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Barb
There were moments in her life Willow wished she could
quarantine, like virus-infected files on her computer. Not get rid of them
entirely, because who knew when studying them might be useful. Just cordon
them off in little partitions of their own, where she could observe
them--preferably via a completely different operating system--without actually
running the executable. Moments preserved like specimens in formaldehyde,
like Jesse’s death, or the tropical fish incident, or her parents’ realization
she hadn’t aced the SATs after all--cross-sections of time under glass, tinted
to show off their most interesting features.
It was fifty-fifty whether or not this was going to be one of those
moments. She was sitting in a cave a little too deep into Sunnydale’s maze
of caverns for comfort (she had taken the right-hand fork when the tunnel split,
hadn’t she?) It was the wrong side of midnight on a Friday evening, and
Tara could be waking up at any minute and wondering where the hell she
was. She’d just summoned up something that looked like a Balrog on
steroids, and last but not least, Willow Rosenberg, Wicca Supreme, had acquired
a crowd of truly wiggins-inducing groupies.
The eyeless men shuffled into the cavern, gaunt Blair Witch stick-figures with
leathery skin stretched over gangly limbs, filthy rags draping their bodies like
Spanish moss. They carried staves hung about with bones and feathers and
small sickening dried things the color of old blood. Their withered
eyesockets were sewn over with a double X of coarse brown twine, but they padded
across the uneven floor of the cavern with never a pause or stumble. Bare
feet scuffed and whispered against the stone. Twiggy fingers reached out
for her, straining to be first to touch her hair or grasp the hem of her
sleeves. “The vessel,” they murmured in chorus.
Willow’s face twisted in revulsion, and she slapped the
eagerest hands back with a fizzing shower of blue sparks. “Hey! No
touchy!”
The eyeless men cringed away, some
prostrating themselves, others raising their staves and beginning a reedy
chant. The thing she’d summoned laughed, and dwindled down, splashes of
red and green and alabaster blossoming out of the darkness. “Bad puppies,”
her vampire self crooned, flicking a riding crop at the nearest
supplicant. “No treats for you. Down.”
“Is it vitally necessary for you to look like that?” Willow asked.
“It’s ooky. And if the purpose is to unnerve me, hey, already existing in
a nerve-free void.”
Color leached away and
the clear heartless peal of laughter deepened and roughened as the phantom scent
of tobacco smoke tickled her nose. The thing inclined its bone-and-ivory
head, regarding her with luminous blue eyes. “I can look like anyone,
pet.” Another shift--her mother’s distant, accusing face looked back at
her, a little frown pinching her perfectly penciled brows. “It’s just a
phase, Willow. You need to work through this stage and return to a healthy
phase of ego development.”
“Stop
that!”
Her own chirpy grin returned.
“Givin’ you the wiggins?”
Willow unzipped
her duffle and began pinching out the wicks of the half-melted candles, stuffing
them back inside beside the Ziploc bags of frankincense. “You’re trying to
scare me? OK, I’m scared. Woo frickin’ hoo.” She grabbed
another candle and yanked it free of the spot where its own drippings had welded
it to the stone floor of the cavern. The scent of melted wax and licorice
made the still air of the cavern seem stuffy, despite the underground chill, and
she wondered if licorice was maybe an extra-evil scent, candle-wise. “I’ve
been scared pretty much twenty-four-seven for the last six years straight and
fought vampires and demons and hellgods and furthermore given oral reports in
front of the entire class without fainting and all this stuff I do while shaking
in my high-heeled boots, so you may as well just give it up and head back to
Dodge, because scaring me? Waste of time. I did what you wanted me
to--you’re all manifested and everything. I’ve got my magic back.
I’m happy, you’re happy, everything’s coming up sunshine and puppies, so we’re
finished, ‘kay? No more little voices in my head, no more oogy visions, no
further doorstep-darkening of any variety on either of our
parts.”
Vampire-Willow perched on an
outcropping of stone and swung her legs back and forth. “Aw. Don’t
you like me, Snuggles? We could have lots of fun. But if you don’t
want to play--” Her hand described a languid circle in the air, a gesture which
Willow was morally certain was just for show. As the pale fingers
completed their revolution, she felt... void. Her insides drained away
into nothingness, and the raw dry ache as the power leached out of her soul was
unbearable. She knelt on the cold stone, gravel digging into her
knees--the center of her being was a vacuum; how could nothingness torment her
so? With physical pain, at least she could point to it and say my hand
hurts. “Bye-bye now,” Vampire-Willow said, waggling her
fingers.
“What did you do?” Panic
drove Willow’s voice to an undignified squeak. The muscles in Willow’s
hands spasmed and she dropped the candle she’d been about to toss into the
duffle; it hit the ground with a waxy thump and rolled away into the
darkness. Some bean-counting part of her mind which had become too
thoroughly caught up in Buffy’s budget woes thought grouchy thoughts about the
waste of a perfectly good candle, though it really was kind of gross-smelling
and if licorice-scented candles were extra-evil it wasn’t like she could
recycle them in another ritual.
“No-thing,”
her alter ego sang. “Nothing at all. I stopped doing.” She got
up and slink-strutted over to Willow with a sly, I’ve-got-a-secret smile,
slapping the riding crop against her palm. “You don’t have your magic
back, clever witch, you have my magic back.” Her lashes fluttered.
“And you can keep it as long as you do me little favors. I like people who
do me favors.” She flicked the riding crop out, just short of tapping Willow on
the nose, and power rushed back into the void within. Magic surging
through all the empty channels of Willow’s soul, monsoon rains following on the
heels of a summer drought, sparkling, effervescent, limitless, bubbling up to
soothe every ravaged nerve.
Willow moaned in near-orgasmic relief as the nameless, bodiless ache dissolved
before the flood, but the relief fled before a desire to scream like a
frustrated two-year-old. It’s not FAIR! I want my magic back
NOW! She dug her nails into the surface of the nearest candle, leaving
little crescents in the wax. OK, fine, Willow doesn’t get what she
wanted. Again. Big news, not. Repress, retreat, regroup, the
Rosenberg family motto. She snuck a look at her alter ego. It
couldn’t hurt to ask. “What kind of favors?”
