing,” Cordelia giggled.

“No, you,” Xander repeated, “everyone loved you.”

“No... Well, okay I am amazing,” Cordelia acknowledged, “but you... you’re getting there fast. Even I was impressed.”

Xander sat up a little straighter in bed, adjusting the phone to a more comfortable position against his ear. “To be honest though, I still don’t exactly get what happened.”

“Okay, so in my old life, my reputation was built on being a bigger bitch than anyone, people were in fear and awe of me.”

“Yeah,” said Xander, “I remember.”

“Nobody had to like me,” Cordelia went on, “what mattered was if I liked them.” She sighed. “Then you came along and ruined everything,” she explained with a sort of affectionate resignation.

“I did what now?” Xander asked, not sure if he was supposed to feel offended.

“Coldhearted bitches don’t fall in love,” Cordelia said matter-of-factly, “at least not unless it’s clearly in their best interests. You showed them my weakness.”

“And the rest of the pack devoured you,” Xander concluded.

“Exactly,” Cordelia acknowledged. “So I’m not queen bitch any more, you never get that back. What does that leave?”

“Worker bitch?”

“That’s Harmony,” Cordelia laughed. “No, reformed ex-bitch. I had no clue what a good idea that was when I was having it. People love a good redemption story.” Cordelia took a deep breath before plunging in to the next thing she had to explain. There was no avoiding it. She had defeated and humiliated Harmony. She had to be prepared for retaliation. “Besides,” she said, “it partly defuses... gossip older than a certain date.”

Xander was confused. “I’m confused,” he said. “What gossip?”

“I wanted it to be Kevin,” she said. “If it had to be anybody, I wanted it to be Kevin. But the math kept adding up to Mitch, who I dumped—for another guy, a week before Spring Fling, after he got beaten half to death because of me—because I didn’t love him.”

“What are you talking about?” Xander asked. “What was Harmony doing with Mitch anyway?”

Cordelia sighed. Xander was many good things and some smart things, including witty and very occasionally insightful, but he was not too quick at adding up facts and insinuation to their logical conclusions. “He was a prop,” she explained, “a reminder. A threat.” Cordelia laughed mirthlessly, “‘I know what you did last summer.’ That’s why he got so pissed when he figured out what they were there for.”

“You hit a crazy pirate guy with your car?”

“No, Xander,” Cordelia said, resenting his obtusity to the fact that she wasn’t in a joking mood. “Mitch got me pregnant last year. I had an abortion.”

“Oh,” said Xander. He didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t having thoughts and his feelings didn’t have neat labels. They mostly added up to wanting to make Cordelia’s previous statement be not true, possibly by beating the crap out of Mitch McNaughton.

“In a way I guess it was easier,” Cordelia went on nervously, speaking to fill his silence. “That it was Mitch I mean. I loved Kevin so much, I think that would have been harder. Especially with... the way he died.”

“Goddamn vampires!” Xander said, seizing on something he knew how to feel about. “I wish they could feel what it’s like to be human and have to get your heart ripped out all the time.”

*** 

Edwards stood in the hallway, waiting for rage to burn itself out. When the sound of smashing wood and crashing metal had been replaced a good five minutes with nothing but broken sobs of anguish, he ventured hesitantly across the threshold. He’d have thought his very presence would have shamed Spike into pulling himself together and getting back up on his feet. But the ‘General’ of the subterranean army continued, to the disgrace of all vampires and Englishmen, to lie face down weeping and banging his bloodied fists on the debris strewn floor.

“Get up,” the older vampire said at last, his tone entirely flat.

Spike rose to his hands and knees and looked up at him. “She’s gone,” he said, not only with anguish, but with the frustrated urgency of one imparting vital information to one too blind to see it. “Drusilla is no more!” It was the most important fact in the history of the world. But only to Spike.

Edwards grabbed Spike by the lapels of his long black coat and pulled him to his feet. “For Satan’s sake, stop sniveling!” he chided, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“I don’t care!” Spike wailed. His voice died down to a hollow whisper, “God, I don’t care,” he rasped.

Edwards’ next impulse was to slap the boy, or perhaps to beat him senseless. He refrained. Despite his current state, Spike had it in him to be a leader in ways that Edwards did not; to rally, to inspire, to organize, to plan, to bulldoze over opposition. And there was no doubt that a leader was needed. The army had to be held together, to keep the Slayer off their backs for the three weeks it would take to complete the ritual and get Zanya in a fit state to leave town. The last thing he wanted to do was to tip Spike over the next breaking point from busted up to obliterated.“Revenge,” he said with conviction, “is the ultimate act of love.”

“I don’t want love,” Spike whispered bitterly, turning half away, hiding his face in his hands, showing a little shame at last. “I want Drusilla. I’m nothing without her. I never was. I never will be.”

“And I thought I was a sentimental fool,” Edwards laughed.

“Humph,” Spike snorted, “You are,” he pointed out. “You’re as big a sap as I am or you wouldn’t be bothering about me at all. The Slayer doesn’t know you from Adam. The only reason you’re still here is to get your girl patched up.”

“Well my father gave eight pounds for her in 1697,” Edwards explained facetiously, laughing more at himself than Spike now, “I reckon it’ll take me at least another year or two to be sure we’ve gotten our money’s worth.”

A ghost of a smile passed over Spike’s features. “Your father’s was she?”

Edwards grinned, “To the day we killed him. We were humans then, so it was a bit traumatic. And there’s another investment I have to make worth my while I guess.”

Spike shrugged. “I never thought parents were much of a loss,” he said, his tone a little harsher than what his indifferent expression tried to project. Edwards was relieved to see that he was pulling it together enough to try to project anything, but he sensed he was getting too near a sensitive subject. Frankly, he was feeling a little exposed himself.

“Demons don’t mourn,” Edwards said firmly. “Grief is for humans. They’re made for it. Let’s give it to them.”

 ***

Willow pushed the buttons again, listening to Oz’s message for the tenth time at least. “Hey, Willow?” his voice wavered just a little from its usual causal monotone, but it was enough. “Just... wanting to talk to you. Call me when you get a chance. Just... let me know what’s up with you, okay?” He all but repeated himself, three variations on the same theme. Twenty words to say what could have been said in two, not wanting to hang up, not wanting that thin sliver of almost contact to be broken. He was worried. He was upset. He had reason to be, even if he didn’t know it.

Willow buried her face in her hands, but since she was in there with it, it didn’t do her a lot of good. At least Amy had gone home after the dance. She’d had enough Willard for one day Willow guessed. She could always come around snapping her fingers again whenever she wanted more.

And what about Oz? Willow missed him terribly. She longed to be enfolded in his arms, to be told that everything would be alright from now on. More realistically, she could have hoped to lean on his bed and hold his hand, to be told that everything would probably be alright for a little while, but she didn’t know if she could bring herself to go and see him when the hospital opened for visitors. She was too ashamed to face him, too afraid he would know.

She played the message again, listening for every single, subtle sign of distress, torturing herself. She deserved to be tortured. She deserved to suffer. She was weak. She was filthy. She was nothing, a mere extension of Amy’s desire. A desire with desires of its own. A hollow vessel of lust and regret. She played the message again. Again. Again.

 ***

“You have reached Joyce—” “—and Buffy—” “—Please leave a mess—”

“Damn it!” Joyce swore, slamming the receiver back into its cradle. It was nearly two a.m. She’d called ten times in six hours. By definition, something had to be wrong. Either Buffy couldn’t be home, or she had chosen not to be. Did the fact that she was fighting a secret war for the benefit of all mankind somehow make a third category, or did it fit into the first one? The second?

Filled with dread and resentment, Joyce wondered for at least the tenth time how she could have failed to get a phone number for Rupert Giles before leaving Sunnydale. Of course he was unlisted. Once again she resisted the urge to call Buffy’s friends. None of their parents could be trusted with the information that Buffy was in violation of her terms of release. It would only make things worse as it had done before....

Joyce had an odd sense of vertigo as the facts relating to the Pacific Coast Motor Lodge shifted and realigned themselves in her mind. Angel had not been there with her daughter. It was Buffy who had thrashed him back in Sunnydale hours earlier. Which meant she had been driven to the motel on the other side of the county by? Rupert Giles. But why? To avoid arrest? Was that the real reason? The only reason? If so, it was a panic move. He hadn’t seemed like a man prone to panic. If not...

Yesterday (going on the day before) when she had been buried in fifty-thousand metric tons of new information about her daughter, Joyce had felt almost as much relieved as overwhelmed. She’d felt certain that when she finished sifting everything would be explained. Everything would be justified. But now she was forced to admit that there was no real reason why a world filled with demons would preclude a seventeen-year-old girl merely misbehaving. Or a forty-something-year-old man for that matter. She’d have liked to say Buffy had better sense, but that would mean steeply discounting the fact that she found it acceptable to not only have sex with a demonic undead monster but to bear its offspring....

Suddenly, other facts started realigning in Joyce’s mind. A dozen red roses left by the kitchen door for her authentically heartbroken daughter on Valentine’s Night. The weeks of moping that had led up to that moment. The anguish and dread in her eyes as she read the single word, ‘soon.’ If Buffy and Angel’s ‘break up’ had been a hard break between the natural and the supernatural, not the back and forth tug of a normal human relationship drawing to an end, it was hard to see how the time-line could really work out. ‘What did you do for your birthday?’ ‘I got older.’ That was hell and gone from the morning after. A morning after needs a night before. Apparently, Buffy had spent not only most of the night of her arrest but at least some part of the previous night alone with none other than Rupert Giles. Comforting him in his grief. Assisting him in his quest for revenge. It was too terrible. It made too much sense. Why tell a lie unless the truth was worse, or at least worse for someone?

