Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1455889.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con,
      Underage
  Category:
      Gen, F/M, Other, F/F, M/M
  Fandom:
      Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer, Firefly, Serenity_(2005)
  Relationship:
      Rupert_Giles/Buffy_Summers, background_Cordelia_Chase/Xander_Harris,
      background_Xander_Harris/Joyce_Summers, Oz_Osbourne/Willow_Rosenberg, Amy
      Madison/Willow_Rosenberg, Minor_or_Background_Relationship(s), Hank
      Summers/Original_Female_Characters, Buffy_Summers_&_Hank_Summers, Buffy
      Summers_&_Joyce_Summers, Hank_Summers_&_Rupert_Giles, retrospective
      Harmony_Kendall/Principal_Snyder, Buffy_Summers_&_Watchers_Council,
      Gwendolyn_Post_&_Watchers_Council, Sheila_Rosenberg_&_Willow_Rosenberg,
      retrospective_Rupert_Giles/Ethan_Rayne, Malcolm_Reynolds/Inara_Serra,
      Ethan_Rayne/Inara_Serra, Wash_Washburne/Zoë_Washburne, very_slight_past
      Wash/Saffron, Malcolm_Reynolds_&_Zoë_Washburne, Allan_Finch/Mayor_Richard
      Wilkins, Ethan_Rayne/Saffron_(Firefly)
  Character:
      Rupert_Giles, Buffy_Summers, Hank_Summers, Willow_Rosenberg, Principal
      Snyder, Xander_Harris, Cordelia_Chase, Harmony_Kendall, Owen_Thurman,
      Spike_(BtVS), Drusilla_(BtVS), Original_Characters, Minor_Characters,
      Angel_(BtVS), Devon_(BtVS), Anyanka, Dr._Wilkinson_(BtVS), Maggie_Walsh,
      Ms._Barton_(BtVS), World_Leaders, Soldiers_-_Character, Politicians_-
      Character, Doctors_-_Character, Nurses_-_Character, Vampires_-_Character,
      Faith_Lehane, Emma_(Travers)_Dunstan_OC, Laura_Sterling_OC, Lydia_(BtVS),
      Gwendolyn_Post, Watchers_Council, Potential_Slayers_(BtVS), Joyce
      Summers, Sheila_Rosenberg, Ira_Rosenberg, Katherine_Madison, Watching
      Families, Council_Staff, Ethan_Rayne, Andrew_Giles_OC, Malcolm_Reynolds,
      Zoë_Washburne, River_Tam, Simon_Tam, Monty_(Firefly), Hoban_"Wash"
      Washburne, Inara_Serra, Kaylee_Frye, Jayne_Cobb, Mayor_Richard_Wilkins,
      Saffron_(Firefly), Minor_&_Original_Characters_having_a_field_day_and
      becoming_major_characters
  Additional Tags:
      Angst, Horror, Poltergeists, Witchcraft, Missing_Persons, Father-Daughter
      Relationship, Mother-Daughter_Relationship, Fatherhood, Motherhood,
      Responsibility, Pregnancy, Unplanned_Pregnancy, Teen_Pregnancy, Irony,
      Rape/Non-con_Elements, Statutory_Rape, Mutual_Non-Con, Magic_Made_Them_Do
      It, Episode:_s02e19_I_Only_Have_Eyes_For_You, Episode:_s03e09_The_Wish,
      What-If, Be_Careful_What_You_Wish_For, World_Without_Men, Martial_Law_-
      Freeform, Bad_Parenting, Magical_Accidents, Magical_Girls, The_City_Dump,
      Time_Going_All_Wonky, Time_Travel, Crossover, Episode:_s01e11_Trash, Blue
      Sun, Psychic_Abilities, Religion, Goddesses, Psychic_River, Psychotic
      River, Earth_That_Was, Spaceships, Outer_Space, Space_Pirates, Father-Son
      Relationship, Same_Song;_Different_Verse, Werewolves, Werewolves_in
      Space, Jealous_Wash, Sport_Flirting, schrodinger's_cat_-_Freeform, Inside
      the_Box, Outside_the_box, Stuck_in_time, Murder-Suicide, Virgin
      Sacrifice, The_Eternal_Council, Priorities, some_Canon_Dialogue, sexual
      warfare, Manipulation, Appearances, authenticity, Orgasm_Control, Orgasm
      Delay, Fakeing_Orgasms, Faking_Emotions, Faking_Social_Interactions,
      Present_Tense, Past_Tense, Changing_Tenses, Shifting_perspectives, Social
      Roles, Expectations, Truth_Spells, Miracles, bloodlines, Family_Drama,
      Family_Secrets, A_certain_God_who_shall_remain_nameless, Oh!_THAT
      'Goddess_Hecate'?, Sequels_"The_Presumption"_and_"A_Stitch_In_Time"
      anticipated_in_2018_and_2019, Sorry_for_the_lag, I_swear_I_haven't
      forgotten_this
  Series:
      Part 7 of Blood_Screaming
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-06-02 Completed: 2014-10-12 Chapters: 9/9 Words: 47896
****** Missing People ******
by MyEvilTwin_(ProtoNeoRomantic)
Summary
     A lot of people in Sunnydale are dealing with specific person shaped
     holes in their lives. Some of them, maybe not so much dealing. Some
     of them maybe not so much lives. ...After a while, maybe not all that
     specific either. And then, hey, "Toto, I don't think we're in
     Sunnydale anymore!"
Notes
     The Firefly parts start in Chapter 6.
     For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story
     Mechanics and Themes, see series description.
See the end of the work for more notes
  This work was inspired by
      Lady's_Choice by ProtoNeoRomantic, Who_Do_You_Think_You_Are? by
      ProtoNeoRomantic
***** Desperate Times *****
Chapter Summary
     Hank, Giles, Buffy and Snyder are all feeling trapped and confused by
     there responsibilities, by ghostly goings on and by the consequences
     of their recent sexual adventures. Owen Thurman once again confronts
     his feelings for Buffy.
Hank meant to get home by 7:00. He really did. But only working three days a
week, no matter how careful Janet was with his schedule, there was always one
last thing to squeeze in. Okay, technically, in this particular instance, that
one last thing had been his penis, which he had needed to squeeze into Janet’s
cunt, but it was a special circumstance. Normally, Janet had a strict policy
against doing it at the office, but with everything that was going wrong in his
life, she wanted to show her support. And to prove that he was still hers.
Given how much he was relying on her, Hank didn’t need the hassle involved in
making a point of the fact that he wasn’t. Besides, his life was stressful and
he needed sex. And Mitzie was out with bronchitis. And he was not about to have
either of them set foot in Joyce’s house.
Of course, the squeezing in had not ended with the sex. There were still and
always actual work things that had to be squared away for the marathon day he
needed to have to morrow to get ready for his four day weekend. By the time
Hank actually got home it was 8:15. He was sure Buffy would be pissed, or gone.
He hadn’t dared to call her and tell her when he was leaving, figuring she
would just take it as permission to break curfew for two and a half-hours. Or
maybe to have Angel over to the house. Or Mr. Giles. Hank didn’t believe for a
minute that she had only been fucking herself last night. She had had a
partner. Live and in person and in his—no, in Joyce's—house. The only question
left in his mind was which son-of-a-bitch it was. Well, that and what he was
about to walk in on now.
Buffy had dinner on the table waiting for him, still hot, thanks to the magic
of the crock pot. And the fact that she had lived with him enough years to know
what ‘I’ll definitely be home no later than seven’ really meant. She’d even
made a gallon of iced tea and set the table complete with placemats and napkin
rings. She was sitting there in the dining room, wearing a nice, conservative
outfit, drumming her fingers nervously on the table cloth like a person with a
lot of energy to burn. Or something important to say.
“Damn,” Hank said, surprised at how upset he was by news he’d thought he had
already known, “you are pregnant aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Buffy admitted nervously. “And I’m having it, so there is no point even
arguing about it.” Hank sat down, served himself and started eating in silence,
steaming. Buffy stared at her plate and pushed the food around a little with
her fork, waiting for him to blow.
“You’re sure it’s his?” Hank asked after a long while. Grief struggled with
anger in his voice. Buffy couldn’t meet his eyes. She tried to nod, but it was
such a shitty thing to say. Especially if she was going to someday eventually
admit that it really was Giles’ baby. Which if they were going to stay together
and be a family, how could she not? But as of this moment, it was still an
accusation that could send him to prison. Or out of the country. Or worse,
apparently, if the creepy Council found out about it. Nothing at all had been
worked out about that Buffy suddenly realized. Had Giles even said that they
were going to stay a couple and keep the baby together or had she only assumed
it?
“Pretty sure,” Buffy mumbled, still looking down at her plate, leaving herself
the out that she could have miscalculated rather than having manipulated him
with a cruel and deliberate lie.
“Goddammit!” Hank shouted, slamming her fist on the table, “Don’t play games
with me, little girl! Who else have you been fucking!”
“Nobody!” Buffy shouted back, succumbing to tears. But she knew that he knew
that she was lying. Hank was deeply angry and ashamed of his daughter. He
wished desperately that Joyce was here right now to somehow fix this, or at
least be jointly responsible for the fact that it couldn't be fixed.
And yet, somewhere in the midst of that, Hank found a little space to be
relieved. Buffy was clearly not a hundred percent sure that her mother’s killer
had fathered her baby, and even if that was wishful thinking on her part, at
least it gave Hank a pretty good idea who he had actually scared out of her
bedroom the previous night. It was a pretty sorry state of affairs when a man
could be relieved that a forty-something teacher was sneaking into his teenage
daughter’s bedroom window in the middle of the night to fuck her, but he was.
And suddenly, to his even greater relief, and maybe just a little sneaking
sense of triumph, he had a pretty good idea what he was going to do about it.