Vampire-Willow draped herself across a boulder and sucked on the tip of
her index finger. “Ooooh, lots of terrible, naughty things... or
not. Who knows? Right now, three things, and if you do those, I’ll
let you do anything else you like until I need you again. That’s not a bad
bargain, is it, to have your wings back?”
“No, it sounds pretty suckified, in an open-ended, indentured-for-life
kinda way.” Willow crossed her arms and sat back on her heels. “But
from the absence of any overwhelming zombie compulsion to go and work your
naughty will, I’m beginning to get the idea that you can’t make me do anything I
don’t want to. Aren’t you going to, like, slap a lien on my soul or
something?”
The image writhed, and now it
was the lean, tired countenance of Daniel Tanner looking at her. “Souls
are highly overrated as a medium of exchange. Why don’t you see what’s
required of you? Your first task would be to restore the minds of the
people living in the landfill.”
Willow
blinked. She’d been expecting a request for roast babies or
something. “I was going to do that anyway.”
“You see? I’m not unreasonable.” Another shift of light and
shadow, and Giles was standing there before her, wearing his old librarian’s
armor of tweed and reserve. “My second request is also simple.”
Flicker. Dawn’s gangly form stood in his place. “Use the girl as
the power source for the spell.”
“What?” Darn. Here it comes, the soul-sucking evil part.
“Dawnie? I can’t do that!”
Dawn’s
image reverted to Giles’s again. “Indeed you can--you’ve thought of it
before now. No harm will come to her from it, I give you my word on
that.” Modifications to the spell she’d been working on leaped into her
mind full-formed. “The Key has tremendous power, enough to open every
gateway between every world simultaneously. To siphon off a tithe of that
power to heal the minds of so many will harm nothing.”
She could see it unfurling in her mind’s eye, the
elegant way that Dawn’s latent power could be transformed into the mental energy
necessary to repair the damage done to Glory’s victims. When she’d
designed her revamped version of the spell to draw energy from an external
source, could she truthfully say she hadn’t been thinking about something like
this? “If you’ve got all this vast cosmic power, why do you need
me?”
Faux-Giles shrugged and began to
polish his glasses. “It’s all rather torturous, really,” the measured
English voice said, reflective. “I was, er, evicted from this little
corner of reality some years previously. Since then my associates--” he
waved at the huddle of eyeless men-- “have recouped their numbers, and recent
events have made it possible for them to grant me access to this plane once
more. Mr. Tanner became, quite accidentally, the focus of an incident
which, while insignificant in and of itself, proved to be the proverbial straw
which broke the camel’s back. I suppose you know there are two forces at
work in the cosmos--Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos, Creation and
Destruction--call them what you will. At present the balance between them
is threatened, and I am doing my small part to restore
it.”
Willow frowned. “So you’re
kinda like that guy Buffy met back when Angelus was on the rampage?
Whistler?”
An expression of distaste
crossed the Giles-face. “Not precisely. But you might say we’re in the
same line of work. In any event, my associates established a rapport with
Mr. Tanner, and Mr. Tanner was able to perform a few minor services for me--in
the main, putting me in a limited form of contact with you. However, he is
neither skilled nor stable enough to perform the ritual which you just
performed, which now allows me to channel my not inconsiderable powers through
you to affect the material world. I have power; I desire agency. You
have agency; you desire power. What is more logical than that we ally and
benefit one another?”
Willow plucked at
the strap of her duffle, fiddling with the frayed spot where the buckle rubbed,
little fuzzy nylon fibers frizzing beneath her fingers. It couldn’t force
her to do anything. Check. It would give her the ability to use
magic again. Check. And it hadn’t asked her to do anything in the
roast baby category yet. Check. “Ok. What’s the third
thing?”
It had been considerably easier
checking into a hotel in the middle of the night back in the days when he could
just eat the desk clerk and take over the presidential suite. On the other
hand, Spike had to admit that Hank Summers’s impressive credit limit proved
almost as effective as raw terror in securing them a room despite their
disheveled state. One impassioned wheedle of the hotel laundry staff and a
very long, hot shower involving several brilliant shags later, they’d arrived at
that drowsy, almost-sated point where giving it another go and lying there and
falling asleep were equally attractive options. Spike made yet another
mental note: Install shower in crypt immediately if not sooner. He
supposed they could use the one at Buffy’s place, but the Niblet’s banging on
the door and yelling at them to hurry up in there would be something of a
mood-killer.
A tsunami of applause
burst from the television. “Oi, that’s a cheat if I ever saw one!” Spike
aimed the remote at the screen like a weapon and zapped the Iron Chef into cable
oblivion. “The challenger had it locked up! That simpering little
bint’s probably shagging Morimoto on the side--explosions of happiness in her
mouth my arse!”
“I refuse to take sides,”
Buffy said. She was curled up beside him on the rumpled expanse of the
hotel bed, wearing an oversized t-shirt in bright pink emblazoned with I SAW THE
STARS COME OUT IN HOLLYWOOD in gold glitter--not exactly high fashion, but when
one was trying to find replacement clothing at eleven o’clock at night, it
didn’t do to quibble about what presented itself in the hotel gift shop. “To do
so would be to admit that sea urchin is a real food. What else is
on?”
Spike began power-flipping
through the channels. “Got to be something on with explosions in
it.”
Buffy made a half-hearted
attempt to snag the remote. “How can you tell if it’s any good when you
never stop on one channel for more than half a second?”
“Superior vampire eyesight and fifty years of
telly-watching savvy. It’s a knack.” He brought the remote to
a screeching halt on John Cleese banging a stuffed parrot on a counter.
“There’s quality multicultural programming for you.”