Reaching a decision, Joyce got up and started packing. She had her bags half packed before she remembered that she didn’t have her car with her. It was too late to rent one. Because it was too late to be taking off half cocked on the assumption that Buffy was either lying in the arms of her middle aged ‘Watcher’ or dead in a crypt somewhere. If Mr. Giles was the father of Buffy’s baby, if they were somewhere together right now, what could she do about it tonight? There was one thing, Joyce realized. She could call Hank. He could be in Sunnydale in two and a half hours the way he drove. Was it worth it? What would he do when he got there? Whether he found Buffy in bed with her high school librarian or failed to find her at all, he’d probably end up calling the police or worse. If there was one thing the situation didn’t call for it was yet more drama.

Of course, it was entirely possible, Joyce reminded herself, that she was imagining the whole thing. Buffy might just as well have been distressed by some other man or monster on both her birthday and Valentine’s Day, the tragedy of Angel still ahead of her. Was it possible she only wanted to believe the worst of Mr. Giles so that she could justify keeping Buffy away from him and his war, whatever the cost to mankind? Who said she needed a justification? Didn’t she have a right to protect her daughter, a duty even, ‘destiny’ notwithstanding? Joyce felt sick. Most of what she knew about war had thirteen stripes and three corners. It was always for the good of mankind, of course. Stop the spread etc. Until Saigon falls and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. How much difference could it really make for one girl to kill a few vampires?

 ***

“Why aren’t there more of us?” Kim whispered to Keri.

“Because Spike doesn’t want the others to know that the ritual’s not about killing the Slayer,” Keri whispered back. “At least not until she’s dead.”

‘Which is never going to happen unless there’s more of us,’ Kim thought sourly, but she said, “Then why are they here?”

“The early risers?” Keri asked, indicating the two somewhat taller blond girls who were pushing and shoving each other as they rolled a barrel of gasoline along near the front of the group. “They don’t even know about the ritual. Also, they know the Slayer.”

“Not them,” Kim hissed. “Them.” Sunday and her five minions made up the center of the group, just behind Spike and Edwards but in front of the two Aurelians Edwards had convinced Spike to take into their confidence.

“That’s the weirdest part of the whole thing,” Keri explained. “The big mean blond one just walks up to Spike, bold as a very bold thing and says, ‘Screw all this virgin crap, what’s the real plan?’”

“No way!” Kim breathed.

“Swear to God!... or... whoever. I was standing right there!”

“What did Spike say?”

“He told her. About Angel and Zanya and Drusilla and the Slayer and the whole bit. He was like... impressed or something.”

“Um, I think this is it,” Harmony announced nervously, smiling like a child who really wants a cookie reward but isn’t sure she’s earned one.

“Of course this is it, lame brain!” said Tiffany harshly. “1630 Revello Drive.”

“Would you two stupid whores please shut up?” Spike scolded, rough but quiet. “You’ll wake her before we’re ready.” They sunk into sullen silence. “Hold on a tick,” Spike motioned Edwards to come closer to the house with him. “What do you feel?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Edwards said grimly.

“Exactly!” said Spike.

“She’s not here,” one of the Aurelians acknowledged.

“Well, can we go ahead and burn it down anyway?” Harmony whined, “Because we’ve been rolling these barrel things for-like-ever and my arms are getting really, really tired.”

“Shut up Harmony,” Tiffany barked. Looking up as Spike, with servile love shining in her eyes she added, “It’s a pleasure to serve the Master.”

“Whatever,” said Harmony, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms. “Are we going to burn Buffy’s house down or not?”

“Well it would send a message, I suppose,” Edwards mused. He wanted to keep Spike engaged in the active quest for vengeance and surrounded by beautiful young vampires as long as possible, not give him too much time to think and grieve and fall apart again.

But Spike scoffed. “Yeah,” he agreed sarcastically. “It’ll send a message all right! ‘Dear Buffy, please come to the Hellmouth looking for payback and bollix up the ritual.’”

“We could try the librarian’s house,” Tiffany suggested.

Spike shrugged, “Angel was convinced they were shagging, figured he was just being paranoid.”

“Like rabbits,” Tiffany confirmed, “the whole school knows about it. It’s disgusting.”

“Jealous,” Harmony muttered.

Tiffany kicked her in the shins and pushing and shoving ensued. “Shut it,” said Spike simply, banging both their heads together.

“Sorry, Master,” said Tiffany.

“Oww(!)” said Harmony.

“Uh, guys?” Sunday pointed out, expressing absolute certainty in an interrogative tone as only she could, “it’s almost four o’clock already? I don’t think we really want the sun coming up while we’re fighting the Slayer.”

“I guess she’ll keep till tomorrow night,” Edwards suggested doubtfully.

“Maybe,” Spike mused, “but she’s going to be mightily pissed off in the morning when she finds out three dozen of her little school chums have disappeared. That puts us right back on the waiting for payback plan. We need a better idea.”

“I have a better idea,” Sunday suggested coolly.

“Oh yeah?” Spike challenged, “What’s that then?”

She smiled. “Let’s ‘send a message’ to the County Prosecutor. One that says, ‘Hi, I’m Buffy Summers and I need to be arrested because I like to burn things down.’”

Spike smiled slowly, appreciatively, nodding his approval. “It can’t be this place, though,” he mused. “They might blame Angel first. Even if we leave them plenty of incriminating clues, we’ll still have the Slayer on our hands while they’re sorting it out.

“It has to be something that immediately says ‘Buffy’ not ‘Angel,’” Edwards agreed.

“Well,” said Tiffany. “Buffy likes to burn down school buildings. She’s famous for it.”

“Brilliant!” said Spike “If we burn down the school, she won’t be able to come in through the Church that way, even if she’s still loose tomorrow. She’ll have to come up through the tunnels, and we’ll be ready for her.”

 ***

Giles awoke before dawn. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to Buffy’s deep, even breathing. He couldn’t go back to sleep. The euphoria that had followed the epiphany of his proposal to Buffy and the miracle of her acceptance was wearing off. There were too many important variables over which he had no control. There was too much hanging in the balance. He thought of the Chariot card from the Tarot, the horses rushing in different directions. A symbol of duality, inconsistency, chaos. He was not interested in chaos. He had had his fill of it long ago. But then, those two horses also represented reason and passions, the two motive forces of the human spirit, the team that together made life livable and worth living. The trick, of course, was to get them to pull together.

He was tempted to have a drink to settle his nerves, but he had a sneaking suspicion his nerves were getting entirely too used to being settle that way lately. Too much reliance on the philosophy of Brother Malt could easily become a bit unseemly for (he chuckled to himself) a family man. Instead, he set to work on his next Official Report to the Council, describing Buffy’s many accomplishments over the last few days in as much intricate and glowing detail as possible, holding back information that was over due to be reported. It was an exercise in what American politicians called ‘spin’ and the rest of the English speaking world propaganda, though the accomplishments themselves had at least ‘the modest and minor virtue of being true.’

Buffy probably really was the most talented and effective Slayer of the twentieth going on twenty-first century, he realized. Given her (to be generous) ‘unconventional’ approach to every single aspect of her calling, he couldn’t help but wonder if the Council were upholding the wrong conventions. More likely it was simply another case of the rules didn’t apply to Buffy. She was... a law unto herself, a force of nature. Buffy was Buffy.

Buffy rolled over and sighed uneasily in her sleep, reaching for him. He lay back down and put his arms around her. “You’re here,” she muttered, still more asleep than awake. “I thought they took you away.”

“No,” he assured her, resisting the impulse to say ‘never’, “I’m here.”

“Mmmmm,” she mumbled, snuggling against him, dozing off again, comforted, secure. He had the frightening realization that he had made himself more or less entirely responsible for her comfort and security. A responsibility on which he knew he could not entirely deliver. What could he do to justify her faith in him? It wasn’t the vampires that bothered him. She didn’t expect him to protect her from those. It was the things that he was a part of from which Buffy needed protecting. From the Council; from Cruciamentum.

Could he do it? Could he ... incapacitate Buffy and send her weakened, defenseless to fight a monster that could tear her apart like a tiger ripping at tissue paper? What kind of a man was he if he could? If he couldn’t? And if she died, would she realize that he had sent her to her death? Would she die never knowing why, believing he had simply betrayed her? Would she be right? If she returned, what would he say to her? ‘Congratulations on surviving a barbaric ritual with no other purpose than to prove your worth to a lot of fools who ought to know it already, what’s for dinner?’

That proving herself to the Council was important in itself, that it was worth some risk to her life, was a point of view he felt certain that Buffy would never be able to see. Of course, the Council would see that as his failing, perhaps with some justification. Any Watcher worth his salt would have done more to manage the Slayer’s point of view, to inculcate in her the beliefs and values the Council expected of her. While it was true that Buffy didn’t take inculcating very well, it was also true that he could have done more on the cerebral side of her training. He could have done more to help her understand the history of the institution of the Council and her place in it. He’d judged her at first too quickly, too harshly, as someone who could not adhere to the demands of a rigorous course of study and then... the pace of events had taken over. Somehow they had never gotten back on track. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to do more to prepare her for what was coming. After all, the time they had ahead of them was about three quarters as long as the time they had behind them. He was convinced now that Buffy could learn quite a lot in ten months if she put her mind to it, if she accepted the importance of it. He’d simply have to make her understand (he sniffed, a ghost of a laugh) without telling her the most important thing that could have helped her to believe it.