****
Giles walked into the library and turned on the lights. It was the same as it
had ever been. Occult books filled the shelves. Weapons rested unseen in their
cabinets. His private office waited, jammed with its neatly organized clutter
of items significant only to him. But it was different. It didn’t feel like his
private domain anymore, his place of refuge, his stronghold in the fight
against evil. It felt vulnerable, exposed, very much like a public school
library. A ridiculous place to carry on a clandestine war. Or a secret affair.
He stared a long while at the seamlessly repaired floor, at the place where the
Earthquake had cracked it nine months ago. The mouth of Hell waited there,
beneath his feet, as it always had. But tonight it felt more alive somehow.
Watchful. He felt very much like a middle-aged librarian, quite as horrified by
his circumstances as one might imagine such a presumably milquetoast person to
be.
It wasn’t only that he feared the practical consequences of being caught in a
relationship that transgressed the laws and mores of both societies in which he
simultaneously lived his life, though that was no frivolous matter in itself.
It was more that he had no trouble seeing the point of view from which those
laws and mores could be judged to be correct. As for example, the point of view
of anyone who thought it might be wrong to use a position of authority to gain
sexual access to a girl whose mother was too young to go out with you. It had
been a very long time since he’d thought of himself as the kind of man that
parents couldn’t trust around their daughters, and almost as long since he’d
thought of himself as someone the Council couldn’t trust carry out its most
basic edicts. Unlike in his youth, he was not proud of either distinction.
Buffy would be furious of course at the suggestion that he was taking advantage
of her. It implied that he had her at a disadvantage. The only trouble was that
it was true. Granted, Buffy was different from other high school girls. She was
exceptional. She was dedicated. She was self-directed. She was a brave, strong,
resourceful, responsible, formidable young woman who would someday be far more
than a match for him. She was also a volcano of sexual energy in desperate need
of an outlet, and she walked in a world that no mere boy could safely inhabit.
Indeed, she was in every possible way oh so very mature for her age. Which was
still only seventeen years old.
He had loved and fucked and killed and lied and had his helpful hand in saving
the world and keeping it a mess long before she had walked or crawled or cried
or breathed or swam into the universe as a hopeful and deceptively simple
little cell. Even if a Slayer was by definition a woman and an Englishman a
minor until he turned twenty-one and told his father to get stuffed, he still
had thirteen times the experience of adult human life that she had. He
understood things about her and about himself and about men and women and
humans in general that she could not yet begin to imagine, things that cannot
be learned without being lived. To pretend otherwise was a dangerous and
unforgivable self-deception.
Yes, he was taking advantage. Buffy depended on him, and not just in the ways
that all lovers do. He was her main source of guidance as to who and what she
was, not only as the Slayer, but as an aspiring adult human person. She came to
him with the problems and concerns she withheld from her own parents, including
information about her romantic and sexual life that no man outside her family
had any right to know. He was trusted with these confidences at least in part
because the Council had placed him in a position of authority over her. More
importantly, though she’d never admit it, she accepted his authority over her
as the price of his guidance and protection.
‘Protection’, Rupert laughed bitterly to himself. He knew what ‘protection’
Watchers really offered Slayers, and at what price. But Buffy didn’t, not yet.
As Celeste had put it, shortly before her own death, ‘the shepherd may be fond
of the sheep, but he makes his money at the slaughter house.’ Buffy may have
thought she was choosing her own destiny in pursuing this relationship; but
Rupert knew full well that if she had had any idea what the man she had invited
into her heart, into her body, planned to put her through in ten short months,
she would have chosen differently. Rupert was not Buffy’s equal. He was her
elder and in many ways, her inferior. He was not her partner but her handler, a
shepherd in the pay of butchers. The fact that he was in love with her didn’t
change any of that, it just made it all an even more thoroughly tangled mess.
To make matters still worse, now that her mother was gone and her relationship
with her father remained as strained and unhealthy as it so very clearly was,
he could feel her leaning into him, desperate to depend on him even more. And
why shouldn't she. Besides being the closest thing to a trusted parental figure
in her own increasingly confusing life, he was also the father of her unborn
child. She had aright to depend upon him. He was not at all sure; however, that
that gave him a corresponding right to take up the reciprocal role, to demand
what fathers to be (what husbands) typically demanded of the mothers to be who
were their wives.
She had not asked of him and he had not made any such commitment to her. In the
eyes of the Council, he must not. By the laws of the State of California, he
could not. And both of those revered and formidable consolations of human
beings, each in its own right holding the power of life and death over both he
and Buffy, were still blissfully, ignorantly, innocently, trustinglysupporting
and rewarding him for his work as an educator and quasi-parental guardian over
her. By the very concrete and morally/legally binding means of a monthly direct
deposit. Which made him feel, on top of everything else, as though he were once
again a practicing thief.
Tearing his eyes away from the floor, leaving the Gordian knot unsolved, Giles
walked to his office intending to make a start of some of the work that had
piled up while he was gone. In the middle of his desk was a large cardboard
box. Scrawled across it in black magic marker was the legend, ‘J.C.’s stuff.’
The box was full of personal things; books, a sweater, a day planner, one
corkscrew-like ‘earring’; which had obviously been left in her classroom.
There were a handful of not-so-floppy disks as well, which Giles realized, for
Jenny, could very easily be personal things. It struck him again how little
they had walked in each other’s worlds. He had called it a betrayal that she
kept her origins from him and counted himself honest for sharing the secrets
that he was a Watcher, Buffy the Slayer. But he had shared so little of what
itmeant to be a Watcher. He thought again of the days he had wasted being angry
with her, feeling wounded and superior because she had kept her own counsel,
made her own judgments about whom to trust and what to reveal, just as he had.
Suddenly, Giles felt... not a presence exactly, nor an absence, as he had felt
in the cemetery, but a sort of calling to a presence, a longing that promised
to be fulfilled. As if obeying a command, he reached into the box and pulled
out a yellow 3½ inch disk. It felt heavy in his hand. Powerful. Dangerous. The
disk bore a hand-printed label: RESTORATION.
With a little cry of surprise, Giles dropped the disk back into the box.
Whatever it was that had reached out to him was gone. That label couldn’t mean
what he had momentarily thought it meant.  Surely he had heard Willow or Oz or
someone use that same term in a computer related context.  It was something for
fixing system crashes or what have you. That was all it was. He was sure of it.
His hands still shaking, Giles reached into the box again, this time seizing
upon something familiar and comforting. It was a large rose quartz suspended
from a leather strap. He had given it to Jenny after the incident with Eyghon,
correctly guessing that she would know of its healing powers. The gift had been
well received, if not the giver. She had told him during their next
reconciliation that she’d worn it next to her heart in the intervening weeks,
that it had helped to bring her to a decision to come back to him.
Tying the strap around his neck, Rupert let the large crystal drop beneath his
shirt, where his tie helped to conceal it. He still didn’t feel Jenny’s
presence, but he felt comforted a little. Of course, he realized, if Jenny had
been present, even in spirit, she couldn’t have been very happy with him. Her
blood had not been cold when he’d betrayed her, and with the one person he had
always put above her when she was alive, with Buffy.
****
Buffy didn’t have to worry about waking up to patrol. She couldn’t have
possibly slept. She lay in the dark like a cat, ears pricked up to listen for
the sounds and silences that would tell her her dad had finally gone to sleep.
Hank hadn’t said a lot about her pregnancy except that she ought to ‘think some
more’ about her decision. Buffy had said she would just to get him off her ass.
There was no sense fighting about it. It wasn’t like she had a lot of strong
logical arguments to make. She couldn’t even really say she’d wrapped her mind
around what was about to happen. She was firm in her resolve, and she could
just about picture holding her tiny, precious baby in her arms; but when it
came to details, like where the kid would be while she was at school, or the
Bronze, or the cemetery or the Hellmouth, the picture got a pretty sketchy.
Would they live with her dad? With Giles? Would it ever be safe to admit he was
the father? If not, how were they going to live around that? She didn’t know.
It was a lot to not know.
At Midnight, when she hadn’t heard any wakeful noises in the house for almost
an hour, Buffy got up and got dressed, not in the slacks and sweater she’d worn
for her dad, but a tight little blue number too short to meet the tops of her
thigh high boots. She felt a desperate longing, a need, not exactly for sex
although she did want that, and specifically to finish it too. But what she
wanted more that anything was belonging, acceptance, clarification of her
status. She wanted it the way a seventh grade girl wants the one really
important party invitation that lets her know that all the other cheerleaders
agree that she really is a cheerleader too and not just a girl that some “fair-
minded” adult insisted on letting wear the uniform. She wanted Giles to tell
her she was his girlfriend.
She went braless and thought about skipping panties too. After all, when a guy
couldn't make up his mind in this short life, there was really nothing left for
a girl to do but to make it up for him and with Giles... that girl had better
be pretty persuasive. But she couldn’t quite justify climbing in and out of her
widow with her bare bush hanging out, even if half the town had already seen
it. Instead, she found some lacy black panties that her father didn’t know
about, climbed down that old, familiar tree as nimbly as a cat in search of an
unwary midnight snack, and went looking for Giles.
When she found the side door into the main corridor of Sunnydale High unlocked,
Buffy smiled. It was never locked until Giles locked it, when he closed the
library, usually late at night, and often without going home himself. She’d
known Giles couldn’t stay away from the library for a whole 24 hours that he
wasn’t actually hospitalized, even if it did mean walking in Sunnydale at
night.
Snyder groused a little about Giles’ late nights on security grounds, but since
he never did anything about it, Buffy figured he was secretly thrilled to have
someone under him who would work double hours for free. She suspected he’d be
less thrilled to know who his supposed-to-be-subordinate was actually working
all those hours for. Of course, Buffy grinned, he wouldn’t be exactly thrilled
about some of the other things that were about to be going on in that library
either. Buffy’s skin was singing with anticipation of Giles’ touch, her minds
ear already hearing the pledge of love and coupleyness that he would have no
choice but to make her, when she rounded the corner by the trophy case... and
was not alone.