Buffy rolled her eyes and settled back at his side,
holding up one foot and wiggling her toes in front of the glowing screen.
“So, this waking up together thing--if it becomes a habit, will you still love
me when I’ve got leg stubble and a dead cat on my head?”
Apparently she’d failed to notice the post-shower
exploded poodle on his--though from the way her fingers kept sneaking up to play
with the curls he was beginning to get the horrid suspicion that she liked it
that way. If so, she was in for a disappointment; not even the Slayer
could come between him and his century-long love affair with Brilliantine and
its chemical descendants. I draw the line at looking like sodding
Little Lord Fauntleroy. “Pet, I’ll even let you borrow my razor.
Greater love hath no man.”
Buffy
laughed and Spike grew thoughtful. Short of that first night in the Magic
Box and last night at her father’s place, they’d not had much opportunity to
wake up together--one or the other of them always had to drag themselves out of
bed and back to their own domicile in the brightening dawn. And it was
only going to get more inconvenient come summer when the nights grew
shorter...
Somewhere in the back of his
skull, Manly!Independent!Spike grabbed Soppy!Romantic!Spike by the lapels and
gave him a good smack across the chops. Bloody hell, you’re not
thinking of moving in with the chit? Well, of course--who was he
kidding? Soppy!Romantic!Spike would have been picking out rings and
composing pathetic speeches about having a man in the house and making an honest
Slayer of her by now if it were an option. Just seeing her wear that old
ring of his around her neck made him burst with possessive male pride.
Manly!Independent!Spike was reluctantly forced to agree that this was a bit of
all right, and when Insatiable!Horndog!Spike chimed in with the point that
shared quarters would allow for a lot more quality shagging time,
Manly!Independent!Spike threw up his hands and retired to the cerebellum for a
good sulk.
Not that his moving in was
really an option either, given the vigilance of Dawn’s social worker. But
there was a middle ground here, wasn’t there? “Or bring your own--I can
spare a drawer.”
Buffy’s hand, which had
been playing idly across his stomach, tracing the muscles up and down, stopped
dead, and she said in a small quivery voice, “You’d give me a drawer?”
He sat up and looked into her welling sea-green eyes
and ran a thumb over the sweet curve of her lower lip, bewildered. They
didn’t look like unhappy tears. “Sure, love. A whole dresser, if I
can find one good enough to cart home.”
She
gave a little gulping sob and threw her arms around him; Spike had no idea what
it was he’d said, but apparently it had been very much the right thing to
say. Buffy pressed him down into the nest of hotel pillows as her mouth
sought his, her fingers splayed across his chest to cover as much skin as
possible: All this belongs to me. Spike shifted beneath her and ran
a hand over the curve of her hip, up the rising slope of her body. His
palm cradled the soft weight of her breast, her mortal warmth seeping into his
flesh like liquid gold. Buffy made a kitteny little “mmmm” noise as his
thumb drew lazy circles on the crinkling aureole, and she squirmed most
gratifyingly as he tweaked the firm little nub in its center. Why was it
that copping a feel under the t-shirt was somehow sexier than doing the same
thing when she was stark naked?
Though stark
naked had its own advantages. One small warm hand crept down under the
covers and started to demonstrate a few of them, and when she had him thrumming
like a high-tension wire in a hurricane she crawled astride his hips and sank
down, engulfing him in a series of lascivious little wriggles. “You’re
blocking my view of the telly, woman,” Spike growled, mock-severe. Buffy
gave him a smug little smile and rocked forward, pulling the t-shirt over her
head oh so slowly, revealing slim hips, flat belly, twin cherry-tipped
ice-cream-scoop breasts... Oh, yeeessss. Golden hair cascaded round her
shoulders as the shirt came off altogether, and the muscles in her belly and
thighs went taut as she tightened her internal vise-grip on his cock. His
voice went hoarse and his hips bucked involuntarily. “And you can keep right on
doing it.”
In the prosaic sixty-watt glow of
the bedside lamp her eyes held him mesmerized with their changes: storm-tossed
green, misty grey, every shade in between. Her hand brushed his
cheek. “Talk to me, Big Bad,” she whispered. It was an order.
He laced his hands behind his head--he’d
obey, oh, yeah, but he’d take his time about it. “Yeh? What
about?”
That sinful little pink tongue-tip
darted out for a second, and her cheeks flushed a matching pink. “You
know.”
“Oh?” He bucked again,
deliberate this time, caught her around the waist and held her there for a
second in mid-air, half-impaled and gasping, before letting her sink down on him
again, the sweet slippery-warm friction making him groan. “You wanna hear
what a naughty bitch you are?” She nodded, a fractional bob of her head,
still drowning him in those eyes. “How walking down the street watching
that sweet little arse of yours twitch makes me want to throw you down on the
sidewalk and fuck you raw right there? Someday I’m gonna do it, and you
won’t be able to stop me--you won’t want to stop me.” She was writhing
slowly against him now, every movement sending little shudders of bliss through
both of them. “We’ll be screwing on the sidewalk come morning, and the sun
won’t be able to bloody touch me ‘cause you’ll have sent me up in flames
already. Oh, yeh, love, just like that, wring me
dry...”
Buffy said very little when
they made love--when pressed she retorted that he talked enough for the both of
them--but she listened, oh, she listened. She made an epic of their
lovemaking, scribing the lines with teeth and nails across the ivory parchment
of his flesh, her hands moving incessantly over his body, seeking out every
sensitive inch of him, memorizing the planes and curves of muscle and
bone. She reared above him, his golden goddess, his lost little girl, his
Slayer--moist and warm, lips half-parted, a trickle of sweat drawing a path
between those small perfect breasts. She rolled beneath him, her body the
violin to his bow, seperately mute but together drawing forth the music of the
spheres until they arrived at the coda together, and then--then at last she
cried out Spike! Just that, as if his name were the most important thing
in the world, the only possible thing to say at the moment when all the universe
stopped, breathless, waiting upon the fulfillment of their
pleasure.