Of course, he realized, most of these thoughts were predicated on the utterly unwarranted assumption that he would still be Buffy’s Watcher ten months from now. In all likelihood, he would be replaced the minute their relationship came to light, probably by someone who met all of the objections that had been thrown at his selection for this assignment. Someone without a colorful past, someone more... by the book. Someone completely inadequate to deal with Buffy in any sense, let alone be of any help to her.

No, he would have to do the job of being Buffy’s Watcher even if someone else had the title, the paycheck and the support of the Council. It would be trick enough to maneuver to be allowed to stay in Sunnydale without defying the Council and incurring its considerable wrath to do so. On the plus side, if his work were unofficial, he wouldn’t have to actually participate in that bloody test. Would that help Buffy to forgive him? Would it help him to forgive himself? It’d certainly be a fine excuse to give a child. ‘I let them kill your mother, but I didn’t participate.’ Insoluble.

Giles held Buffy’s warm sleeping body close against him and smoothed her hair back from her face. He thought of the phrase she had used a few hours earlier to express the sincerity, the permanence of her devotion: ‘from here to eternity.’ No doubt in her frame of reference it was an almost entirely positive statement; romantic, defiant, perhaps with just a hint of mortality on the horizon: sex on the soon to be bloodstained beach, not arrogance blundering happily towards damnation. ‘...and bears it out, even unto the edge of doom....’ Well they were always within hailing distance of the edge of doom. There was no way of knowing that she (or he) would be alive in another ten months.

He kissed the pulse points in her temple and her throat. He felt the blood coursing through his own veins. They were alive today, and, as it was written, the evil of the day was indeed sufficient thereto. ‘Angel’ might have been gone to his eternal rest, and that was all well and good for him, but Angelus the vampire was still out there somewhere meditating day and night on the cruelest way to destroy Buffy. Neither he nor Spike was likely to take kindly to the news of Drusilla’s demise. Perhaps it was a bit premature, a bit self indulgent even, to begin lying awake nights over Cruciamentum just yet.

*** 

“Drag all those book cases out into the hallway there,” Spike instructed. We don’t have nearly enough fuel to collapse the whole building. What we want to do is concentrate the damage around the entrance to the basement so that she can’t go down that way.”

The basement door swung open and Harmony emerged. “Well?” said Spike expectantly.

“I didn’t find any oil or paint thinner or any of that stuff you told me to look for,” said Harmony, seeming strangely pleased with herself, “but I had a better idea.”

“Which was?” Spike inquired skeptically.

“I opened the gas valve. Now we can blow the whole place up.” She stood there grinning, wanting a pat on the head. Her smile faltered a little as she took in the shocked, horrified looks all around her.

“You did what!?!” Spike demanded angrily, demon faced, slamming her against the wall so hard she thought her skull might have cracked a little. Did that matter if you were a vampire? It sure as hell hurt like it mattered. Unlike in life, the pain made Harmony more mad than scared.

“I turned the gas on,” she snarled back, baring her fangs at him. “More fuel, like you said.”

Spike looked at Sunday, who nodded and gave Miranda a shove towards the stairs. “Shut the valve off,” she said, “Then go sniff and see how much has gotten into the tunnels.” Edwards silently went with her. Spike threw Harmony against the book cases they had brought from the library, turning them over. She scrambled sullenly to her feet and stood pouting with her arms folded.

“It’s pretty bad,” Miranda confirmed when she came back up a few minutes later. The tunnels are filling up pretty quick. We put out the candles in the...” she shuddered, “Church. Mr. Edwards looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

“What?” said Harmony petulantly, “How was I supposed to know?”

“Ahhhggg!” Spike half grunted, half screamed in frustration. Grabbing the girl by her hair and swinging her around like a human, he threw her to the ground, kicking and stomping her as she tried to scuttle away from him. The crowd backed away a little, some looking amused, others horrified. Sunday seemed moderately contemptuous and mildly worried.

Harmony had her back to the wall now and the pile of book cases blocking her on one side. She wept and begged for mercy as Spike kicked her a dozen more times, then actually got down on the floor to punch her in the face. “Why...” He bashed her in the temple, with his right fist. “Can’t...” He brought his left up under her chin banging her jaws together, cracking more than a few teeth. “Anything...” He gave her a hard right jab to the nose. “I do...” When she tried to turn her face away he boxed her on the ear, “Ever...” He slammed the back of her head into the wall, cracking her shoulder against the corner of the wall and the floor at the same time. Sunday cocked her head in the direction of the nearest exit. “Workout...” he rained redundant blows upon his insensible victim. “... Anymore!”

Spike lay on the floor next to Harmony’s unconscious body, weeping. “You’ve lost your audience,” said one of the Aurelian Brothers with quiet contempt. Spike looked up to find that he was alone with the two cultists. The other nine vampires had left.

“Over a woman!” said the second Brother, scornfully. “Why should we follow you? Why should we help Angelus for that matter?” he added, addressing his colleague now. “Let’s take the army and go kill the Slayer ourselves.”

Spike got to his feet. “You’re not taking my army anywhere, Mate!” he said menacingly. The two Aurelians laughed loudly, but not long.

*** 

At five a.m. Joyce Summers called the American Eagle desk at the Sacramento Airport. “Our next flight to Sunnydale is the one you’re currently booked on. 2:25 Monday afternoon,” said the attendant in a friendly, encouraging way, as if the news were actually helpful. Joyce tried to be gracious, but it was difficult in her exhausted state, especially knowing she had an eight-hour drive ahead of her, never mind the hour she still had to wait for the car rental to open.

She thought again of the possibility of sending Hank to find Buffy. It was morning now, so wherever he did or didn’t find her couldn’t prove she had stayed out all night in defiance of the Court. Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from taking an excessively ‘manly’ attitude with this Mr. Giles who was what? A life coach/personal trainer for budding superheroes? Probably more than a match for her ex-husband. No good could come of that.

Joyce made a different phone call instead, to someone who she hoped could get her some answers about what kind of a person she was actually dealing with in Rupert Giles, someone she knew she could count on to use discretion. Then she lay back, fully clothed, on the motel bed. She would wait until six o’clock and try Buffy at home once more. Then she would rent a car and head back to Sunnydale. It had been foolish, she realized to think that she could leave Buffy alone, could trust her to be responsible, just because there had been... reasons for most of her prior risky behavior. If Buffy had really been ‘chosen’ to protect the world from demons, that meant her mother had to worry about her safety (and her conduct) more, not less.

 ***

When the girl’s battered body landed on the floor in front of him, Edwards looked up. “Where are the others?” he said coolly. Spike didn’t answer right way. He sat down on a fallen slab of marble and hid his face in his hands. Edwards made a noise of contempt. “You let them see your grief.” He surmised.

“I cried like a bitty baby, alright,” Spike spat hatefully. “The kiddies split for parts unknown while I was bashing up the little girl. The Brethren hung around and forced me to kill them.”

Edwards cursed with quiet conviction. “You’ve lost a fourth of our army in one night,” he said thinly, “and gotten nothing for it.”

“I noticed,” Spike replied with a tight smile. “On the other hand, we have got twenty-six more recruits waiting to rise. That brings us up to fifty-three. More than enough to take the fight to the enemy.”

“Assuming Sunday hasn’t stopped by the pump station on her way to ‘parts unknown,’” Edwards pointed out sourly. “And it’ll take at least three or four days to get the lot of them on their feet. Hell,” he added nodding at Harmony, “it’ll take two days to get her back on her feet. We’re defenseless here.”

Spike laughed bitterly. That had been the idea of course. He hadn’t had any notion six hours ago that he would ever want to protect the Church, to complete the ritual. But now it was one of his top contingency plans. He wanted revenge on the Slayer by any means necessary. If he couldn’t manage it himself in the meantime, Angel might be his last best chance. Also, more than incidentally, Edwards was the last person left who knew the real score with the army, the last person he could trust to act as his right hand. He had to show that getting him what he needed out of the arrangement was a priority.

Spike ruminated a moment. “Go down to the pump station and bring up half a dozen vamps. Big, not too smart. Bring all the sleepers with you. We’ll tell them we got hit by the Slayer, heavy casualties, sent the survivors out to beef up the sentry posts.” And this was why Edwards hadn’t dispatched Spike when he was lying on the floor all but begging for death. Even on his worst night (and this was certainly his worst night) Spike had a head for strategy. They needed strategy to keep the Slayer at bay until the new moon rose.

Edwards picked up the girl, Harmony, and carried her into the cloak room with Angel and Zanya. “Look after her,” he said, giving Zanya a kiss on the forehead. She nodded solemnly as her man, her boy, her sire headed out to deal with business.

*** 

“How many missing?” Snyder demanded.

“Forty,” Ron repeated grimly. “Thirty-six of them your students. Four of the boys were from other schools, but they all disappeared going to or from that damn dance. Bob called me in as soon as he had a sense of the scope of the thing. We’re forming a task-force. Hopefully that’ll delay the State Police or the FBI getting involved until we have a better idea what kind of... information we have to manage.”