“I’m not afraid to use it, I swear!” a boy shouted at a girl he was holding at
gunpoint.
“Oh my God!” the girl sobbed, running towards Buffy. Buffy passed her, laying
on speed, fractions of seconds separating her from the gunman.
“Don’t walk away from me, bitch!” he screamed, the instant before Buffy kicked
the gun from his hand. Her skirt road up so high, she could feel it bunching
around her waist. She was extremely happy with her choice to wear panties after
all.
As a janitor came running up to check on the girl, the boy gasped, “What
happened?” He seemed as terrified as anyone. Which Buffy found somehow
unsettling, bordering on infuriating.
“That’s what I’d like to know!” she demanded, clinging defensively to her
anger, as if he were trying to take it from her unjustly.
“Thank you,” he burbled, taking both her hands, “Thank you! If you hadn’t been
here...” He looked at his girlfriend miserably. She ran to him and fell into
his arms, both of them sobbing. “My god,” he wailed, “I can’t believe I
almost—! I don’t evenown a gun.”
“I don’t see any gun,” the janitor said, as if they all might have imagined it.
“Thank you,” said the girl earnestly, turning towards Buffy, but still holding
tight to her would be murderer. “You saved us.”
“I savedyou,” Buffy corrected hotly, “from this creepazoid who was about to
kill you!”
“No,” the girl tried to explain, “It… wasn’t like that.”
“I didn’t see any gun,” the janitor repeated.
“But I—!” Buffy started to argue, still angry and confused.
“Do you want to talk to the police,” the girl asked, gently reminding Buffy
that the whole damn town knew all about her business, or thought they did.
“You know what?” she said, frustrated, clamping down on both her temper and her
tongue, “forget about it. You want to get yourself killed, fine. I was never
here.” What could she do? She took the quick cemeteries and allies tour of
fabulous Sunnydale, California, lashing out at trees and shadows in the absence
of real enemies even more than was usual, then went home to catch a few hours
in the sack. There would be plenty of time for love or war or whatever this was
tomorrow, she tried to reassure herself. One thing about Giles, she might not
always understand where he was coming from or what direction he was going to
take, but she always knew where to find him.
****
Giles awoke to the sound of footsteps entering the library. The morning sun
found his face pillowed on the cleavage of an open book on a table strewn with
texts of a similar subject matter. “Oh. Hello, Owen,” he yawned, glad to see
the friendly, familiar face, one of his few regulars.
“Hey, Mr. Giles,” Owen said, grinning shyly, the way he did before any
conversation that might last longer than thirty seconds. “I’m really glad
you’re back.” Then a look of concern passed over his face. “Are you alright,
though?” he asked.
“Oh, erm... yes,” Giles lied, “I was just...”
Owen examined one of the books. “Pondering weak and weary over many a quaint
and curious volume of forgotten lore?” he asked with a sort of sardonic
sympathy.
Giles sighed. “Precisely,” he admitted, not really expecting the boy to
understand. Owen looked entirely too intrigued. He knew nothing about Mr.
Giles’ mystical background, but he thought he knew what had happened to Jenny
Calendar. “Did you...erm... want something?” Giles asked uncomfortably.
“Oh, yeah,” said Owen, seeming to come to himself, turning suddenly grim. “Can
I ask you something?”
“Of course,” Giles said. “Sit down.” He could count on one hand the number of
times a student, other than those who knew him as Buffy’s Watcher, had come to
him for advice. He felt relieved to be able to serve as an honest, helpful
faculty member for once, if only for a few moments. He supposed it went a
little ways towards justifying that portion of his finances which was supported
the the property taxes of each and every one of his neighbors.
“Are women really turned on by intellectual men?” the boy asked earnestly, “I
mean, not in high school, obviously, but in real life?”
Giles sighed, He wasn’t sure this was really the type of wisdom he ought to be
imparting. “Well... it depends on the woman really,” he assayed at any rate.
Owen sighed too. “So that means no, basically?”
Giles gave a small shrug, “I wouldn’t say that. Intellectual men are attractive
to intelligent women, and I would say vice versa.”
“The thing is,” Owen went on, “There’s only one girl I want. I feel like I’m
going to die if I can’t have her! But—I mean I guess she’s smart and
everything, but she’s... kind of wild? Which is what makes her so hot, she’s...
a force of nature! She’s like… a volcano! I can't sleep at night thinking what
it would be like to be... one with... a woman like that! I think I would be
literally willing to die afterward if just once... just for a few minutes....
But she thinks I’m boring. She hasn’t said ten words to me since our one and
only date last year.”
Giles sighed more deeply still. God must really hate him for something. Murder,
sodomy, criminal seduction and fornication with demons, for example? “I’m not
really sure I’m the right person to ask about this,” he warned stiffly.
“And she does read,” Owen went on, exactly as if he had met with some
encouragement. “She’s about the only person who comes in here more than I do.
But she also does stuff.”
“Buffy,” said Giles, since it was painfully clear of whom Owen spoke, “is...
Buffy. I don’t think advice about women in general would translate to Buffy, or
vice versa.”
“Maybe I should try asking her out again,” Owen mused.
It had to be the murders, Giles decided. No depth of sexual depravity could
warrant this kind of torture. “I don’t... really feel... comfortable with this
conversation,” he said aloud.
“Okay, sorry,” Owen mumbled, stung. “I’ll just… get some poetry books or
something.”
“Listen,” said Giles, taking pity on the boy, “You’ll... hit your stride
eventually. If Buffy never… responds to you, someone else will, and you’ll be
just as glad.”
“Do you really think that?” Owen asked skeptically.
“So all experience suggests.” Giles assured him with a small, benign smile.
“So what should I do in the meantime?” Owen asked.
“Well... I’ve always found William Blake to be good for a little...
philosophical perspective,” Giles suggested.
“‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desire!’” Owen
recited brightly, with entirely too much conviction. “Thanks!” he declared,
“You’ve been a really big help!”
“I... erm... hope so,” Giles murmured dubiously, as Owen leapt up and headed
for the door without any poetry books at all. He was left with the uneasy
feeling that a very bad situation was about to be made oddly worse.
**** 
“What do you mean, let you go?” Angel demanded, “Where are you going?”
“Home, to Ohio,” Drusilla answered sadly.
“Then why do you need a gun?!” Angel demanded.
“Don’t worry,” Drusilla assured him, “I was too much of a coward to use it.
Don’t worry about... what happens to me. You...deserve better.”
“No,” said Angel, putting the gun to his own temple, “I killed you!” slowly
applying pressure to the trigger. “I don’t deserve anything!”
The shot roused Buffy with a scream on her lips. Unless it was the alarm clock,
loudly announcing the advent of seven a.m. She slammed her hand down on the
clock hard and fast, knowing that it would be broken, not giving a damn. The
house was empty and silent. Buffy missed her mom. She was also exhausted. But
there was nothing for her to do but go to school. She couldn’t just sit in that
empty house all day. Besides, she needed to see Giles. She needed to be
reassured that he was still hers, that whatever kind of trouble they were in,
they were in it together. She just had to keep telling herself that however
ambiguous their status had seemed in the lonely dead of night, he had actually
made it pretty clear at his apartment yesterday (by actions if not by words,
exactly) that he was going to be with her. Even if he had been less than
enthused about the idea of her having his baby.
****
“What do you mean he’s not here?” Snyder demanded.
“Just what I said,” Ms. Barton replied, “Coach Marin isn’t here. He didn’t show
up for bus duty, and he didn’t call in. First period starts in twenty minutes.
I have to find someone to cover a ninth grade gym class, and I can’t do it
because I have to cover Computer Science.”
“Did you try the pool complex?” Snyder pressed. “You know how obsessed he is
with the swim team.”
“I’ve looked everywhere,” she insisted. “I even tried Ruth’s office. He’s
always ‘consulting’ with her first thing in the morning.”
“Well, has she seen him?” Snyder snapped.
Ms. Barton shrugged. “She wasn’t there. The place was locked up.” She paused
for a moment, then looked pleasantly scandalized. “You don’t suppose they
finally ran away together?” she suggested, a twinkle in her eye.
For a moment Snyder involuntarily imagined the fat nurse and the bullet headed
coach writhing against one another, gasping in more-than-typically-breathless
ecstasy. It made him think, with a sickening shiver, of the sex he had had
yesterday with Harmony Kendall. It seemed equally wrong, equally disgusting.
But it wasn't. It was however, at least as unlikely in his opinion. “I’d be
shocked,” said sourly, trying to banish both imagination and memory. “No...
something strange is going on here.”
Ms. Barton sighed. “Isn’t that our school motto?” she asked.
Snyder favored her with a withering look. “You cover the computer lab,” he told
her. “Coach Hawkins can cover more than one gym class at a time. They can play
dodgeball. I have things to do. I’m still the principal around here, damnit!
 Whatever is going on here, nothing changes that!  This is my school!  Mine!
 And I say what does and does not happen here!”  
But even as he said so, his senses were filled with the loathsome yet
unsettlingly arousing memory of orgasaming inside the hateful, beautiful,
underaged, overused, belatedly resisting but alway unconsenting Harmony
Kendall, and his soul was sick with regret and terror.  And with a much less
definable but altogether horrible feeling of powerlessness to make something so
awful not have happen to him, which he couldn't help believing was very much
how it must feel to have been raped.   
***** Desperate Measures *****
Chapter Summary
     As ghosts, gunplay and vampire invasions persist at Sunnydale High,
     can Snyder regain control? When Buffy and Willow must fight a
     poltergeist on their own while Giles tries to contact Jenny Calendar,
     will it be Amy Madison to the rescue? Meanwhile, Cordelia
     contemplates revenge, Owen asks Buffy to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and
     Hank makes Giles an offer he can't refuse.