Afterwards she lay panting across
him, her ear pressed to his chest as if the silence within were music, and his
own breathing slowed and finally segued into a low growl--absolutely,
positively, definitely a growl, since chip or no chip he’d rip the lungs out of
anyone who suggested he was capable of anything so nancified as a purr.
“So does any random offering of used furniture get me this kind of
treatment?”
Buffy giggled. “No, just
drawers. It’s a long story. Damn it!” She sat up, misty
romantic Buffy instantly replaced with pissed-off Buffy. “Anya’s wedding
shower is tomorrow afternoon!”
“And?”
Possibly there were world-threatening and shag-interrupting implications in a
gaggle of demon bints and assorted members of Sunnydale’s Business and
Professional Women Association getting blitzed on wine coolers and regaling Anya
with dirty jokes and a variety of embarrassing underthings, but if so, Spike
failed to see them. Hmm. Focus on the embarrassing
underthings.
Buffy made a wry face.
“And it’ll look pretty shoddy if I don’t have a present for her.
Especially since her maid of honor is another vengeance demon, who, for all I
know, specializes in non-present-givers.” She crawled over to the edge of
the bed and leaned over, scrabbling for the t-shirt. “I have the wedding
present budgeted, but I completely space on the shower, and--”
Her backside bobbed enticingly in the air, a perfect,
luscious peach just waiting for someone to... Insatiable!Horndog!Spike
took over and he lunged, wrapping his hands around her waist, just above arch of
her hips--she was such a tiny thing; he could almost circle her waist with his
fingers--and had her back on the bed and pressed tightly against him in one
effortless heave, his rapidly hardening cock resting in the warm cleft of her
ass. He drew a fingernail lightly down the side of her neck and rasped
into her ear, “Still got your Dad’s plastic, don’t you?” Buffy gasped and
nodded, momentarily incapable of coherent speech. “And you’ve got to take
the dinner togs back anyway, so--just--aahh, you like that, Slayer? I
thought so--pick up something then.”
“It
wouldn’t--” Her eyes closed and she broke off into a high-pitched whimper as he
slid into her again. “Oh. God. Spike. Ohhhh...”
And she was arching forward to allow him better access to that impossibly tight
velvet warmth, drawing him deeper and deeper...
Some considerable time later, the TV burbling on unwatched in the
background, Buffy mumbled, “...be right to use Dad’s card,” into the
pillow. She opened one eye and perked up slightly. “You know, I
really think we’re getting the hang of the not wrecking the furniture
thing. Everything’s still flat. No saggy spots.”
Spike spat out a strand of her hair and
propped his head up on one hand, cocking an eyebrow at the bed, which, while not
a complete loss, looked rather the worse for wear. “That would be because
we’re on the floor now, pet. But if we straighten out that leg and prop
the wastebasket under that corner they won’t notice a thing.” He rolled
over, spooned up against her and began kneading her shoulders. “No
sponging off Daddikins, then--I think this conscience business is highly
over-rated.” He sucked in his cheeks and thought for a moment. There
was another possibility. “I know you haven’t been keen on it in the past,
love, but--assuming no one’s gotten to it already--we could stop back by the
restaurant and prise out a few of those Rudnark teeth. They’re not
stunningly valuable, but a dozen or so of ‘em would fetch enough on the black
magic circuit to pay for a present that wouldn’t make Demon Girl give you the
fish-eye the moment her magical ability to divine price tags comes into
play.”
Buffy stirred uneasily against
him. “Black magic circuit? What are they used
for?”
He shrugged. Why was that any
concern of theirs? “This, that--curses mostly, I think.”
She was frowning--tempted, he could tell. “So
we’d be selling something that someone else could use to turn someone into a
frog or afflict them with ever-growing nose-hair?”
Spike chuckled. “More like excruciating pain in the gut until they
fall over frothing blood at the mouth and--” Buffy’s shoulders locked solid
beneath his hands. Bloody hell. Idiot. Does it never occur
to you to lie to the girl? No, it didn’t, and it wouldn’t matter if it
had; the two of them could see through each other’s deceptions as if through
clear glass. He wracked his mind for something to make it right again, but
rights and wrongs were hopelessly mixed up in his sex-muddled brain at the
moment. Surely there was some rule about it, like not going swimming for
half an hour after a meal--no man should be required to think for thirty minutes
after an orgasm? It was hard enough to mix and match the things his mind
labeled good and bad with the often diametrically opposed things which brought a
glow of satisfaction to his heart under ordinary circumstances. “Which
would, uh, be a bad thing?”
“A very bad
thing,” Buffy said through clenched teeth. She sat up and wrapped the
sheet around herself, looking small and cold and forlorn for all the anger in
her eyes.
“Well... it’s not like we’d be
cursing people ourselves,” Spike offered. That was good, wasn’t it?
Buffy gave him a withering look, and he began to get irritated. Couldn’t
she see he was trying here? Did she have any clue how difficult it was to
navigate your way through life backwards, fighting your basic inclinations every
step of the way? “Oh, come on, love, Demon Girl’s got a wagon-load of
things for sale in the Magic Box that’re the dog’s bollocks for cursing!
It’s all right for her to do it because she’s got a soul and a tax
number?”
The mule-stubborn look crept into
Buffy’s eyes, and Spike knew with sinking certainty that it didn’t matter what
got said from here on in, he was battling for a lost cause. “Giles and
Anya don’t sell anything that can only be used to hurt
people!”
Well. Might as well be hung
for a sheep as for a lamb. Gonna learn sooner or later, love, demons
live for a good fight. “Right. I’ll wager ‘only’ doesn’t matter
a lot when you’ve been a sodding rat for the last three years.”
“Don’t bring Amy into this! She did that to herself
and Willow’s been trying--”
“Oh, yes,
Willow’s been very trying.”
“Don’t change
the subject!”
“And what is the bloody
subject, Your Majesty?”