“We know what there is to cover up,” Snyder countered. “Vampires! Who else could do something like this! They’ve gone too far, this time they’ve gone too damn far! It’s a direct attack on my school. I won’t have it!”

“The school is definitely the target,” the Sheriff agreed, “whoever’s responsible. Paulson and Greer went to check it out with a couple of Bob’s guys. It looked like someone was about to start a fire then just... changed their mind. They piled a bunch of book shelves from the library in the main hallway and poured a little bit of accelerant on some of them. There was a barrel of gasoline just sitting there.”

“Were many books ruined?” Snyder asked hopefully. “Were they occult books?” It’d be nice to get a little good news tonight.

“Math and Science,” said Ron. Snyder cursed. Those he would have to pay good money to replace. “Fire doesn’t sound much like vampires,” Ron pointed out.

“Not usually,” Snyder agreed. He smiled grimly, “I know who it does sound like,” he said.

“The Summers girl?” said Ron more than a little skeptically. “How would that explain the forty missing kids?”

“I don’t know. Yet.” Snyder admitted. “Maybe she’s... stirred the vampires up somehow.”

“Maybe,” said Ron with a definite lack of conviction. “Anyway, Terry and his guys are putting in those grates today, and pouring the concrete in the holes we know about. Hopefully we can stop them coming in in the daytime at least. As for the nights, I spoke with the Mayor. He’s agreed to ask the City Council to impose a ten p.m. curfew on juveniles.”

“Ten p.m.!” Snyder was incredulous. “That’s four and a half hours after sunset!”

“We’ll be lucky to get that,” Ron pointed out. “Any earlier and the Chamber will cut the legs out from under it.”

“Greedy bastards,” Snyder spat. “Those kids can’t go out and spend money if they're all dead.”

“Actually,” Ron pointed out, “they can. Vampires do a lot of spending in this town. Anyway, Cranston has the rest of the Chamber under his spell—probably literally— and he doesn’t make a dime before eight o’clock.”

“Cranston,” Snyder said, at once hateful and contemplative. “This dance was at his place. Can’t we use that to put any pressure on him? Shouldn’t he have some responsibility for security?”

“I think that’s how we’re getting him to agree to ten o’clock,” Ron admitted.

Snyder sighed in frustration. Giving up the subject of the club owner’s culpability for the time being, he returned to his eternal theme. “I know, some way somehow, this is all going to lead us back to Buffy Summers.”

“I wonder...” said Ron contemplatively. “The Rosenberg case was definitely vampire. I read the coroner’s report.”

“So?” said Snyder.

“So, the girl positively I.D.ed the killer as her ex-boyfriend ‘Angel’.”

Snyder snorted contemptuously. “I wouldn’t put it past Summers to screw a vampire.”

“You're missing the point,” said Ron crossly, “if the girl really is pregnant, then she’s been screwing around on this vampire. This whole thing could be some kind of...domestic dispute. I guess you know what everybody’s saying about your librarian.”

“No!” said Snyder defiantly. “That is not happening, not in my school. It’s impossible.”

“It’d go a long way to explaining the Calendar case,” Ron pointed out. “Payback with interest. It’d also explain that B.S. about the stolen car and why somebody ripped the door off his office, not to mention the aborted book burning. Something has to be stirring those damned ghosts up too. I’ve never seen them this bad. The music room was completely demolished.”

“I’m telling you, it didn’t happen,” Snyder insisted. “Even if he was... inclined that way... a girl with a body like that can pick and choose better playmates than Rupert Giles. She knows it too.”

Ron knew better than to try and argue with R.C. when he was in that frame of mind or to ever try to convince him of a fact that didn’t already fit his world view. His cousin had been born with a talent for looking at giants and seeing windmills. Ron was convinced that was the main reason the Mayor wanted him in this position. It was part of the workings of the whole sick system. It was the same with local law enforcement. They were meant to keep the trains running on time despite the rising tide, to keep the chaos just contained enough that people would keep getting up every morning and going to work, shopping at the mall, sending their kids to school, pretending everything was alright. The point was not to keep the people safe, but to keep them from leaving. Even at that they were failing. Forty kids disappearing in one night was enough to start a mass exodus.

‘Good,’ said a deep, hidden part of him with bitter conviction. But nothing was that simple and he knew it. It was too late to start getting sentimental and idealistic again after all these years. He had too much invested. He was part of the whole sick system. He needed those trains to run on time. He had to find an explanation that people could accept. He’d have settled for scapegoating some handy undesirable, but he also had to stop something like this from happening again tomorrow or the next night.

“Well...” Ron said, “We’ll keep working all the angles. If there is anything... scandalous involving the school, we’ll do our best to keep it out of the papers and let you handle it.”

“Thanks,” said Snyder grudgingly. “Just... keep me posted. From now on, the minute anything happens to one of my students, I want to know about it.”

 ***

Most of the girls wept and shrieked as they were taken from the chain one by one and dragged into the sanctuary. This one faced her captors with sullen, childish defiance. Even when she could see the drained shell of the girl who had gone before her being lowered to the floor, the place of honor being cleared for its new occupant, this girl only pouted and glared at them. “Where’s Pete?” she demanded. “What have you done with my boyfriend?”

Spike smiled grimly. Love of course. He should have known. Love was the only thing that could make you stupid enough not to fear death. “He’s over there somewhere I expect,” he said cocking his head with calculated nonchalance towards the bodies laid end to end along the far wall.

“If Pete’s going to be a vampire,” she persisted stubbornly, ignoring the fact that she was being lifted off her feet, “then you have to make me one too. Pete needs me. We have to be together.”

“You know,” said Spike, mock contemplative, “I’m really sort of tempted. You’re not bad looking, south of the face anyway, and you don’t lack for courage, I’ll give you that. Not much in the brains department, but still...” The girl was starting to look a little more frightened now that that she was actually being hoisted upside down, but she was keeping it together impressively. “The problem is,” he explained, putting on a businesslike we-regret-to-inform-you kind of voice, “pure virgin blood is the high dollar commodity around here these days, and yours’d be no good if it got all mixed up with mine.”

Spike flashed a cordial, half apologetic smile at the slightly trembling young woman. “Stick her!” he commanded a large muscular vamp in camo pants and an Army green T-shirt. The girl's eyes widened, terrified at last, as the hollow metal spike was driven into her throat and blood began to pour from it into the pool below. “Which is what your boyfriend should have done,” Spike opined coolly, “if he needed you so bleeding much.”

 ***

Buffy woke up feeling queasy as per the new usual. She’d kind of hoped that was part of the whole ghost thing, since you weren’t even technically supposed to have symptoms this early she didn’t think. Oh well, she reminded herself, looking over at the man sleeping beside her, since when did what was ‘supposed’ to happen have anything to do with her life?

He looked older lying there asleep, maybe because she was able to study him more closely or possibly because the lines and creases around his mouth and eyes lay heavier without the animation of his personality. His hair was that dull shade of brown in which a few gray hairs don’t do much to announce themselves, but there they were in the clear pale light of early morning. His hair was maybe a little thinner than it had been this time last year too, just around the temples. Paradoxically, these first small signs of impending decline, though not attractive in themselves, stirred her heart with warmth and affection. His mortality, of which they were evidence, seemed to make him more precious somehow. ‘Act now. Supplies are limited.’

Buffy’s stomach stirred uneasily again, reminding her that she needed to put something in it before badness ensued. She got up and headed for the kitchen. Her kitchen? Were wives still expected to cook in the almost-twenty-first century? Moms were she guessed. The question was currently moot. Apparently Giles hadn’t made it to the grocery store since getting out of the hospital three days ago. No surprise with all that had been going on. The milk was visibly spoiled. There was no cereal anyway. She found a couple of slices of bread (stale but not moldy) and started rummaging around in the cabinets for a toaster.

Nothing was where she expected to find it. Where there should have been small appliances, there were canisters of flour, sugar, coffee, etc. There were pots and pans where the food should have been. What she couldn’t help thinking of as the silverware drawer contained an extremely neat assortment of things that should have been tossed somewhere haphazardly: loose screws, bits of string, wooden matches, sticks of incense? (for Hellmouth purposes, hopefully); all slotted into a custom made tray that had lost a fight with a label maker. The canned goods were alphabetized. She couldn’t decide if that was adorable or horrifying. Split the difference and call it ‘quirky.’

When she found the peanut butter she gave up on the toast and made a sandwich, which turned out to be exactly what she wanted. ‘The winding path of destiny,’ she thought with amusement. Sitting in that quiet, cramped, only half familiar kitchen, eating her meager breakfast, Buffy felt... lonely, in need of reassurance. She resisted the urge to wake Giles up so that he could put his arms around her. He probably needed his sleep. It was probably a little early to call Willow too, even with so much to tell her.

She decided to call home and check her messages. There were seven of them. All from her mother, in progressive states of distress. Damn. She had just spoken to her twelve hours ago. Feeling resentful and obligated, she found her purse—lying on the living room floor—and rummaged through it to find the scrap of paper where she had written the number of the Merry Day Inn Sacramento.

“Hello?” Joyce answered groggily, on the third ring.

“Mom?” said Buffy hesitantly, “I got your messages.”

“Buffy! Thank God!” her mother exclaimed with excessive relief, then with equally excessive anger, “Where have you been!?! I called a dozen times!”