Buffy was dressed and at school in record time. They still had nearly twenty
minutes until the first bell. In her mind, she was already walking into the
library, already being reassuringly, supportively caressed by Giles, being
cossetted in his arms. But she never made it that far. Just inside the front
door, Owen Thurman lumbered into her path and stood there smiling shyly,
ignoring her obvious desire for him to be anywhere else. “Excuse me,” she said,
stepping around him, and fairly sprinting down the hallway, wondering for the
millionth time how such a smart, good-looking guy could be a complete oaf.
Long-legged Owen loped alongside her at a leisurely pace.
“I’ll walk with you,” he offered, doing exactly that.
“Suit yourself,” said Buffy dryly. And he did.
“So...” he said when they were close enough to the library for Buffy taste the
hope of escape it offered, “Are you planning to go to that dance tomorrow
night?” He stopped and stood with his back to the library door, blocking her
way like the oblivious, riddle spouting guardian of some enchanted passageway.
“The one where the girls ask theboys?” she reminded him pointedly.
“That’s the one,” he acknowledged, oafishly embarrassed, “And if you're... I
mean you know, if you want to,” he finished hesitantly but hopefully, grinning
in that maddening, aw shucks way, “I thought you might ask me?”
“Can’t,” Buffy answered immediately, with maybe just a little more bite than
the situation called for. “I'm busy tomorrow night. I have to walk down town at
two a.m. and picked a fight in a bar(!)” God, had she once actually thought of
this... boy as alluringly broody and mysterious? What did it take to get rid of
someone who couldn’t take eleven months of pointed silence as a hint? Of
course, she guessed she could always confess that she was carrying Giles’ love
child. Then again, there was no telling what, in Owen’s mind, might qualify as
a turn on. Maybe the thought of following his lexicographic idol where some but
not many had gone before would make him hard as a rock. Or maybe he would see
dating a pregnant girl as a grand adventure in being a devil-may-conform, risk-
taking rebel without a cause.
“Well... Okay,” Owen said, heading off down the hallway, confused and dejected,
“I guess I’ll... see you around.”
“Yes,” said Buffy, “I’m sure you will.”
“Hello,” said Giles in a tired, oddly sad way, looking up from one of his books
as Buffy entered the library.
“Hey,” she replied, smiling nervously. Sneaking a quick look around, she leaned
down and tried to kiss him on the lips. He turned his head away, fussing with
some papers. “Hey,” she repeated, unpleasantly puzzled, “what gives?”
“This... isn’t the place,” said Giles tensely.
“Well I wasn’t going to do anything... much,” Buffy pouted. Although she might
very well have if he'd given her half a chance.
Giles gave her a stern look, which shouldn’t have been sexy, but was. “Very
grave things are happening here,” he said seriously.
“Well that’s unusual,” Buffy quipped, but Giles was far from laughing. He told
her in extremely vague terms about a ‘presence’ he had felt in the library last
night, and in extremely precise terms about both incidents that had occurred
with Harmony Kendall the day before. Before she could interject, he also
acknowledged the parallels between the second incident and the scene she had
witnessed the night before. “The janitor told me, about all of it,” he
explained. “And of course, there is the involvement of the language used in
your dreams, and of course… what you yourself experienced in English class
yesterday.”
Buffy looked miserably guilty. She felt it too. But she quickly traded her
guilt for confusion when Giles said, “I’m afraid it’s terribly obvious what’s
happening here. It’s Jenny. She’s… trapped here. Because of us. Because of...
what we've done. And she’s not going anywhere until she’s found a way to have
it out with me.”
*** 
Snyder knelt diffidently on the mildew stained tile, peering down into the
opening. They were coming up through the foundation! They couldn’t do this,
damn it. It was out of bounds! There were supposed to be agreements in place.
There were supposed to be rules! The raid on Parent Teacher Night had been
violation enough, but this had all the earmarks of a permanent grab for
territory. “There are too Goddamn many tunnels in this town,” he murmured to
himself. He felt guilt for speaking such sedition against Sunnydale, but things
were beyond out of hand!
Snyder rose, and by the time he reached his feet, he’d reached a decision. “I
want a school wide announcement,” he told Mrs. Haulk as soon as he got back to
the office. “Until further notice, this campus closes at four p.m. Everything
locked up. Any student, teacher or employee caught on campus after hours will
be harshly disciplined. Any practices, games, meets, tryouts or club activities
of any kind that can’t be moved up or held off campus will be canceled, is that
clear?”
The secretary nodded. “What about the dance on Friday?” she asked. “Should we
cancel that too?”
“No!” Snyder snapped. “The dance is off campus, has been for years.” This was
about one thing and one thing only, he decided. Vampires. As for... the other
problem, he would ride it out. He was still the principal of this school and by
God he would set it's schedule! In doing so, he would not be forced to
accommodate the inappropriate behavior of students or faculty, dead or alive.
**** 
“What a load of horse hooey!” Willow exclaimed.
“No shit,” Buffy agreed miserably. “The gun, the Sadie Hawkins Dance, it’s all
a pattern that doesn’t fit with the way Miss Calendar died. But there’s never
going to be any convincing him of that. There’s too much that does fit.
Especially when you really, really want it to. Like the whole… student/teacher…
sex thing—God! Poor Harmony!—and, I mean, it’s not like he’s wrong exactly
about what we did or how she would have felt about it. It just… doesn’t happen
to be what’s actually going on.”
“Agreed,” Willow acknowledged. “But he probably is right about it being a ghost
though, a poltergeist. Which means, he’s probably also right—or half right
anyway—about what to do about it. We have to find out who’s ghost it really is
and help them work through whatever it is that they’re so pissed off about.”
Buffy started to respond with a slightly snarky comment about having enough of
her own problems to solve without becoming a therapist for ghosts, but when she
opened her mouth something ranker than sarcasm threatened to come out. She ran
for the girls’ room, Willow following close behind. The world was spinning. She
felt too unsteady leaning over the toilet. She sat down on the floor with her
back against the stall door....
Grace knelt on the bathroom floor, retching, weeping. This couldn’t be
happening. But it was. She cursed the day she’d ever come to Sunnydale. She
cursed the day she’d ever fallen in love. Love(!) At seventeen that might have
been an excuse, but she was thirty-two, and there was no excuse for it. She had
chosen to have sex with a high school student. And she had gotten caught. The
hard way. What was she going to do? She wished she had two one-way tickets to a
country where poets were the acknowledged ‘legislators of mankind.’ She wished
she had whatever quality allowed a person to go down to Mexico, have a surgeon
carve away her sins, and come back wholehearted and free to love again. She
wished the Earth would open its jaws and swallow her whole, that she could end
the agony of scrabbling at her fate in desperate hope of salvation and finally
be damned once and for all.
 ****
“Mr. Giles?” the voice was warm, polite, friendly even, so it was with no small
shock that Giles found himself looking up into the face of Hank 'I have a gun
and I'm coming to kill you' Summers. Giles stammered and stumbled over his
tongue as he took several tries to coordinate standing up, putting his book
down, marking his place, and extending his hand. Hank accepted and shook it
with a small smile that, with no real reason that he could put his finger on,
Giles found decidedly unsettling.
“I think I'll have a seat, if you don't mind,” Hank invited himself, amused at
the librarian's distress.
“Erm, yes, please,” he managed, still off balance.
“I wanted to apologize, for the other day,” Hank offered with a warm, easy
smile, enjoying the fact that this left his companion even more confused, but
unable to say so.
“Well I... I suppose everyone's emotions were running a little... a little
high,” the Englishman finally managed. Hank felt his assessment of the
situation ever more corroborated. An innocent man wouldn't have been so quick
to accept such a tepid apology for exposing him to such a dangerous accusation.
“I realized something,” Hank went on, “about the other day. Buffy, comes to you
for advise, for guidance. You're the one she wanted to tell that she was
pregnant before anyone else. She trusts you. And she's a pretty smart girl. She
must have pretty good reasons.
“I have business to get back to, back in L.A. But Buffy has to live here, with
a parent or legal guardian. I know it's a lot to ask, but well, you're here
anyway, and...” Hank produced a sheaf of legal looking papers from a slim
leather portfolio. “So I had Hal draw up these Temporary Guardianship papers
this morning. Apparently, he's pretty well acquainted with all the local
judges. He thinks we might be able to get it approved this afternoon.”
“Good lord! Are you serious?” Giles gasped, clearly distressed.
Hank gave him a hard look, his eyes narrowed and his smile twisted with grim,
cruel amusement. “Are you going to tell me some reason why I shouldn't be?” he
asked coolly, “some conflict of interests you might have that I should know
about? Some reason I shouldn't trust her with you?”
Giles' eyes widened in surprise and mild horror as he caught up to the game
that was being played. But Hank wasn't finished. “See in the old days,” he
said, “when one man messed with another man's daughter, there were only a few
things he might do. He might cut off his balls, he might kill him, or he might
make him marry her. Well... this is the twentieth century. People don't act
like that anymore. They mostly just call the police, let them handle it.
“But see, I think there is always something to be learned from the old ways of
doing things. If a man had to marry a girl in that situation, then he'd be
responsible for her. He, not her father, would be living with the consequences
of his actions. Now, I think that's very fair. But the problem with that is,
he'd have too much control over the situation. He'd be, absolved. It forecloses
all the other options.”
Hank grinned savagely, “I'm a nineties guy,” he mused, “I like to keep my
options open. Sign here. I need to get back to work.”
**** 
Buffy awoke slumped in a bathroom stall with her face pressed against the cool
metal partition. The whole front of her shirt was splattered with watery,
insubstantial vomit. Clearly she should have eaten breakfast. “Buffy?” Willow
called worriedly, apparently not for the first time. “Are you alright.”