“You trying to talk
me into selling dangerous demon parts on the black market! It’s
wrong!”
“‘It’s wrong!’” Spike
mimicked. “Well if they weren’t bloody dangerous they wouldn’t be worth
selling, would they? You seemed happy enough to consider it when you
thought they were only good for frog-curses, but--”
“Oh, shut up!” Buffy turned away and huddled under her
sheet. “Why do you have to be so--so--”
Spike cursed under his breath; she looked ready to burst into tears, and
if she did he’d melt as usual and end up petting her head and agreeing with
anything just to get her to stop. “Evil? Sorry, love, it comes with
the fangs.”
She sniffled. “No!
If you were just evil I could kill you! But you have to be s-so damned
g-good to me at the same time!” She wiped her nose on a hank of
sheet. “I was halfway to talking myself into it when ‘excruciating pain’
came up. And I shouldn’t have been. Frogs aren’t any more of the
good than frothing blood at the mouth.” Her eyes were haunted for a
moment. “There really is something dark in me.”
Spike sighed. “Yeh, but that’s not it, pet.” He
stretched out a hand; after a moment she scooted over and curled into his
arms. “Observe. Buffy Summers considers selling nasty demon bits to
the unscrupulous: result, wracking guilt. William the Bloody, Esq.
considers same: result, mild irritation that B. Summers won’t let him go for
it.” She shot him a heartrending look and, as predicted, the remains of
his ire dissolved faster than an ice cube on a Sunnydale sidewalk in July.
“Ah, love, I’m sorry I brought it up. I haven’t gone daft enough to care
about people who aren’t us yet, but I could do a better job of
pretending.”
“Don’t.” Her voice was
tight and hard. “Don’t ever pretend. You
promised.”
“So I did. It cannot be
said I’m a flattering honest man, but I am a plain-dealing villain. I’m
trying, love, I just--” How was it he could face down Rudnark demons without
blinking an eye and be so helpless in the face of her tears? “When it gets
past ‘Eating people bad, Buffy pretty’ I don’t even know where to begin
sometimes.”
Buffy cast her eyes down,
as much to hide her smile as anything else, twisting the sheet in her fingers
into little horns of fabric. If he could get a grin out of her, he
couldn’t have cocked up too badly, could he? “That’s the important thing, I
guess,” she said, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself as much as
him. “That you’re trying.” Then her mouth firmed and she looked up,
meeting his eyes again. “No. The important thing is we’re
trying.” She reached up and ran a finger down the acute angle of his
cheek, tracing the intersecting curve of his lower lip. “It’s just...
every now and then it hits me. You’re not just pretending, or trying to
annoy me. You really, truly don’t get it, here.” She placed a hand
over his heart. “Sometimes it’s as easy as breathing, loving you.
Then a minute later it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I could say the same, and for some of us breathing
takes a little extra effort.” Spike pulled her down into the pillows again and
held her close. “But I’ve always done things the hard way.”
He wondered if he’d ever get it.
Angel could afford to believe in miracles; Spike was grateful for a lack of
disasters. Did he really want to? Angel’s getting it hadn’t been a
pretty sight. In his clearer-eyed moments he could see that his moral
existence from now on would likely consist of a Red Queen’s race to stay where
he was now. With Buffy a warm, sleepy, comfortable weight in his arms,
where he was now did not seem such a bad place to be. They lay there
together, wrapped up in each other and their own thoughts, until the hotel’s
wake-up call startled them back to the world again.
Sunlight was filtering through the blinds, gilding the
sedimentary layers of books and papers spread out before him. Giles
excavated his saucer, took another sip of lukewarm tea and laid his glasses down
on the page before him. He’d heard the morning paper thump against the
door half an hour ago, but hadn’t gone out to retrieve it yet. Xander and
Anya had begged off on him hours ago, and he was left the sole defender of a
play-fort of paper and calfskin. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling
the grit under his eyelids. Fit as he kept himself, his fiftieth birthday
was looming nearer and nearer, and he no longer possessed the resilience to
bounce back from all-nighters with nothing more than a pot of tea and a cold
shower. He’d have to get more sleep before tomorrow if he and Tara planned
to attempt to contact any of the powers which seemed to be circling Sunnydale
like sharks.
The last few days had
been too late to bed, too early to rise, too many journals to pore over, and
frustratingly little gold sieved from the gravel: a handful of volumes out of
the stacks of dozens of bound Watchers’ diaries which barricaded the kitchen
table. Accounts of those few Slayers who’d survived as long or longer than
Buffy Summers, four hundred years worth of observation and expertise--to go back
further he’d have had to contact the Council Library in London, and he wasn’t
sure he wanted to let anyone else know the direction his researches were tending
yet.
Even in light of the cursory reading
he’d been able to give each case history so far, there was a definite pattern
emerging. Slayers who lasted four or more years followed one of two paths:
For most, increasing emotional isolation and intense focus on their slaying,
sometimes to the point that they were barely able to function outside a combat
situation. In a smaller number of cases... well, in Buffy he would have
called it normal behavior--rebellion against Council strictures, over-reliance
upon emotion, increasing independence. Most of this smaller group, he
noted, shared Buffy and Faith’s history of having been missed by the Council’s
screening processes, and had grown up without the years of indoctrination
concerning their destiny. They often had families, ties to the world of
the living.
And almost without
exception, they had ended as Faith had: going rogue, succumbing to the dark lure
of their own power, throwing off their Watcher’s guidance and striking out on
their own. He scanned the list of names on the legal pad, checking it
against the books he’d pulled. A dozen girls, a dozen lives. Could
he read between the lines of the dry, scholarly reports, discern which of these
rebellions were the perfectly normal result of a young woman realizing that her
life was not her own, and which were true descents into
darkness?