“I ... had to take care of something,” said Buffy annoyed, in no mood to explain or justify last night’s Hellmouth adventures, let alone... anything else. “What’s the what, Mom?”

“I was up all night,” Joyce informed her.

“I don’t know why,” said Buffy, getting rankled now. “I can take care of myself.”

“Were you slaying?” Joyce demanded, as if it were a bad thing.

“Yes, I was, Mom” Buffy said, “and I did a great job, by the way. Killer ghosts are history. Yay me, if nobody else is going to say it.”

“Why didn’t you call me when you got in?”

“It was after midnight,” Buffy pointed out, trying to remember what the time stamp had been on Joyce’s last message. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“I called again three hours ago,” Joyce challenged. “You sound like you’ve slept more than three hours.”

“I... must have slept through it,” Buffy insisted.

“Have you been home at all?” Joyce demanded. “Are you home now or... somewhere else?”

Buffy hesitated. Her mother sounded like she had a specific somewhere else in mind. “I’m at home,” she said finally, with all the conviction she could muster though, even apart from how her mother would see it, the statement felt less true than it had last night. “I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast,” she added for the solidity of detail.

“So if I hang up and call the house right now, you’ll pick up?” Joyce persisted.

Damn. “No,” said Buffy with what she hoped was convincing sarcasm, “I’m lying about eating my breakfast. Look, Mom,” she added more gently, trying to shift the focus from where she had spent the night back to her slaying, “I know you worry about me, but you can’t sit up ringing your hands every time I stay out late. I’m the Slayer; mythic, supernatural, there-can-be-only-one warrior type. I mean, half the point of letting you know that was to get you to understand that sometimes there are reasons why I have to stay out all night.”

“Whatever the reasons, Buffy,” Joyce countered, “things can’t go on this way.”

“Yes, they can,” Buffy assured her. “They have to.”

“Who says?” Joyce demanded, “Mr. Giles? This... ‘Council’?”

“It’s fate, Mom,” Buffy explained tiredly. “Giles has nothing to do with it except... helping me deal. He has my back. I need that, but it’s not what makes me the Slayer.”

Joyce sighed heavily, “I know it seems like you have to do these things, like no one else can do them and you have to be the hero, but...” she hesitated, trying to say exactly what she meant, “my father was a hero too. I don’t want that for you. Nothing’s worth your life, Buffy.”

“Yes,” Buffy corrected her mother, “some stuff is.”

“Not to me, it’s not,” Joyce insisted.

“Mom, it’s not up to you,” said Buffy.

“Yes it is,” Joyce protested, “I’m your mother.”

“But I’m not a little girl,” Buffy countered, “You said it yourself. If I’m going to be a mom I have to stop being a kid? The same thing is true of being the Slayer. It’s not just about one life depending on me. All life is depending on me. Whatever the forces of darkness get by with, it’s on me. It’s on my watch. You can’t change that. I can’t change that. I need you to let me do what I have to do.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Joyce asked forlornly.

“Mom,” said Buffy firmly but not unkindly, “go buy art.”

“So you’re back to deciding you don’t need me after all,” Joyce surmised bitterly. “Whatever guidance, whatever protection you need, this Mr. Giles can handle it? He has your back?”

“Yes, Mom,” Buffy assured her, “he does.” She had the uncomfortable feeling that her mother was nearing some kind of a point, something she felt the need to dance around, to work up to. The truth? She didn’t know. How could she know?

“How much do you really know about him?” Joyce asked.

Then again... “I know enough,” said Buffy flatly.“Giles is Giles. We’ve been fighting a nightly war, side by side for over a year. We’ve saved lives. We’ve saved each other’s lives. We’ve saved the world. He’s... solid, someone to count on. I trust him with my life.”

“And so I’m just supposed to trust him too?” Joyce asked.

“Or you could trust me,” Buffy pointed out. “Mom,” she said seriously, “I’m seventeen-years-old. That may not be the mystical magical number eighteen, but it’s not twelve either. People my age have jobs; they go to college, join the military, get married and have babies. I’m eight month away from being somebody’s mother. If I don’t know how to pick someone to count on by now, then I guess I have bigger problems than whether or not Giles has my back.”

 ***

“Hey,” said Amy worriedly, almost apologetically, “rough night?”

“Kind of,” Willow admitted, eyes downcast. “I don’t really want to talk about it though.”

They stood a long moment on opposite sides of the threshold. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Amy asked finally.

Willow laughed harshly. “Haven’t I already?” she asked, standing aside.

“Ha ha,” said Amy sourly. “I’ve never been anything but good to you, one way or another,” she insisted, coming inside and closing the door. “I don’t know why you have to be such a bitch about it.”

“Did you want something?” Willow asked, struggling for a more civil tone.

“I... wanted to see if there was any news on the uh... ghost... fighting thing,” Amy stated unconvincingly.

“You could have called Giles for that,” Willow pointed out.

“I also wanted to see you,” Amy admitted.

“You mean you wanted to see him,” Willow grumbled.

“You are him,” Amy pointed out.

“I’m not or... maybe I am, but... he’s not me.”

“That makes perfect sense,” said Amy sarcastically.

“I don’t know how much sense it makes,” Willow pleaded. “I don’t know how much it has to make. But I do know I’m a girl, and I want to be a girl, I need to be a girl and from now on I’m going to be.”

“So that’s just it?” Amy demanded incredulously, “you’re just done with me?”

“I love Oz,” Willow said firmly.

“How can you?” Amy demanded. “You’re a lesbian! You do realize that don’t you?”

“Yeah well...” Willow returned just as stridently, “maybe I am... kind of.... I don’t know, but you’re not, so what difference does it make?”

“I can try,” said Amy exasperatedly.

“Amy,” Willow whined in a come-on-be-reasonable kind of way, but she felt that increasingly familiar tug of irresistible temptation pulling her down into defeat as Amy approached the boundary of her personal space. She truly wanted to take a step backward. She couldn’t. Amy closed her eyes. Willow kissed her. It felt fifty kinds of wrong against one very, very solid right. Amy made an effort to kiss Willow back. It felt weird but not bad... exactly. With men and gods—and girls she guessed—you had to give them what they wanted to get what you wanted. She’d done stranger things for less. The high pitched, helpless little cry Willow made in her throat was unnerving, but when she put her hands on Amy’s breasts, through her clothes, they didn’t feel that much different than a man’s. Amy kept her eyes closed, picturing Willard’s face.

Willow knew where she wanted to touch Amy. She knew where she wanted Amy to touch her. Her heart was pounding. Her hands were shaking. She didn’t think she had the nerve. Lust struggled against fear, weakness to weakness, like two negatively charged fields repelling each other. She pulled Amy close to her, into her embrace, running her hands up her back under her shirt. She enjoyed the feel of her skin while still beating around the bush... so to speak. Willow unhooked Amy’s bra. Even shaking as she was, Amy noticed, it didn’t seem to give her any trouble. Obligingly, Amy pulled her shirt off over her head. She looked at Willow and smiled nervously. Willow pulled her own shirt over her head and Amy embraced her to unfasten her bra behind her back as she had done once before. They let the garment fall to the floor between them as they kissed again, bare breasts rubbing together. Passion made Willow bolder. Lust defeated fear at last. She unbuttoned Amy’s pants and reached inside. Amy stiffened just a little at her touch but resisted the urge to pull away. With a stab of guilt and self-loathing, Willow continued to caress her most intimate places, pretending not to notice her discomfort. ‘... and makes a welcome of indifference,’ she reproached herself bitterly. But after a few of minutes steady effort, she was able to produce a change in Amy’s breathing and the little noises she made spoke more of pleasure and anticipation than of discomfort or indifference.

“Touch me,” Willow pleaded, “exactly like that.”

“Let’s lay down on the couch,” Amy suggested breathlessly. Willow agreed. Shucking off the rest of her clothes, she lay down and let Amy climb on top of her. Amy kept her panties on, but she put her hands on Willow’s genitals at last and even kissed her breasts. Amy rubbed Willow the way she would have done to herself, mostly touching her outer lips but putting firm indirect pressure on her clitoris. It felt awkward to have to turn her hand the other way, but it seemed to be working alright. In fact, in made her want to be on the receiving end again. With her free hand, she lifted one of Willows very slightly in the direction of her cunt. It was all the encouragement she needed. Willow came before Amy did, but they both got there. Amy wondered if she was supposed to lie there holding Willow in her arms or something, but it didn’t seem to be required. The two girls sat on the couch for a while catching their breath, not looking at each other. For Willow, the experience had been something of an epiphany, as was the fact that, despite having just had one of the best female orgasms of her admittedly short sexual life, what she wanted now more than anything was to be fucked by a man, specifically Oz.

“I’m not a lesbian!” she said in amazement. Amy looked at her skeptically. “No, really,” Willow explained, “I’m... bisexual? Wow, is that actually a real thing?”

“Apparently,” said Amy, with mild amusement. She was just relieved to find out that having lesbian sex was not such an unpleasant chore as she might have imagined. Of course, they hadn’t tried doing... that other thing, yet.

Willow felt... disappointed, sad even. So much for the theory that God made one perfect person for everyone. Now that she knew what it felt like to give and receive sexual satisfaction with another girl, she didn’t want to go the rest of her life without doing it. She didn’t think she should have to. Which meant she was going to have bigger problems pursuing her relationship with Oz than just getting rid of Willard and Amy, which was problem enough all by itself.