Buffy wiped the vomit from her shirt as well as she could, which wasn’t well,
and opened the stall door. “No,” she admitted, gratefully taking the glass of
water that Willow held out to her. “I’m not alright.” She looked for feet under
all the stalls again before adding. “I’m pregnant. Giles knows. I think that’s
at least half of why he’s freaking out. I wasn’t not telling you, I just wanted
to tell you all about this ghost thing before we got sidetracked.”
“Wow,” Willow said.
“I’m going to have a baby!” Buffy agreed.
“Wow!” Willow repeated, as if genuinely surprised that one condition might be
expected to lead to the other, which Buffy guessed a lot of people might be.
Her dad certainly was. And Giles. They were quiet for a few seconds. It was
about to be a few seconds too long when Willow said, “I had sex. With Oz.” It
was Buffy’s turn to be stunned. They would have talked more, but third period
(Chemistry) was starting.
Both Xander and Cordelia were missing. Normally, their friends might have
presumed they were blissfully committing lewd acts in a mop closet, but even
with everything that was going on, Willow and even Buffy could not help but to
have heard what everyone was saying about their breaking up, and why. Maybe
they’re somewhere making up?Willow suggested, scrawling on her notebook where
it lay on the table between them. Buffy looked doubtful. Obviously a
misunderstanding.Willow added. ‘Duh,’ Buffy’s eyes said. But whose? She wrote.
Willow gave nod/shrug of acknowledgment. Most likely the bystanders had missed
whatever the fight was really about, preferring to take some sarcastic comment
of one or the other combatant at face value because it was so fun to believe,
which meant that Cordelia was probably still fuming about whatever the real
deal was.
Buffy suddenly looked so very sad that Willow knew she wasn’t just thinking of
Xander and Cordelia anymore. And then, Willow felt pretty low herself. Because
she had no idea if or when she was going to get her mom back either. And the
whole situation was so very much more entirely her fault. To distract them both
she wrote: I got asked to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, sort of.
Buffy smiled in the direction of a laugh. Me too actually,she wrote. What is it
with the guys around here? They seem to have a problem with the whole 'ladies’
choice’ concept. Then the light dawned. Not Amy? Willow favored her with a look
of miserable, apologetic acknowledgment. Wow. Buffy wrote. A second passed. Was
she mad? Buffy asked. BOLO for curses? Willow looked more miserable and
apologetic still. Buffy absorbed the implication of her look but couldn’t quite
believe it. ??!!she demanded.
I need her help with my magicWillow explained, stopping herself just short of
referring to something Buffy still didn’t know. Buffy was giving her a look
anyway. A worried, skeptical look, closer than Buffy usually got to judging
when only humans were involved. Willow felt extremely judged. The explanation
she had given was not a good one. Well, at least Buffy didn’t look depressed
anymore. But she did look more doubtful than reassured when Willow added, I bet
Amy could help us find a spell to talk to this ghost.
**** 
BEEP: “Hello... it's me... again.... Cordelia? If you're listening please...
please call me.” BEEP: “Cordelia? Cordelia I love you, please, please pick up!”
BEEP: “Cordelia, I'm sorry, okay? Look I know you're there this is stupid,
alright? Just pick up.” BEEP: “Okay, so I shouldn't have said that last thing,
I mean you have a right to be mad at me, I know that, I'm an asshole, just
please, please, when you feel like it, if you feel like it, call me?” BEEP:
“Hi, it's me, again. It's been... seven... and a half minutes [nervous laugh]
so I'm getting you know a little better at waiting. But listen, if I could just
talk to you... Please, call me?” BEEP...
Cordelia sat in her darkened bedroom, lights out, curtains drawn, and let the
drone and warble of Xander's voice, punctuated by the beeping of her answering
machine, wash over and around and through her, willing it to become a
meaningless gray noise, like waves pounding on a rocky shore, like whales
sounding. She sat cross legged on her bed, still wearing the pajamas she had
thrown on without showering the night before, still in her streaked and uneven
makeup. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, but she was no longer crying. She sat
with a tea tray in her lap, dozens of photographs spread before her. Pictures
of her with Xander. Every picture she had of him alone or with his kindergarten
paramour or the daughter of his latest slut, she had already burned in a great,
blazing fire in her bathroom sink, leaving the enamel slightly scorched, about
which she did not care. Now with scissors, matches and an incense burner, she
was setting about the more delicate task of cutting his hateful face and form
from every photo they had ever taken together and sending each and every image
of him to its own fiery oblivion.
This wasn't how she had meant to spend her day. She had meant to go see Harmony
in the hospital. To swallow her pride, admit what a fool she had been, to beg
the forgiveness of the one real friend who had tried to warn her about what a
creep and a loser Xander really was, and to reach out to her in her suffering
while she still might be low enough herself to reach back. But they weren't
letting anyone in.
Whatever had happened to Harmony, whether she had actually gone crazy and tried
to kill the principal like everyone was saying or whether he had really, truly
given her a reason, something a lot stranger than either of those things was
going on. The Harmony Cordelia knew, had known since preschool, would have
never had the balls to confront anyone head-on like that without a dozen other
people validating her every move, no matter how good a reason she had, or
thought she had. Not even if she had been raped. Especially not, actually. On
her own, Harmony could not bear up emotionally under a slanderous attack on her
actually very natural hair color, let alone... something so viscous and
personal. Without the support of a gang of friends or a mob of wannabes,
Harmony wouldn't get mad or get even, she would just get hurt.
Cordelia's heart ached thinking back to that horrible day in the second grade,
of the little blond girl with crooked teeth and crooked bangs that she had held
in her arms in the girls room of East Sunndydale Lower Elementary School, while
she sobbed and sobbed, crumpled in on herself like a paper doll, broken,
betrayed, “You're supposed to be mybest friend. How could you... how could
you... make fun of me like that? With those girls!”
“I'm sorry!” Cordelia had wept right along with her. “I just wanted... I just
wanted to not be the one that gets picked on anymore!”
“I know that!” Harmony had wailed, “But you're my bestfriend!”
And there was no argument against that. Not at seven years old with four years
of history already behind you, back into the mists of time immemorial. The
choice was laid before Cordelia stark and bare. She could be cool or she could
be loyal. She could be a queen or she could be a friend. And she had wanted to
be a queen. She had wanted it with all her heart. But with Harmony sobbing in
her arms, crumbling into her, she had dug in her heals with the stubbornness of
a Chase and made a third choice.
“Listen,” she'd said, “I'm smarter than all of those girl. You're prettier than
all of those girls. We're richer than all of those girls. We can becoolerthan
all of those girls. And we will be, together, cuz you're my best friend.”
“Promise?” Harmony had sniffled hopefully.
“I promise,” Cordelia had assured her, “always, no matter what. I promise.” And
with the ironic, innocently-strivging-to-be-jaded smile of a bright almost-
eight-year-old girl who thinks she's sophisticated because she can follow the
plot of an R-rated movie it will take her years to fully understand, Cordelia
had added, “I'm going to be the coolest girl ever. I'm going to rule this
school and I'm taking you with me. Betty and Veronica Take Over the World!” And
they had. And it had torn them apart.
Being the Queen, and knowing she herself had made it happen, had made Cordelia
feel validated, triumphant, but at the same time stifled; superior yet alone.
There was so much that had to be done strategically, to suit her role rather
than to suit herself. The pleasures of the popular life were bitter sweet,
never to taste, always à la mode. But Harmony didn't see it that way. She more
than triumphed in her role as the Queen's Handmaiden. She throve. Braces on,
braces off, a few years hard study of trends and techniques in hair, makeup,
clothes and strategic snubbing, and Harmony had taken to being a cold hot bitch
like a fish to water. It frightened Cordelia sometimes to see her own power
over people, the things they would stoop to and stretch to to please her. It
never frightened Harmony, never seemed to make her feel tired or strained. They
were the bitches, the enforcers, the wearers of the proverbial (but certainly
not literal) red scrunchy. And that was the way it had to be. The way it was.
As hard a thing as it had been for Cordelia to walk away from all that she had
worked to build over all those years, it had also been a relief, a release, not
to have to keep it up anymore. Their was something thrilling about making that
choice, to be able to make the strategic 'right' decision to stay on top but to
refuse, to get her righteous individuality on and walk away. Like a Veronica.
But nobody really ever wanted to be Betty. And Harmony certainly wasn't. She
was a Hydra headed Heather, the kind of friend who always made you feel like
you were talking to a mirror, totally alone. After all those years, it had
seemed the biggest relief of all, at last, to be able to forsake her, without
guilt, to be the betrayed rather than the betrayer, to let Harmony have the
Cool Rule of the School, while Cordelia sloughed her off and moved past her. To
something more like being grown.
And then again there was reality. And the reality that settled on Cordelia, as
she sat alone in her room, clipping and burning, was that she was not a Heather
and not a Veronica, not a villain or a hero. She was a fool. A romantic sucker.
Who had lost her best friend and her place in the world. Over a guy. A lying,
cheating, stupid, dorky, too-poor-to-pay-attention guy. A guy who was beneath
her. A guy who didn't love her. And her best friend was alone and suffering and
forsaken by the world, even more than she was. And none of this ever would have
happened, if they had stuck together, like she had promised. If she hadn't
fallen for a creep like Alexander Harris.
God how Cordelia wished she had a friend now to help her, to put things right,
and to make Xander pay, for everything she had lost, and everything he had
done!
**** 
When the announcement was made in fourth period, all of the gossipers of
Sunnydale High started having second thought about whether it was really
Harmony or Principal Snyder who had gone nuts after all. There was wailing and
gnashing of teeth among the ranks of every club and organization. Jocks
demanded an explanation. Cheerleaders called for Snyder’s head on a plate. He
must be out of his mind! There was no way they could get everything done before
4:00! If they had to have the games before 4:00, when would they practice? And
if they couldn't have the games, what was the point? Why have a High School at
all?