Hannah Griesenger, Salzburg,
Called 1623, died 1628, avenging the deaths of her family against the counsel of
her Watcher. Maria Lupe Hernandez, Mexico City, Called 1732, disappeared
1737, reappeared and died 1739 in a battle with reawakened Aztec jaguar
spirits. Kathrine Allston, Edinborough, Called 1868, died 1877, turned
rogue, slain by Council forces in an attempt to restrain her. Linnet
Almont, Marseilles, called 1904, died 1911, staked by her Watcher Vincent Marron
after being turned by the Master of Marseilles...
He got up and stretched, walking a few paces round the table
and feeling all his bones creak in protest. Some future Watcher, no doubt,
would be reading about him: Buffy Anne Summers, Sunnydale, Called 1996, died
1997, 2001 et al., drove Watcher Rupert Giles to drink with a succession of
vampire lovers.
There was so much
left to do before he left--complete the interview project with Spike, give Buffy
all possible information relevant to Travers’s hints, complete the paperwork
signing over the Magic Box to Anya... not to mention the personal packing and
sorting he had yet to take care of. He gazed nearsightedly about the room,
allowing himself a short wallow in mild despair. How he was to complete it
all by the New Year he had no idea...
You
could always stay.
He walked back to his
chair and sat down, sliding his glasses back into place. Spike’s advice
was nothing he hadn’t thought of himself, lying awake in the night in the weeks
after Buffy had returned from the dead. He had no doubt that Spike had
meant it from the heart, however bluntly it had been phrased, and as far as it
went, it was true. But Spike, at heart, was a pack animal: for all he
played at being the cat who walked by himself, he craved a place at the hearth
with the same intensity he craved blood--though having attained it, he’d grumble
loudly about how much better it was to walk by his wild lone. Giles, on
the other hand--he’d been thrust by circumstance into the center of a group, but
while he loved Buffy as a daughter and looked fondly upon Willow as a protégé,
he couldn’t exactly call any of them friends. There was a reserve between
them, a gap of age and attitude bridged more easily by a
hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire than by a forty-some-year-old
introvert.
It wasn’t only emotional
cowardice which drove his flight, he argued, addressing the silent, skeptical
presence in the back of his skull. He’d never asked to become a father
figure, and felt himself ill-suited to the task. He was homesick for green
fields and fogs and buildings that were older than he was and an ocean that was
grey and stormy rather than blue and placid. He wanted a life of his own
again, and conversations with people who had both personal recollections of the
world prior to 1980 and a pulse.
The phone
rang. He sat there through three rings, debating whether or not to let the
answering machine get it, and finally rose and picked it up on the fourth.
“Giles,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Angel.”
After four years his fingers still tightened painfully on
the receiver at the sound of that voice. ‘How nice to hear from you’
seemed inappropriate somehow. Giles could think of only one reason for
Angel calling at this particular time, but if Buffy hadn’t confessed yet, it
wasn’t his place to give the game away. “You sound perturbed.”
Keeping his voice neutral around the vampire was second nature by now, because
he was an adult, and a compassionate man, and Angel was not Angelus. Not at
the moment, anyway. “I hope nothing untoward’s happened to Buffy?”
There was a nervy edge to Angel’s normally laconic
delivery. “That depends on your definition of untoward. Are you
aware of--has she--” Giles realized that in some odd way the vampire was trying
to spare his feelings, and felt a reluctant gratitude. “Buffy and Spike
seem to be very... close. Closer than--I’m worried about
her.”
Giles picked up his teacup.
There must be a technical term for the defensiveness roused by an outsider
questioning one on a decision which, until that moment, one might have been
willing to admit was less than optimal. “Yes, I’m aware of the
situation. I’m no more pleased about it than I was about her liaison with
you, but in the end, I trust Buffy to do the right thing. And oddly
enough, I trust Spike to do the right thing for Buffy, if not the right thing in
general.” Enough to leave the two of them together half a world
away? Manifestly so. How very peculiar.
Angel’s laugh was bitter. “I guess Spike’s not the
only one who’s fallen into bad habits. Giles--Buffy told me the purpose of
her trip down here was to convince the Council to give her and Faith a
salary. Do you think that her... liaison with Spike is going to impress
the Council? You know it’s going to get to them sooner or
later.”
Giles swirled the dregs of his
now-cold tea around in the bottom of his cup, watching the erratic orbits of the
flecks of tea leaf. Jenny had read tea leaves--for fun, she’d said; they
were utterly useless as a method of divining the future. “No. I
think they’ll be appalled, with good reason. I expect threats, ultimatums
and possible attempts on Spike’s, er, life. And in the end...” He found
that he was smiling, ever so slightly. “I expect Buffy to win, because
that’s what Buffy does.”
Angel was silent
for a long while. “I don’t think I expected you to be taking it this
calmly.”
“Neither did I, really, but
apparently I have hidden depths. And if she must be enamored of a vampire,
I find the current situation vastly preferable to the two of them sneaking about
behind my back.”
Silence again. A
hit, a palpable hit... “I suppose you’re prepared to stake him the moment
there’s a sign of anything going wrong?”
“You suppose correctly. And Angel--I hope it need not be said that while
the Council will find out about this eventually, later is preferable to
sooner?”
Another bitter chuckle.
“Well, remember this, Giles--with Spike, the moment you realize something’s gone
wrong is already far too late. I speak from personal
experience.”
And with that he hung up,
leaving Giles to the contemplation of his tea leaves. A hat, was it?
He rotated the cup. Or a boat? Giles set the receiver down and took
the cup into the kitchen, rinsed it out, and put it into the dishwasher.
With another weary stretch he left the kitchen and started up the stairs towards
his bedroom.
So much depended upon one’s
point of
view.
“I’m sure we rolled these up last year.”
Dawn hauled another olive-green tangle Christmas lights out of the box and
tugged on one of the looser coils, which had the effect of drawing three other
loops more tightly about each other. “We always roll them up.”