“What’s the matter,” Amy asked warily.

Willow sighed. “Nothing,” she said.

And that was exactly what she could do to please her, Amy realized. Nothing.

 ***

Cordelia left Xander another message. Two in two hours. That was two too many. Damn it, she was cooler than that, better than that. He had no right to make her feel like she had something to apologize for. For what? For living almost seventeen years before they were ever together? For having a sex life? For making one miscalculation? For doing the smart thing about it? Were we in religion and politics land here? He hadn’t said so last night. He hadn’t said much of anything. He’d avoided the subject and gotten off the phone. Pretty much like he was doing now.

Of course, it was still technically Saturday morning. He could just be asleep. He could be dreaming right now of his amazing girlfriend and the wonderful life they were going to have together. Sure he could. This was why you didn’t tell guys things they didn’t need to know; because they weren’t wired the same way. They didn’t have the same problems. They wouldn’t understand. It was stupid to think ‘love’ made a difference to that. It was stupid to think ‘love’ made a difference to anything. It was stupid to think you could wipe your slate clean and start over just by choosing to be something different.

*** 

Giles woke up feeling fresher and more optimistic than he had gone to sleep. Of course he noted, it was nearly nine o’clock, so he certainly ought to be rested. There was the distant sound of a tea kettle boiling, telling him that Buffy was absent from his bed, but not from his home, from their home, nor he absent from her thoughts. It was a fair certainty she hadn’t got up with a sudden notion to make herself a cup of tea to start the day. It was a thoughtful, endearingly domestic gesture. He tried to guess if he was supposed to come down stairs and find her bustling about the kitchen or if she was coming back to bed for tea and... something else.

No one could consistently be that lucky Giles decided. He pulled his robe on over his pajamas and headed downstairs. His smile widened when he met Buffy coming through the living room with a tray. She was wearing the top of another set of his pajamas, red and white vertical stripes. She looked like the world’s sweetest candy cane. “Aww,” she pouted, maybe half seriously, “I wanted to surprise you.”

“You never do anything else,” he said. Taking the tea tray from her hands he leaned down and kissed her on the lips. She stood on her tip toes and made it worth his while. He sat the tray down on the coffee table and put his arms around her. “I think I could get used to married life,” he said. Buffy leaned her head on his chest and sighed a little sadly. He smoothed a hand over her hair and sat down with her on the couch. “You’re still worried about... working things out with your mother,” he surmised.

“Yeah,” Buffy admitted, straitening a little, “I am. I talked to her this morning. She’s not dealing all that well with the Slayer thing. Apparently she called me like a dozen times after I left last night. She didn’t sleep. I had to talk her out of renting a car and driving home.”

“Well,” Giles said in his understated British way, “that not good.”

“Duh,” Buffy agreed. “So she wanted to know where I was and I told her I got in late from fighting ghosts and I must have slept through the very latest calls, but I don’t think she bought it. She asked me... how well I really know you.”

“I see,” said Giles worriedly. “She’s... sharper than my first impression of her,” he mused, checking himself before adding, ‘not surprisingly.’

“She’s getting suspicious,” Buffy agreed. “I think when she hears what’s going around at school...”

“She’ll know what to think,” Giles agreed grimly. “When is she getting home?”

“Monday afternoon,” said Buffy. “God! I’m going to kill Amy Madison!” She didn’t sound like she meant it literally but it was close. He sympathized.

“Maybe we should talk to her sooner, rather than later,” Giles suggested. “It’ll be better if she hears it from us, even if not by much.”

“I guess,” said Buffy doubtfully, “but that means taking a chance on being separated sooner rather than later.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “We really have no way of knowing how hard a line your mother will take.”

Buffy snuggled closer against him. “I don’t want to miss a day with you that I don’t have to,” she said.

“Nor I,” he agreed, “but we can’t go blindly forward holding our breath from one day to the next. Plans have to be made. We need to manage the order of events.”

“Like how?” Buffy asked.

“Well, as I said last night, from a legal point of view, I ought to quit my job at the library yesterday if not sooner. But the Council went to some trouble to get me that job, to allow me to have constant contact with you, and now that we know it also give us 24 hour access to the Hellmouth...”

“If you quit they’ll know something’s up,” Buffy acknowledged.

“And if they send one half competent person to ask, they’ll know what,” he pointed out. “I’d like to avoid that for as long as possible.”

“Which to me says don’t rush to tell Mom,” Buffy suggested reasonably.

“Unless, as we suspect, she’s mere days away from coming to her own conclusions,” he pointed out. “If we talk to her we stand some chance of containing the information. And, even if we can’t... reason with her, at least we’ll know the knock on the door is coming. Ideally, I’d like for us to be married immediately before I resign and immediately after I surrender my teaching license. According to Hal, at least, that’s about the best we can do for minimizing investigation.”

Buffy felt a pang of guilt. “You're... burning a lot of bridges here aren’t you.” She said.

“Have burned,” he corrected her, “past tense. I’m happy with my decision Buffy. Let’s don’t wallow in the cost analysis. This fellow, Engels, is a small town chap, old fashioned. Hal thinks a marriage license, even after the fact, will go a long way with him, whereas in Los Angeles, it would probably just get the book thrown at us. At any rate it will give me a legal right to claim paternity without admitting the underlying facts.”

Buffy cocked her head quizzically at him, “You’re not... marrying me on advice of counsel?” she asked, he couldn’t tell how seriously.

Giles laughed, “Certainly not,” he assured her. “In fact, I believe Hal’s exact words were, ‘get the hell out of Dodge.’”

“Remind me to thank him for that advice the next time we see him,” said Buffy dryly.

“At any rate,” Giles went on, “hopefully, my resignation will be the first solid information Snyder has that the rumors are correct, but once I’ve resigned, the school board will have no power to investigate and if they attempt to contact the State Board of Education they’ll find I’m no longer a license holder, so they won’t investigate unless I apply for reinstatement, which I won’t. That leaves Engels, Children’s Services, the INS and the Council. You being seventeen, Children’s Services won’t care as long as I’m not working with students. INS won’t care if Engels doesn’t, except that I will have to change the basis on which I’m claiming permanent residency from a work related to a family related status, but Hal thinks that’ll work out without an interruption in status, at least unless the Council weighs in against us.”

Buffy’s brow furrowed. “Can they do that? They’re not even from this country.”

Giles laughed. “The Council is the oldest extant human institution in the entire world, Buffy, older than any nation state, older even than the Roman Catholic Church and arguably as powerful though not in such an... overt way. They may be based in London, but they operate at a level higher than national boundaries, they’re... embedded everywhere, manipulating bureaucracies, pulling political strings, trading influence; they’re the best in the world. They can do what they damn well want to us, and they will too.”

“Wow,” Buffy said, “when we make enemies we really pull out all the stops, don’t we?”

“The Council are not our enemies, Buffy,” Giles corrected her seriously, “They’re too big, too complex, too... personality driven to ever be united in anything, except perhaps the War Against the Darkness. But certain people in the Council are our enemies, or will be, and they can make life very difficult for us. I just need to think of a strategy to... outmaneuver them until we can reach some kind of an accommodation. I still have... one or two possible allies I can talk to, though they are not likely to be very sympathetic to our... circumstances.”

Buffy thought for a moment. “This Watcher deal,” she said, “it’s a family thing, right? Will your relatives help us out at all?”

The harshness of Giles laughter startled her. “They’re all my relatives one way or another. Probably no more so than a lot of other people, but we have the genealogies to prove it, going back in some case to the time of Christ. Unfortunately, my father and I are both only children, as was my grandmother, so none of them is closer than a third or fourth cousin. That’s nothing to trade on, I’m afraid.”

“So you come from a long line of shirkers?” said Buffy, not without amusement.

“Something like that,” Giles admitted. He seemed troubled for a moment. Buffy expected him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

Buffy squeezed Giles’ hands and gave him a small kiss. It must have been hard for him, she realized, not having any family to speak of. Buffy had always loved being an only child, getting all of the attention, all the presents, all the praise (and of course later on all the blame and discipline which was less fun) but she had to admit she’d never really thought about what that meant when your parents were gone. She thought again, regretfully, of the way things were with her own father. How terrible would it be if he died without ever speaking to her again? She hoped her mother was right about him coming around. But then, he had more to come around about than he or her mother yet realized.

Giles sighed, squeezing her hand affectionately in return. “Let’s... not worry about all of that right now,” he said, pulling her onto his lap, his smile returning. “Let’s enjoy our ‘tea for two’, shall we?”

*** 

Xander stared at the answering machine. He needed to call Cordelia back. If he didn’t she would think there was something wrong. Was there? No there wasn’t. He just... didn’t want to talk to her right now. Okay, so that was something wrong, but nothing he wouldn’t get over. He just... didn’t like thinking of her that way, as somebody else’s girl, as someone with a Past, the kind you had to spell with a capital letter. Of course, he had known, within reason, that she wasn’t a virgin, or probably not, but still... that wasn’t quite the same as having to do the math to see who it added up to. Other math kept trying to do itself in his head, but he resisted. He didn’t usually have that much trouble not doing math.

The fact that she ‘loved Kevin so much,’ that she’d still be with him if only she could, competed for head space with the fact that she’d let someone like Mitch do her just for the sake of doing it. Either by itself would have been easier to take than the fact that both were true. What was he? The happy medium? Adequately beloved and conveniently available? The lucky runner up who could serve in Kevin’s stead, below who’s name the list of possible replacement candidates continued?