And if Snyder was out of his mind, why believe him over Harmony? Especially
when no one was even allowed to talk to her, to find out anything for
themselves. Clearly the authorities were covering something up. The principal
must be fired, imprisoned, run out of town on a rail. Before the rest of the
basketball season had to be forfeited, and the band failed to compete in All-
Region and all the routines of the Drill Team and the Pep Squad and the
Cheerleading Squad and the Swing Choir all went straight to crap. Ergo,
Principal Snyder was guilty of rape, and of having Harmony locked away in a
hospital to shut her up.
And it was in this atmosphere of seething unrest, that Mr. Miller found himself
trying to impart a few facts about an unsettled period in American History to a
restless, agitated group of eleventh graders. “Miss Summers!” he called
hopefully, his eye alighting on one student whom he at least knew would be too
out of the loop to be very caught up in any gossip or plans for student revolt,
“Can you tell me how restrictions on child labor impacted the jobless rate in
the U.S. in the 1930s?”
Grace gave James a miserable, longing look, “How are you enjoying that book I
loaned you? The Hemmingway?”
“Miss Summers? Ahem. Miss Summers?”
“Oh, um, I’m sorry,” Buffy murmured, “what was the question?”
“Child labor, Miss Summers?”
“Well... I’m against it,” Buffy said with a nervous half-smile.
“Its effect on the labor market, Miss Summers,” Mr. Miller insisted, much
tenser than his usual self today, as everyone was.
“Well there was a market... as always... for labor... so if there were no
children laboring... then there must have been more jobs for grownups to
labor...at, which would give them more market power...”
“Thus driving wages...?” Miller prompted.
“Up?” Buffy guessed, making a pained face.
“Yes,” said Mr. Miller, “the effect should have been to drive wages up.
“Mr. Walker,” he said, picking another outsider to engage, “Can you tell me
what factors if any mitigated this tendency of wages to rise in the face of
child labor restrictions?”
At first, he didn't respond. Mr. Miller had the unsettling feeling that
something was very, very wrong. He felt a... presence... he felt... called.
Buffy's attention, like everyone else's was caught by Mr. Miller's stricken
look and sudden intake of breath. The class followed his eyes, which were fixed
in terror on Cameron Walker as the boy rose from his seat, slowly, shaking.
Suddenly, he held a gun in his hand, leveled at Mr. Miller. No one had seen him
raise it. It was as though it had been there all along. Buffy was in motion,
flying through the air towards him as he cried out from the depths of an
anguished soul, as if Mr. Miller's question had broken his heart, “Don't do
that damn it! Don't talk to me like I'm some stupid k—” An instant before the
gun went off, Buffy's flying kick landed in the middle of Cam's chest. They
were both thrown to the floor amidst a chaos of screaming, scattering students
and overturned desks.
Suddenly, Mr. Miller found himself crouching behind his desk. He felt... more
himself, but no less filled with terror. A few inches high and wide of where
his head had just been, there was a bullet hole in the chalkboard. Buffy
Summers was pulling Cameron Walker to his feet, twisting his arms behind his
back and demanding, more of the room in general than of Cam, “Okay, so where's
the gun?”
“Gun?” said Mr. Miller, getting his wits about him realizing what was
happening, and not happening for the first time, realizing it right down to the
horrible truth about Harmony Kendall, “There are no guns here, Miss Summers.
This is a High School Classroom. Everyone. Please. Take your seats. Now!”
Everyone looked at everyone else as if someone among them would know what to
do, but the only person who seemed certain of anything was Mr. Miller, who was
insisting that they all sit down. They sat down. He went on with the lesson. As
if nothing had happened. They all might have convinced themselves that nothing
had. But their was still a bullet hole in the chalk board.
**** 
“And nobody heard anything?” Buffy asked Willow, taking her tray and sitting
down across a picnic table from her and Amy, whom she tried, even in her
agitated state, to politely acknowledge. She still wasn't sure how she felt
about Willow and Amy doing more magic, especially together, but she had to
admit, they didn't seem to have a lot of great options right now.
“Well, we wouldn't,” Willow pointed out, “hear anything. Mr. Miller's room is
soundproofed. It used to be the old music room.”
“The music room?” Amy asked, her eyes lighting with a spark of recognition. “Oh
my God, I know what this is about. I know what all of this is about. This is
about Grace Newman.”
***** As You Wish *****
Chapter Summary
     Amy knows stuff about ghosts. Spike is a fool for love. Buffy tries
     one more time to bring Giles to his senses, with shocking results.
     And then Cordelia makes a wish.
“When I was on the yearbook staff freshman year,” Amy explained, “or tried to
be, none of the older kids wanted me around. They'd all been working together,
doing the same jobs, having the same laughs for a couple of years already. So
they made me 'archivist'. I had to catalog all the old yearbooks and index who
was in them, any unusual features or events from each year. It was make work,
go away work, but I learned some interesting things, and when I would get bored
sometimes, I looked up the things I found, and found out more.” The three girls
huddled together around one of the smaller library tables, one of the ones that
was rows of bookshelves that felt like walls away from the tightly closed door
to the office where Giles was hiding, blinds drawn, classical music turned up,
pouring over his goddamned books, trying to find the mystical means to dial
867-5309. Pushing down hard on everything she didn't want to feel about that,
Buffy focused her attention on the book that Amy had spread on the table before
them, the yearbook of Sunnydale High School for 1955.
“Oh, Wow!” Buffy said, looking an the full page glossy picture with it's facing
blank verse obituary entitled In Memorium Grace Newman, “I dreamed about this
woman!”
“And this guy?” Amy asked, turning to another page and pointing to the one
eighth page portrait of a skinny kid in a letterman’s jacket.
“Yes!” Buffy replied stunned.
“James Stanley,” Amy said grimly, confirming the text that accompanied the
picture.
“A student and a teacher,” Buffy acknowledged. “That make sense. It seemed, in
my dreams I mean, like there was something going on between them.”
“Yeah, there was,” Amy confirmed. “Right up until he killed her. He shot her to
death on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance. Then he went into the old music
room and blew his brains out.”
“Oh, god!” Willow gasped, “that's terrible.”
Amy nodded, cool and professional, seeming to enjoy the role of detached
expert. “Terrible,” she said knowingly, “is what gets ghost trapped. Wishes
that never came true, unresolved conflicts, unacted desires, the things that
did happen that you can never...” her smugness seemed to falter a little,
“never take back.” Amy dropped her eyes. Before she did, she glanced at Willow.
Was it a longing glance, or was Buffy only imagining that? If so, Willow must
have imagined it too. She shifted uncomfortably, her smile pained and guilty,
her eyes sad.
“So,” Buffy said, feeling the sadness tugging her down, trying to keep pushing
past it, “It's definitely one of them. Based on the violence and everything,
I'm going to say him.”
“I don't know,” Amy argued sounding equally down, “being a victim can make a
person feel pretty violent.” There was a shudder in her voice as she said this,
of unpleasant memories. “I remember when my—during the whole... body swap
thing, wanting to just smash the whole world to bits. If I'd had as much
nothing left to fear as the ghost of Grace Newman has, I might have.”
“It's both of them,” Willow concluded miserably, adding her voice to the trio
of gloom. “This dance they keep doing is a duet. Two to tango, just like Snyder
and Harmony. Just like... all these other couples. They both died here. They're
both trapped here. Playing and replaying their regrets.” Buffy startled just a
little when she realized that she knew for a fact she was not imagining the
look that Willow had given Amy when she'd said that. A look of miserable,
helpless, agonizing apology. But more than that. This was not 'sorry I went a
little out of bounds the other night' regret. This was ongoing regret.
“Well they were doomed from the start,” Amy said, looking dolefully into
Willow's eyes. “They could never... it would never have worked for them. They
weren't even in the right categories to be a match. Like two left shoes, or a
sock and a glove. There's no resolving that.”
Buffy looked down at her hands to avoid the pitying look she could feel Willow
getting ready to throw in her direction. Her heart and her stomach together
were balled into one giant tangle of knots. She must be brainsick thinking she
could be with Giles. That they could be a really, truly out in the open couple,
a family even. She was not a partner to him, she told herself mournfully. She
was a trap in which he was afraid of getting caught. A trap which he was so
eager to escape that a fantasy of having to confront Jenny's vengeful spirit
and be forced to repent and go back to his own adult kind seemed attractive by
comparison.
“She was pregnant,” Buffy said. “That must be why he killed her. They were
already trapped.”
“That doesn't have to be a trap, Buffy!” Willow assured her fiercely, taking
her hand under the table in a way that got Amy's undivided attention.
Buffy pulled her hand away and turned from them slightly, letting her hair
screen her scarlet face. “No,” she mumbled, “lots of ways out of that.” But
their weren't lots. There was only one way out. One way that felt like saying,
'I give up. I don't deserve to have this. I don't deserve to have anything.
Ever.'
~~~~
______“♫Run and catch. ♪
___________“♫Run and catch. ♪
________________“♫The lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.♪”
The sound of Drusilla’s singing echoed eerily through the ruined church.
Edwards had retired to some dark corner with his convalescent wench to have
quiet, urgent, pitiful sex, throughout which she continued speaking in tongues
while he grunted softly like a man taking a difficult but long needed shit.
Children or something chillingly like them cavorted and romped through dim,
damp passageways filled with the shrills and echos of their chimp-like chatters
and shrieks, playing some damned game.
Spike sat staring at the massive cross above the altar. It was covered with a
thick purple velvet cloth that Edwards had found tucked in some hidey hole, but
it was still there, staring back at him. There would be no hunting today, nor
probably tonight either. Everyone had had their fill of Karl. A meal was not
the issue. And not one of them was strong enough and sane enough and brave
enough to go to the one night spot where girls young enough and old enough to
be suspected of being virgins tended to gather in this town. Not and risk
running into the Slayer. There was nothing left for Spike to do now but wait.