“Maybe you forgot,” Tara said. “Last year was
pretty hairy, with your Mom sick.” It was more likely, she thought, that
Joyce had rolled them up every year; she remembered all the little things which
had inexplicably gone undone after he own mother’s death, things she never could
remember seeing her mother actually doing. She pulled out another box of
ornaments--like most of the others, missing at least one ball. Dawn took
it from her and stared at the fragile glass spheres, tracing the curve of one,
then another, with her index finger. When Dawn had come into existence,
had some of them disappeared, to correspond to the ones a small child would have
broken over the years? Or had memories rearranged themselves to give half
of the young Buffy’s breakage quotient to her new sister?
If Dawn still thought about things like that (and Tara
imagined she did) she didn’t share them with anyone, save perhaps Spike.
Now she set the red and gold balls aside, flicked her hair over her shoulders
and dove back into the cardboard box, pulling out another rat’s-nest of lights
and frowning at it. “This is totally skanked up. All the sockets
are, like, corroded or something. Maybe we should just buy new ones.
They’re only three or four dollars a string these days.”
“Just remember, money spent on lights is money that
can’t be spent on presents.”
Tara
felt a wave of relief which dissipated as soon as she realized that the speaker
wasn’t Willow. Buffy was standing at the top of the basement stairs, with
Spike right behind her, gazing curiously over her shoulder at the sea of ravaged
boxes covering the basement floor.
“Buffy!” Dawn dropped the coil of wire and leaped to her feet, her face
lighting up. “You’re home!” Suddenly self-conscious, she tossed her
hair again and affected indifference. “Not that I care or anything.
Hey, Spike.”
“Hullo, Bit.” Spike
looked askance at the holiday wreckage. “Now I’ll grant traditions may
have evolved, but in my day we decked the halls, not the
floor.”
Tara held up a plastic holly wreath
and peered through it, suddenly nostalgic for real evergreen boughs and pine
scent that didn’t come from an aerosol can. “We decided on a post-modern,
deconstructionist Christmas this year. I’m so glad you’re back,” she said,
getting to her feet. “Did everything go all right?”
Buffy paused at the foot of the stairs, posed, and made a
‘voila!’ gesture with both hands. “I didn’t kill Faith, Angel didn’t kill
Spike, everyone’s still in the correct body, it’s all good.” She walked
over to the nearest box and dropped to her knees. “Oh--Aunt Caroline’s
bells!” She pulled out a set of spun-glass bells which had fallen out of
their tissue wrapping and held them up to the light, inspecting them for
damage. “And here’s Norton the Christmas Moose--” Spike, looking slightly
ill, mouthed ‘Christmas Moose?’ at Tara, who shrugged. Buffy extracted a
rather moldy-looking plaster moose with a tatty green pipe-cleaner wreath in its
chipped horns. Her face fell. “Dawn made him for Mom in fourth grade--he’s
lost all his sequins! What happened to this stuff? It wasn’t like
this when I died, I know it!” Her expression was more tragic than one
sequin-less moose seemed to warrant. “Dawn?”
Dawn, distraught as if the lack of Christmas ornament continuity were her
personal failing, rummaged through her own box for something salvageable.
“The pipes down here burst a month or so before you, uh, got back, and the
basement flooded, and the people who were gonna buy the house backed out before
Dad could get them to close, and Dad had to get the whole house re-piped before
he could put it back up for sale--boy was he mad! But anyway, all the
stuff we had stored down here got soaked. I tried to dry out as much as I
could before we had to put all the furniture into storage, but Dad wanted
to--and I--and it’s all wrecked--and--”
Buffy hastened to assure Dawn that none of it was her fault, and the two of them
went into serious Christmas triage mode: “Here’s those grotty plastic ones--of
course they survived--Oh! It’s Grandma’s old bubble lights!
but they didn’t work anyway--Here’s the ones Mom bought when we moved here--The
glass ones should be all right if we can clean off all this moldy tissue
paper--Have you looked at the tree yet?”
Tara backed off with a certain sense of relief and sat down on the lowest
step of the stairs; it was a little weird poking through the remnants of another
family’s past. Spike sidled over to her as the sisters exclaimed and
commiserated over the various unearthed ornaments. “Where’s Will? We
didn’t see her about when we got in.”
“She’s
upstairs. Asleep. She--she was gone all night. Meditating, she
said.” Tara bit her lip. “Something to help her recover her
magic. She’s been conked out all day--what time is it?”
“About eight.” It was occasionally handy having
a vampire around with an absolute sense of the sun’s position. “We left
L.A. around five-thirty, soon as the sun started going down. Red hasn’t
been up at all?” He sounded a little concerned, and Tara felt slightly
less paranoid; if Spike was worried, she had a right to be
panicked.
“She got up around noon and had a
peanut butter sandwich and went back to bed. I’m getting really worried
about her, Spike. She’s been--”
“Sleeping,” Willow said, appearing at the top of the stairs in her turn, wrapped
up in a robe and what she referred to as her Anya-freaking fuzzy slippers.
Tara’s breath caught; Willow looked... looked... glowing, her hair aflame in the
light of the bare hanging bulb overhead. “Sorry for not hopping onboard
the Christmas spirit choo-choo, but still technically Jewish
here.”
Tara scrambled to her feet and
grinned, deciding that Buffy and Dawn had the ornament situation covered.
“Christmas trees are a pagan tradition. I’m reclaiming them in the name of
Wiccan Liberation.” She smoothed her skirt around her knees and started up
the stairs. “You feeling better, hon? You want me to fix you some
soup?”
Willow smiled back, the cheerful
pixie-grin Tara hadn’t seen in far too long. “Oh... all right, twist my
arm.” She turned and all but skipped off towards the kitchen. Tara
followed more sedately. A glance in the direction of the living room
showed her Buffy’s luggage and a large shopping bag stuffed with wrapped
packages--probably Christmas presents from Dawn and Buffy’s father--heaped
haphazardly over the armchair.