March minus May equals... There was no good there.

He should call Cordelia. He knew he should call Cordelia. Soon, but not right now.

*** 

“I didn’t know you still played the guitar,” Buffy said. She was poking about the room, exploring things while Giles watched her over the top of the newspaper he was trying—with little success and less regret—to read. She picked up his old acoustic six string from where she’d found it propped in a corner and held it out to him.

He smiled, folded the paper and laid it on the coffee table next to the tea try. “Yes well, I admit, I hadn’t touched it in months until Thursday night,” he said, taking the instrument from her.“Romantic angst is terribly inspiring, that’s why Rock’N’Roll was invented by teenagers.”

“Hummmm, so we can do something right,” Buffy teased, leaning down to kiss his lips.

“A couple of things,” he admitted, grinning, pulling her down beside him and into a one armed embrace, “at least one of which is also very inspiring. I just wish I could remember a tenth of the music I used to know,” he added, fumbling through a few measures of something that might have been “Stairway to Heaven”.

“What does this inspire?” she murmured snuggling against him, nuzzling his neck, nibbling at his earlobe.

He strummed vigorously at the guitar, producing what sounded like a musical translation of a sexual act. “The House-rent Blues” he explained, grinning, “at least I remember that much of it.”

“Mmmm,” she said, turning towards him and pulling his face to hers, kissing him deeply, her fingers lanced in his hair, “sounds like someone’s awfully excited about the rent.”

“Yes,” Giles murmured noncommittally, fumbling for a different tune, suddenly reminded of the time in his life when he’d paid his rent to Deidre Page, who did indeed tend to get quite excited about it as she was the one with her name on the lease and her neck in the noose as it were. He tried to think of something to play that connected more specifically to Buffy. He strummed a few bluesy notes of “Leila” smiling to himself, guiltily amused by the irony (or Byrony) of the connections it made in his mind, glad Buffy couldn’t hear what he was thinking. Happily struck by a new inspiration, pleasantly surprised to find that he remembered every note and almost every word (thus justifying every single hour he had ever spent tripping his ass off listening over and over to the White Album) he began a fairly passable rendition of Paul McCartney’s “I Will.”

Buffy leaned her head on Giles’ shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to him croon what she had always thought of as an extremely sappy old love song. Somehow, it didn’t sound sappy when he sang it just for her. His voice was beautiful. He radiated love and sincerity. It made her want to weep with joy to think that his child was growing inside of her. For the first time, she was starting to comprehend the often repeated assertion of certain members of his generation, that love was a radical act. That the law was against their love seemed sufficient to justify a revolution. The doorbell rang. “Thought police,” said Buffy matter-of-factly.

“No doubt,” Giles smiled, standing up, setting Buffy on her feet and heading towards the door. Half way there, he paused and turned around to ask, “Did I just ‘get’ one of your references?”

Buffy shrugged, “Yeah,” she teased, “but don’t worry, it was probably something I had to read for English class at some point.”

He looked pleased-to-be-annoyedly-amused at her, shaking his head. Then his brow furrowed a little as he thought of how close they actually were to bringing the mighty powers of the world crashing down on their heads. The bell rang again. “Maybe you’d better...” he jerked his chin in the direction of the stairs. Buffy nodded and scurried up and out of sight.

Giles put his guitar back in the coat closet and opened the door. The man standing on his threshold was eighty if he was a day. He could have been ninety in fact, but he stood on his own two feet, only slightly stooped, without the aid of any canes or other devices. He was wearing a brown suit and a dark tie. He flashed his driver’s license like it was a badge. “Rupert Giles,” he said without a hint of uncertainty, “B.F. Wallace. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m sorry?” said Giles as genuinely puzzled as he had ever been in his life. Then, suddenly, he was shocked instead. One of the few pieces of solid information he had gotten when he’d shipped out for Sunnydale was a genealogy (complete to five generations, with further research pending) of Buffy Summers. Now, standing before him in the living flesh, was an entry he’d hardly taken notice of. ‘B.F. Wallace 1910—’ somehow he’d forgotten that that dash had nothing after it. Nothing except ten years with the San Francisco Police, five with Army CID during the War and another twenty-eight as a homicide detective in L.A. afterward.

“B.F. Wallace,” the old man repeated.

“You’re Joyce Summers’ grandfather,” Giles acknowledged. Then, remembering himself, “please, won’t you come in.”

“Looks like you were expecting me,” Wallace said in that politely suspicious way that policemen sometimes managed. “Or maybe I’m not your first visitor this morning.”

“Ah,” said Giles, taking note of the two empty tea cups on the tray with the no longer steaming tea pot. He didn’t bother to try to explain. Obviously the ancient detective had his suspicions, or he wouldn’t be here. Clearly Joyce had sent him to investigate, but what had she told him exactly?

Wallace seated himself with a polite nod of acknowledgment in response to Giles’ equally polite invitation. He didn’t seem upset in the least, which made it difficult to imagine that he expected to find Buffy half-naked hiding upstairs. Then again, one probably didn’t last over four decades investigating serious, violent crimes by wearing his heart on his sleeve in front of his suspects. “So how do you know my granddaughter?” Wallace asked conversationally.

“Joyce?” Giles asked.

“No Darlene,” he said with cheerful sarcasm. Giles managed a small laugh. He had the rather disquieting thought that he was in fact talking to 12½% of Buffy.

“I know her daughter, actually. Buffy goes to my school. I’m her... librarian.” He hadn’t meant to hesitate but he had, and he had the feeling the sharp old bastard had noticed. Also, one didn’t usually describe librarianship in terms of a personal relationship. Still, Wallace wasn’t giving much away. “I’m not sure I quite understand why you’re here,” said Giles finally.

The old man smiled. He didn’t smile like a grandfather. He smiled like a detective who was getting the best of someone. Giles couldn’t help but feel slightly unnerved. “It’s an unusual career change, for a museum curator to become a high school librarian.”

“Yes it is,” said Giles blandly.

“Motivated by a love of children, I suppose,” Wallace countered, finally jabbing towards the heart of the matter.

Giles smiled benignly. “Or of books, perhaps. Words, possibly.”

“You change careers a lot for such an educated man.” It was a statement, almost an accusation, certainly not a question.

“I guess I’m not quite steady enough for forty-three years in law enforcement,” said Giles pleasantly enough.

“Sixty-five years actually,” Wallace responded, “though I’d be interested in how you learned about the first forty-three. Seems like a strange thing for a girl to mention to her... librarian.”

“She’s a strange girl,” Giles pointed out evenly.

“A smart one though. She’d have gotten the numbers right. I’ve never been good at staying retired, but I recon I will this time, thanks to this damn heart valve. The last time I was retired was in the late eighties. Buffy was just a tiny little thing then: five, six, seven.” Giles kept his expression politely neutral, waiting for the detective to continue his soliloquy with delusions of mouse trap.

“I was living up in Seattle then with a lady I almost married. When she threw me out, about eight years ago, I had to find something to do with myself, so I got involved with this ‘cold case’ detecting out of the sheriff’s office up there, worked at that for about six years.” Cold cases. Homicide cases. In Seattle. In the early nineties. It was a bloody small buggering world after all.

“See, an old guy like me, they figure is about useless, but if they give you a case that already didn’t close, how much worse can you hash it up?”

Giles smiled ruefully, “So they get the case and the detective out of their hair, two for one, as it were, and then if anything comes of it, jolly-good.” He’d had his share of similar assignments in the purgatorial decade of the late seventies and early eighties when he had been grudgingly re-embraced as a member in ‘good standing’ of the Watcher’s Council.

“Got it in one,” Wallace agreed. “The thing is, we’ve always had a saying in the cold case business. ‘The answer is in the box.’”

Giles smiled ruefully. “I take it my name was in one of your boxes.”

“Two of them, actually,” said Wallace. His tone sharpening a little at last.

“Well, Amanda and Celeste were very close at one time,” Mr. Giles pointed out. “I suppose there are a lot of people’s names in both boxes.”

“Not as many as you might think,” said Wallace evenly.

“You’ve been retired, this time, two years, yes?” Giles asked politely.

“I have,” Wallace acknowledged.

“So you have no official authority to investigate these matters.”

“No,” Wallace admitted.

“You’re here because Joyce Summers asked you to do her a favor. To have... a friend perhaps at the LAPD or somewhere else, run my name through the system to see what kind of a person was... having an influence on her daughter.”

“That’s about it,” Wallace agreed.

“But my name rang a bell,” Giles surmised.

“It’s an unusual name,” Wallace pointed out.

“That it is,” Giles acknowledged. “What is it exactly that you want?”

“I want you to stay away from Buffy,” he said flatly.

“Never gonna happen,” said Giles firmly.

“It might when I tell Joyce about the boxes,” said Wallace, as calmly as ever.

“I didn’t kill those women,” said Giles, thinly, “and I think you know that, since I was in Europe for the first one, or have you forgotten.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Wallace in a harder voice, “but you’re obviously a hell of a lot more to my great-granddaughter than a ‘librarian’ and that ain’t right any way you slice it.”

“Did Joyce tell you exactly what she thought I was to Buffy, or did you reach your own conclusions from what I’ve said just now?” Giles asked.

“That’s not exactly a denial,” Wallace pointed out.