Or dig. If they were really going to hunt and kill a dozen or more virgins in
the halls of Sunnydale High itself before the new moon, someone had to actually
do the hard work of connecting the main basement and other dark corners of the
school to their network of tunnels below. Somehow though, with Dru sitting one
room away, fondling Angel’s sorry withered carcass, rocking it, singing to it,
giving it her undivided affection, Spike couldn’t quite make himself get up and
go bust his ass on their behalf without even being asked.
God, how has his unlife come to this? Squatting in this dank, defiled yet
stubbornly sacred hole, amongst this cavalcade of utterly useless freaks,
bleeding the world’s least appetizing virgins for the chance to revive the
smarmy, insufferable bastard that had made a life’s work out of fucking up his
entire existence. He wasn’t Drusilla’s mate, never had been, not even in an
enlightened twentieth century everybody’s an equal bloody partner kind of way.
He was her servant, her fool, her bitch, her tool to be used to improve her
life with Angel. From the moment she’d sired him, Spike had belonged to
Drusilla, but she had continued to belong, as always, to Angel, her sire, her
lover, the god of her idolatry.
Spike too had bowed before that idol in his time, Angel, the greatest of all
vampires! Thus spake Drusilla, dark goddess of salvation. How could she be
wrong? And so Spike had worshiped Angel, debased himself, called him Sire,
Master and every title of love belonging on the lips of an underling. And what
had it ever gotten him, besides fucked up the ass? Those days were bloody well
over. Fuck Angel! Forget him, better still. Spike was as good a man, as good a
monster, as good a master in his own house as Angel ever was or ever could be.
Better. He ought to march right in there, pull Angel from Drusilla’s arms, grab
him by his singed, bald, scabby, pustulent scalp and twist his scrawny neck
until his head popped off. Then he ought to fuck that sorry, venomous,
inconstant bitch within an inch of death right there among the ashes!
And then what? Drusilla would never love him after that, so what would be the
point of anything? God, she would never be his. He would always be hers. Spike
didn’t need any sodding Gypsy soul to curse him. Love was his curse. Love was
the enemy of happiness.
~~~~
When lunchtime was over, the three girls said their gloomy goodbyes at the
library door promising to meet back up after class, to go to Willow's house and
try to hammer their scraps of disquieting information into a plan of action
before the ghosts finished working up to their big dance which was liable to
end up with someone newly dead. But one girl stayed behind and didn't go to
class. She had something more important to deal with first.
Quietly, Buffy walked back into the library, steeled herself and opened the
office door. She could see Giles in profile, sitting at his desk, muttering
something in a harsh, guttural tongue that might have been German and furiously
making notes on a white legal type pad from the books open in front of him. To
say he looked obsessed would be an understatement. Calling it an understatement
was an understatement. He looked like a mad scientist in a silent horror movie.
Her courage wavered. Her stomach lurched threateningly, but she either had to
fight or give up, and for Buffy, that wasn't much of a choice.
He looked up when she turned the music off, startled, poised to be annoyed,
then seeing who it was bemused, and seeing the look in her eyes, at least for a
moment, worried. “Giles,” Buffy said firmly, “I need to talk to you for a
second.”
“Can it wait?” he pleaded, looking back down at his work, furiously scribbling
a few more notes, “I think I may be on the verge—”
“No, it can’t,” Buffy heard herself saying, hating the harshness, the edge to
her voice. There was a look of censure in his eyes, a slight frown to his lips,
but she could not afford to back down. She pulled the book out of his hands and
slammed it shut on the desk between them.
“Buffy—” Giles started to scold, his eyes once again burning manically.
She didn't let him get another word out. “We found out who the ghosts are,” she
interjected forcefully, pushing the 1955 yearbook across the desk at him. “It’s
this guy, James Stanley, and this woman—”
“You’re wrong!” Giles snapped, cutting her off. “It’s Jenny. She needs me to...
to...”
“Jenny's dead!” Buffy shouted. “To hell with Jenny!”
“Of all the—!” he tried to interrupt, eyes blazing, angrier than ever.
“Goddammit, Giles!” Buffy shouted him down desperately, tears in her eyes
“Ineed you! Me, right here! Remember me!?! Me Buffy, you Giles? I need you!”
Her voice was broken by a sob, she moved towards him, seeking his embrace,
holding his eyes with hers. “I needyou.” she cried, “I. Need. You.”
Her words fell into dead silence. Seconds passed. Buffy stood awkwardly by
Giles' chair as he remained firmly seated behind the desk. They were inches
apart. He did not move to embrace her. He sat with his arms folded loosely
across his lap and looked down at his hands. He picked up his pen and turned a
page, ready to make another note. “Please, Giles,” she tried one more time,
beside herself with fading hope and drowning grief, “I love you!”
“I'm sorry,” he said quietly, carefully marking his place before looking up,
“but I'm not, I can't be, the man you need.”
“What are you saying to me?” she demanded, her eyes hardening.
“It’s funny,” he whispered, sounding near tears himself, focused on her at
last, “I remember very clearly, a little over two weeks ago—a lifetime
ago—giving you a very tiresome speech about responsibility, about not being a
slave to your passions. I should have been talking to myself.”
“Giles, Giles don't do this!” Buffy half pleaded, half warned.
“Buffy, I do love you,” he argued maudlinly, infuriatingly apologetically, “I’d
be lying if I said I didn’t, but I can’t... be with you. That’s not what you
need from me, or from life.”
Buffy’s lip was trembling once more, but her eyes remained hard. “Don’t you
think maybe I’m the one who should decide that?” she challenged fiercely.
“No,” Giles said grimly, looking down at his own hands. “I don’t. As your
Watcher, as a teacher even, I have responsibilities towards you that are not
compatible with... a romantic relationship. It was wrong of me, selfish of me
to put what I wanted, what I needed from you,ahead of my duty to do what’s best
for you. And now—” he started fishing and fiddling, retrieving some paper from
his jacket pocket.
“What’s best for me?” Buffy demanded, shedding new hot angry tears. “You
seriously think getting dumped, abandonedwith your child, is what’s best for
me?” Her voice came out in a sort of strangled, quiet scream broken by a sob.
She could barely breathe.
“I never asked you to—” he started to argue, to correct, to excuse.
“But you did!” Buffy shouted, “You did ask! You said 'please' and I let you! I
let you fuck me! I let you... I let you make me believe... Oh God! You said
youloved me!” Buffy wailed.
“I do,” he insisted miserably.
“Liar!” she sobbed. “If you loved me, you couldn’t do this to me! Giles, how
can you leave me!?!”
“Buffy, I’m not going anywhere,” he tried to reassure her, oh so very
reasonably, “I’ll always be here for you, emotionally and financially—”
“Financially?!” Buffy howled, her voice a storm of rage and contempt. “You
think I wantmoney?”
“I only meant—” he began plaintively, reaching a hand vaguely in her direction.
Buffy backed away, shaking her head in disbelief, “If you touch me, I’ll kill
you,”she declared bitterly. Her voice was hard and cold but hardly louder than
a whisper.
Giles hid his face in his hands again. “Buffy, I’m sorry... I—This is how it
has to be.”
“Then stay away from me!” Buffy declared.
“I can't,” he told her seriously, unfolding the papers in his hand.
“Why?” She demanded, “Because you're my 'Watcher'?” Her fingers actually made
the quote marks. Her head rolled on her neck in a way that Giles usually
thought of as an affectation, as seen on T.V. It didn't look that way in this
instance. It seemed a very genuine and natural expression of rage and
indignation, so much so that he had to fight the temptation to duck under his
desk. Her eyes flashed, and he was physically afraid. “Quit!” she demanded,
“let them send someone else. Someone who's not a liar and a coward and a...
a... a thief!” She knew it wasn't exactly the right word, but she was hard
pressed at that moment to think of a better one.
“I can't,” Giles repeated. His voice was dejected, his eyes miserable but his
guard was up, elbows ready to fly up and block a blow to the head, legs taunt
in anticipation of the need to jump from his seat and flee. He thrust those
stupid papers towards her across the desk. “Your father,” he explained. “To
punish me, he's made me your legal guardian.”
Buffy held in a scream. She covered her face in her hands but could not hold
them still. They slithered up the sides of her forehead and into her hair,
grabbing it in huge handfuls, her finger laced between the uneven blond clumps,
clamping down on her scalp as if trying to hold her head on, trying to hold on
to anything.
Buffy let go. She let her hands fall to her sides. Her imprisoned scream partly
escaped in the form of a twisted, broken mockery of a laugh. “Well I guess I
got my wish!” she spat searingly, “You and me, living together. Just like a
real family! Exactly like. Wow! I feel so fucking loved I might smother to
death! Well played, Dad! Teflon Hank is off the hook and poor Saint Giles is
left holding the bag!”
“Buffy, I—” Giles started in again, eyes wide, horrified, stricken, as if he
were the one being torn apart!
“Just don't!” Buffy warned, but when she stormed out of the office he followed
her at what she guessed he thought was a safe distance, mouth working
intermittently, clearly wanting to say more.  Glaring over her shoulder as she
fled from him, all but walking backwards, Buffy ran smack against something
that quickly turned out to be someone, specifically Owen Thurman.
There was no stopping at that point, momentum carried them forward and down,
limbs curing around each other. She landed on top of him, tangled intimately in
his arms. She had a ringside seat to the battle royal of emotions struggling
within his eyes, within his soul, within his groin. Confusion, fear, hope,
desire, concern, excitement, longing. Fiercely, resentfully, she kissed him
deep and fast enough to leave the memory of her taste seared on his soul.
 Leaping to her feet, pulling him erect as she went, Buffy shoved Owen from
her, towards Giles and headed for the door. A hot second of brutal reflection
later she called back over her shoulder. “You asked for it, you got it. Be at
my house. Seven o'clock. Tomorrow night. Dress comfy. There won't be any
dancing.”