Willow
went over to the kitchen table and opened up her laptop, running her fingers
over the keyboard as if greeting an old friend. Tara pulled a saucepan
from the cupboard, ran a little water into it and set it on the stove to boil
while she began rustling up ingredients--chicken stock from last night’s dinner,
a handful of rice, leftover vegetables from Thursday, a dash of salt, a pinch of
garlic... might as well make enough for everyone. It was mildly wiggy how
Willow and Buffy and Dawn, children of affluence, regarded her ability to cook
and sew and clean house as something as mysterious and astonishing as her
ability to cast spells. When they went shopping, Buffy followed her around
the grocery store in a state of bewildered gratitude, nodding blankly as Tara
dispensed domestic wisdom--Buffy could follow a recipe, but somehow she’d never
learned how to cook. Leftovers are your friend, the McClay
mantra. It was weird when such prosaic skills put her in demand. “So... do
you think it helped? The meditating?”
Willow rested her chin in her hand and looked extremely pleased with
herself. “Yup. It really did.” The laptop cheeped at
her. “Darn it, I have a hundred and eleven e-mails and I’m a week behind
on Sluggy Freelance.”
“Really? I mean
about the helping, not the e-mail. You’re on your own there.” Tara
checked the refrigerator and yelled downstairs, “Spike, we’re out of pig’s
blood--do you--?”
A muffled bellow from
below--“Got some in the boot of the car. Keys are on the coffee
table.”
“Thanks.” She glanced at
Willow. She looked so much better; relaxed, happy, that little pinched
stress-line gone from between her brows. It was wonderful--almost too good
to be true. She hated to think that Willow might have taken some dangerous
shortcut, but, well, Willow had a tendency to take dangerous shortcuts.
“It’s not too--too draining, is it, honey? The meditation, I mean.
You seemed pretty wasted this morning, and you never mentioned what kind of
techniques you were trying--”
A flash of
irritation was there and gone in Willow’s eyes. “Oh, nothing special, a
little chant here, a little incense there, stretch the ol’ magical muscles, om
mane padme e-i e-i om... you know--eclectic.” She kicked back in her chair and
waggled the toes of her slippers so that the bunny ears flipped back and
forth. “I don’t think the major Willow zone-out will be happening
again. I got a little bitty bit carried away with the whole
one-with-self-and-universe-ness, is all. All better now. And
looky--” She waved a hand and Spike’s car keys came zipping through the air from
the living room to land in her palm with a jingle. “No stress, no
strain!”
“That’s great!” Tara tried to
quash her unease in the face of Willow’s proud grin. It wasn’t that she
suspected Willow of taking dangerous shortcuts, but, well, Willow had been known
to take dangerous shortcuts. “Just don’t take it too fast--”
“Will!” Buffy’s face appeared in the doorway to
the basement, atop a box full of assorted Christmas junk. She maneuvered
the box out into the living room and dumped down in front of the
television. “Wow! You’re back with the magic-slingin’! Tres
cool! Are you going to be up for the big loony hunt?”
Tara started to object; no matter how beneficial
Willow’s new exercises might be, there was no way she’d be prepared to cast
spells at that level so quickly. Before she could say anything, Dawn
bounced up the stairs with another boxload of decorations, a disgruntled Spike
following with an armload of metal struts and faux greenery which must have been
the tree. “...goose,” he was growling. “Turkey is a Yank
abomination. And none of these poncy little lights, either.
Candles. At least then you’ve got half a chance of the house burning down
and injecting some fun into the holidays.”
“Yeah, yeah, vampire, evil, bah humbug,” Dawn said. “For a rebel you’re
sure an old fogey. Now put it over on the couch.”
“Hey, guys, check it out,” Willow said, following the
parade into the living room. Tara, a feeling of inexplicable dread curling
her toes, turned the heat down on her soup and tagged after. Willow took a
stance in the center of the living room. She gestured dramatically,
sweeping both arms in a wide circle; in the long-sleeved blue terrycloth robe
there was an unfortunate echo of Sorcerer’s Apprentice to the motion.
“Arise, O Tannenbaum!”
“Oi!” The scruffy green
plastic boughs jerked to life and Spike dropped them as if they’d been dipped in
holy water. He backed hastily away from the couch, wiping his hands on the
seat of his jeans. “Give a bloke some warning, Red!”
Willow just grinned at him, and gestured again. Like
some stop-motion animation, the central support of the tree twitched into motion
and planted itself in the base, telescoping up to full height. In a flurry
of artificial needles the branches assembled and rooted themselves to the trunk,
whish-click-whish. Everyone stood open-mouthed until the topmost branch
clicked into place. The tree leaned drunkenly to one side; Willow bent her
fingers and it shivered and straightened, then shook like a dog emerging from a
pool. Before their eyes the shabby old branches grew green and fresh, and
the scent of pine which Tara had been missing so a moment before wafted through
the living room. A shimmer of golden light washed over the boxes of
ornaments, and twenty years of scuffs and chips and dings disappeared; Norton
the Christmas Moose glittered with his full complement of sequins, and every
single ball reflected back the light in pristine glory. One of the strings
of lights reared into the air, an electrical cobra, and began to interlace
itself through the branches.
“Wait,
wait!” Dawn cried. “Don’t!”
“Halt!” The string of lights pattered lifeless to the floor and Willow
looked a little disappointed. “What’s the matter? I’m not
tired. Not even a tiny bit. Rarin’ to go.”
Dawn shuffled her feet and cast a beseeching look at Buffy.
“It’s just... I like decorating it. You know, by
hand.”
“Wow,” Buffy repeated, obviously
impressed. “Wills, I can’t--I mean, wow. Thank you. But I
think we can take it from here.”
“That’s
half the fun,” Tara said with a pointed look at Willow, who was starting to look
pouty. “Besides, you should save your strength for the, uh, loony
hunt.”
“Oh, all right.” Willow flopped
down on the couch and surveyed her work with a beaming smile. “But I’m
pretty sure that’s not going to be a problem any more.” She aimed her
finger at the tree and made a trigger-pulling motion. “The big gun is
back"
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