“It’s not an admission either,” said Giles crossly. “There are more relationships between human beings than... lovers or librarians, and Joyce knows it. If she thinks I should stay away from Buffy, she can tell me so herself, even after seeing everything you can dig up about my background, including Seattle. Therefore, it occurs to me that she does not have the slightest idea that you are here and she may be rather displeased to find that you’ve so far exceeded the scope of what she’s asked you to do. From what I gather, if she wanted someone to blunder in here and make wild accusations, she’d have called her ex-husband. And if you want to know what kind of a man I am, I’m not the kind that can be intimidated by an eighty-eight-year-old man waving a round a cold case file and playing word games about my ‘love of children.’ Which is a fairly cheap shot, incidentally, when the individual in question is a young woman of seventeen. We aren’t any of us as young as we were in the late eighties you know.”

“Oh, you’ve got some brass ones haven’t you!” Wallace declared, getting to his feet, showing a little anger at last.

Giles shrugged. The interview was over and they both knew it. The old cop balled both hands into fists at his sides, fuming. “Can I call you a taxi?” Giles asked politely.

“I still drive myself,” said Wallace, curtly. “I drove down from L.A. this morning.”

“Congratulations,” said Giles tartly.

“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Wallace demanded.

“Most of the time,” Giles admitted coolly.

“There’s nothing smart about crossing me,” Wallace said menacingly.

Giles smiled, “I have a dozen enemies more powerful than you, meaner too.”

“It only takes one,” Wallace pointed out bitterly.

“Too true,” Giles acknowledged. “But you aren’t going to kill me and you don’t know enough to go to the police, on either score. That puts you pretty far down my list of people to watch out for.” ‘If you didn’t have Joyce’s ear,’ he added silently, ‘you wouldn’t be on it at all.’

“Well, I’ll have to see what I can do about that,” Wallace replied with a dangerous smile.

“I’ll look forward to seeing what you can come up with,” Giles scoffed mildly.

Wallace looked like he was resisting something he wanted to say. Impulse defeated will as is usually the case. “Most of my life,” he said, “I haven’t been blessed with an over abundance of family. I lost all of my sisters and my brother to the Spanish Flu when I was eight and the next year my mother was shot to death running a damned city council race for the Women’s Suffrage Party. My wife and I slept on separate continents half the time we were married, then we were divorced twice as long as we were married and she’s been dead a lot longer than that. Kathy was our only child, and I didn’t see much of her between the ages of seven and thirty.

“But when Allen was killed and Kathy came West with Joyce and the twins, my whole life changed. I loved those three little girls more than anything ever loved anything else. I still do. My granddaughter Darlene buried two little girls—it was the flu got one of them—just the flu her father kept saying, never even took her to the hospital ‘til it was too damned late the ignorant bastard—well her and Arlene both have their boys, but Buffy is all that Joyce has. There’s not another damn thing that matters to her in the world.

“Being eighty-eight years old is a lot like the Spanish Flu. You stay bone tired. You ache everywhere all the time. People are dying all around you every day, ‘til you can count on one hand anybody left that matters. There’s times when you think you should just lay down and stay there, times when it feels like you need to sit up just a little bit more to be able to keep breathing and you wonder if it’s really worth the trouble. Then there’s times when someone or something will come along—like as not one of those hand full of people—and remind you that you’re not dead yet. Well now, I may be just a sorry old bag of bones, Mr. Giles, but I’m not dead yet. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t really know if I still have it in me to be ‘enemy’ enough to scare a man like you or not, but believe me when I say, if you do anything to hurt that girl, we’re going to find out.”

Giles did believe him too. He was touched, sobered and genuinely impressed. He’d all but forgotten what it was like to have family that really cared what happened to you and not just how it reflected on them. He was glad that Buffy still had that, regardless of how inconvenient it might be at the moment. He thought of his grandmother. She was never sentimental of course, but fierce, protective. He’d never once doubted that she loved him, even if she didn’t go in for lullabies and kissing scraped knees, even if he’d sometimes wished there was someone in his life who did. “I’ll... keep that in mind,” he mumbled, hardly knowing what else to say.

Wallace sniffed contemptuously, “You do that,” he said, walking out the front door and pulling it firmly to behind him.

 ***

Spike spent most of the morning down at the pump station. Edwards could supervise the ritual, see to the risers, and tend to the wounded. That’s where he wanted to be anyway, where Zanya was. It was good for a leader to get out among the people Spike reasoned. He couldn’t stand to stay in that damned Church one more minute. It had been his bloody idea to dig that cursed tunnel. He should have left bad enough alone. The work being done at the pump station was mostly make work—putting in bunks, needless fortification—to keep everyone busy, disciplined. Spike made his presence felt, inspecting, scolding, glad-handing, being leaderly. But when midday came and everyone settled down to rest, he was left alone with his thoughts.

He had to go to some trouble to be left alone with his thoughts, actually. No less than three females, two of them fairly attractive, offered to keep him company, transparently attempting to insinuate themselves into the inner circle. He wasn’t even tempted. Drusilla was gone. She had ceased to be. Spike’s heart was a raw, bloody fist banging on his chest to get out, longing to follow her. Revenge was reason enough to keep going for now, but it sure as hell didn’t put him in a mood to drink, shag and be merry. The last thing he wanted was some whore pouring herself all over him pretending that rubbing the right nerve endings was the next best thing to love. Instead he headed up the tunnels until he found a spot that was empty and fairly dry. He didn’t have any illusions that he would be able to sleep. He didn’t need that much sleep anyway. Most vampires didn’t. He sat there taking stock of his existence to date.

The first twenty something years had been a dreary, pointless blur, except for—except for useless sodding sentimental crap that only humans cared about—he reminded himself forcefully, lullabies and all that kind of nonsense, the illusion of love without pain, without need, without a dark side. To hell with that. He had been nothing as a man, hardly worthy of the name; indeed, by some definitions entirely excluded. Such a good, clean, virtuous boy, too afraid almost to touch himself in the dark. Mummy’s doting useless darling drip. A pitiful miserable creature.

Then Drusilla had come shining into his life, glowing with darkness that put the sun to flight, and like St. Paul the Persecutor he had been blinded into sight. He had become a new creature, with new desires and old that he was suddenly free to satisfy. Spike was everything William had never been: confident, vital, savage, special. He had been dear, at last, to someone who was dear to him, and together they had been powerful. Many thousands more had wept than once had laughed at him.

God, those first few months had been a hell of heaven! And then she had presented her new creature, proud as any mother could be, to the master of the house. And suddenly, once again, he had been mummy’s darling and daddy’s inconvenience. It had been like traveling backward in time to the years before his mortal father’s death. Except that here there was no pretense of love without desire, without a dark side, without pain. He had grown a lot in those years, built a lot of sodding character.

When Angel had taken off for America with his brand new soul, Drusilla had wept and torn great handfuls of hair from her head. She had been broken, shattered, unmade. Spike had watched and worried over her for weeks, but it had been a blessing in disguise. He’d gotten the job of putting her back together. He had become the Daddy and she was his little princess, pretty pink petals and all, the sweet smile of love on the dark side of his desire.

Like a cat, Drusilla was both a house pet and a predator, cruel and affectionate. She was up for anything. Torture, rape it didn’t matter, as long as it produced the sweat, cleansing, delicate music of suffering. As long as there were tears. She constantly challenged him to new depths of depravity. She had been raised by Angel after all. Left to his own devises Spike might have been a mere work a day vampire, striking from the shadows, killing only to feed, amusing himself through the day with ordinary human pastimes. But the things he did for her, to amuse her, to impress her, had made him a legend. William the Bloody, Slayer of Slayers. Spike was a monster feared by those monsters feared.

It had all been blood and peaches until, six months ago, Drusilla had been all but killed by that damned mob in Prague. And then they had come to Sunnydale. It felt like a hundred years ago. It had been such a cleaver plan. Impress the locals with his Slayer slaying, step into the place of the Master, assets and organization ready to go. Then he would be able to find the cure Drusilla needed. Even finding Angel—or what was left of him—here had seemed like the helping hand of fate, once he’d learned what the cure they were seeking entailed.

But Spike had never counted on Buffy. She was just a little bit of a thing, not that that mattered much with Slayers, but still, she made a predators’ heart go pitter pat. The first word that came to mind when you saw her was ‘victim’, but it didn’t take long to get to know her better than that. He’d soon given up the idea that he could merely back her up against a wall and rip her throat out. She was an enemy worth watching, worth studying worth getting to know. He tried her, tested her and he was impressed. He was fascinated by her. She was... a challenge. Yet, in those first few months, he had never doubted that he would kill her by his own hand, that he would have his fill of her blood and any other part of her he happened to fancy. But she’d slipped every net he cast for her, and soon, she’d had him on the defensive. He’d given up his fantasies of killing her. He’d merely wanted her dead, gone, out of his bloody way. He’d turned to a plan that couldn’t fail. The Order of Terroka. They had failed.

Buffy was the thing all Slayers thought they were, the thing monsters had nightmares about. She had made his existence a misery of pain, humiliation and fear, not the least by sending Angel back into it. Now Angel’s obsession with Buffy and Dru’s devotion to her sire had robbed Spike of his reason for being. Sooner or later, he would kill her. He’d bargain with Angel or the humans or God himself to get it done. If he had to pull the Earth down by its foundations to do it, so much the better.