Owen stood shaking his head as if to clear it, staring at the spot where Buffy
had stood a moment before. “Man!” he declared when he finally found his tongue,
“She is the strangest girl!”
“If you lay a hand on her—!” Giles began hotly, hands balling into fists at his
sides. Checked by Owens confused, frightened, slightly offended look, he pulled
up short and unclenched his fists, breathing out in frustration. “Look,” he
finished with sheepish resentment, “just don't lay a hand on her, alright?”
“Why not?” Owen half challenged, “I mean, this morning, you said....”
“This morning,” Giles informed him coolly, “I wasn't her legal guardian.”
~~~~
Cordelia didn't spend all day in her room. At noon she got up and took a
shower. She brushed her hair. She put on makeup. She got dressed. She had a
plan of attack, but it wasn't enough. She got in her car and headed for the
mall. She needed armor. She needed equipment. She needed supplies.
Three stores, two salons and one newsstand later, she was on her way to UC
Sunnydale. She made it to the Student Union just in time for the slight off
peak rush that happened every day at 2:55, five minutes after two Physics one
Chemistry and one Astronomy lab all got out at once in the building next door.
And just like that, clumsy Cordelia was accidentally bumping into a tall, lanky
twenty something T.A., spilling hot coffee all over his turtle neck and khakis,
while he was absorbed in his class notes and she in the latest issue of
Scientific American. Except that she wasn't. Although she had looked very
carefully before looking carelessly away, standing (coffee splattered) where
the target of her stealth attack should have been was a girl.
“Excuse you!” Cordelia barked reflexively.
“It's okay,” the kind eyed, ash-blonde stranger assured her warmly, just
exactly as if she had apologized. “It happens to all of us. It's hard to
concentrate. When you're hurting.”
~~~~
Amy sat alone at Willow's kitchen table, trying to concentrate on the spell
book she was scanning for anything to do with getting rid of ghosts, trying not
to listen to Buffy upstairs balling her eyes out, choking on her own
heartbroken sobs, trying extra hard not to resent the attention she was getting
from Willow because of it. 'I'm not in love with Willow,' Amy tried to remind
herself. 'I'm in love with Willard.' But her powers of self delusion were worn
thin by the brutal realities of her short but hard hitting life. She could not
deny they were one and the same person, each a different guise. Even though it
had taken an exchange of X and Y chromosomes to make her see it. Even though it
was the Y side of things that got her hot and romantically inspired. The one
person she wanted to be with more than anyone else was none other than Willow
Rosenberg. What was more, no matter how much she denied it, Amy knew that
Willow truly loved her back.
If that was a surprise, or two, Amy realized, it shouldn't have been. Willow
was the best friend she had ever had, admittedly of a limited number. And even
if she wouldn't have said exactly the same thing of her at any given point in
time, most of the good times Amy had ever had, she had had with Willow,
sometimes with Jesse and Xander in tow, but mostly not. Jesse had never liked
her. That was good and bad for Amy where Willow was concerned. Willow clung to
Xander whenever he would give her the chance and she was deeply, intensely
jealous of Jesse as the reason that he sometimes would not. But she couldn't
say so, not to Xander. Instead, Amy had become the repository of all hostility
towards Jesse and Willow had kind of loved her for it even then.
But then there were those times, more and more as they moved from Jr. High into
High School, when Xander seemed to be able to hold both Willow and Jesse in a
more or less balanced orbit. And Amy was the ball that got dropped in the
juggling, the rogue planet that spun off into the void and was hardly missed at
all. No, they hadn't always been close on a day to day basis, but sometimes
they had, and when they had... Children are curious and girls will be girls,
but... Amy had always been curious, first and foremost about boys while Willow
had been curious about boys, but also about Amy.
Not that she had ever had the nerve to do anything approaching even Jr. High
School lesbian sex, but there were moments: questions Willow asked,looks that
she gave her, the ways that she had touched her shoulders, her hair and one
very memorable time her breasts.... There had always been something there. And
Amy had always been willing to share, to have a friend. How much better, how
much potential now, to know that that friend could finally love her deep
inside, the way she wanted to be loved. If that meant she had to love her, to
make love to her even when she was wasn't being Willard, could you really say
that wasn't fair?
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the wailing upstairs subsided. Willow
came down. “She's asleep,” she told Amy, “I guess she's staying the night. Her
dad went back to L.A. And I told her Mom was out of town.”
Amy sighed, as if burdened by Buffy's absence and distress, though she was not.
“I guess it's just you and me for the research party,” she carefully
commiserated.
“Yeah,” Willow agreed glumly. “It looks like it could be a long night.”
Amy sighed a little more genuinely. Now that she thought about it, it certainly
might.
“You keep looking up spells, I guess,” Willow suggested, “and I'll make us
something to eat. I'm sure Buffy will want something again when she wakes up.”
“As you wish,” Amy said. And something about thewayshe said it, the way she
looked into Willow's eyes, her nervous little smile, filled Willow with
tenderness and regret.
“I'm sorry,” Willow said softly, “that we might have to miss the dance tomorrow
night.”
“Yeah,” Amy agreed, “So am I.” There was a moment. They both felt it. A moment
when something could have happened. But it didn't, and the moment passed.
“Buffy's pregnant, isn't she,” Amy asked. Willow gave her a miserable, won't
confirm but can't deny kind of a look.
“God, men can be such jerks!” Amy fumed, expressing what Willow so clearly
wanted to but couldn't under the circumstances. “How can they just dump someone
in a situation like that?”
“Guys!” Willow corrected her bitterly. “There aren't any men left in the world,
just older and older guys!”
“A man wouldn't do that to a girl,” Amy agreed, “A man would do what was right.
He'd stick by her.”
“You're darn tootin' he would!” Willow declared. “I mean I could never live
with myself if—” Amy found herself sitting up very straight, listening, waiting
for the rest of that sentence.
Suddenly, there came a hesitant knock almost immediately followed by an urgent
pounding on the front door. When Willow opened it, Devon sagged with relief,
but his brow was still furrowed with unwonted concentration and worry when he
asked, “Have you seen Oz? We were supposed to be practicing this afternoon, but
none of the guys showed up. And I went and I looked for them everywhere, but I
couldn't find them. And... and... things are weird everywhere and I thought
like, okay, my dad will know what to do, but he didn't come home and he's not
still at work, and it's like... like they all just disappeared off of the face
of the Earth!”
***** Unmanned *****
Chapter Summary
     Cordelia: "I wish... that all men (except for the really dumb and
     agreeable kind) disappear off the face of the Earth!"
     Anya: "Done!"
     ~BtVS 3.9 "The Wish"
“M-m-more T-t-tr-tr-trauma victims, coming in, D-doc,” the young orderly
stammered overwhelmed, letting the phone fall and dangle from the cord. “An-n-
noth-th-ther unm-m-m-m-m—.” He hung his head at Dr. Wilkinson's nod.
 “Goddamn it, I need another surgical nurse!” Dr. Wilkinson shouted.
 “We need a surgeon!” Nurse Patrick shouted back.
 “Dr. Roberts is stuck at the Women's Center,” Dr. Wilkinson reminded her
between barking orders for the care (or lack there of) of a dozen patients at
once. They were taking casualties there too, using the lobby as another ER.
 “Fuck Dr. Roberts,” Patrick snapped back, “We need Dr. Heigle! Damn it Brab,
we need a traumasurgeon!”
 “Pack and shunt,” Wilkinson said coolly to Nurse Garrison, who had brought
another child on a gurney for her to judge. It was code for slow this kid's
bleeding enough to calm his mother down and ship him upstairs to die of head
trauma. They were putting the “tri” in triage tonight at Sunnydale General.
Wilkinson stared Patrick down until she looked away, silenced, eyes and cheeks
burning. She didn't need to hear again the mantra, 'We have to work with what
we've got.'
~~~~
 “Well would you look at that!” Spike grinned at Edwards, whistling as they
walked along, “This is just... neat!” Everywhere they looked cars were
overturned, crashed into storefronts, stopped on the roadway. There was
screaming and crying from every direction. Women and children wondered the
streets bleeding, lost. There was a 747 on what was left of the Mall. There was
a little rescuing going on to be sure, volunteers volunteering everywhere. But
ambulances and police cars were, sporadic, random, late to come. Firetrucks
were notable by their absence. It was as if the first responders had all gone
on break at once.
 “A few too many fires for my taste,” Edwards grumbled. The truth was,
something a lot more subtle than fire unnerved him about the otherwise
seemingly idyllic scene. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. “I
think I'm going to just grab something and go back down,” he half apologized.
“I want to get back to Zanya. She doesn't seem well tonight.”
 Spike snorted. “Fine,” he said. Unfucking believable was what it was. First
Drusilla had insisted on staying with Angel, letting this unprecedented,
Godsend, carnival of death pass her by and now Nancy Boy was pussing out as
well. Only the brats had had spirit enough to come out and play. They were
cavorting through the blood soaked streets like the happy little monsters that
they were, with any luck getting themselves lost.
 “Please!” a woman appeared suddenly before them in the street, stout but not
fat, plain but not ugly, neither old nor young, “Please help me, my son... he's
trapped in the car and I can't get him out! My husband was driving and then—”
Her voice caught in her throat as she got her first real look at the faces of
the beings she had come upon.
 Before she could scream, Edwards caught her by the throat and squeezed until
she ceased to struggle but not to breathe. “Have fun,” he said, trying to sound
casually cheerful, but unable to banish a hint of worry from his voice. “I'll
see you at home.”
 ~~~~
 “It's the only thing that fits, ma'am,” the young adviser explained to the
Acting President. She had been sworn in hours ago by the one accounted for
Supreme Court Justice who agreed it was 'Constitutional enough'. The other two
women who might have made a claim had been traveling internationally, had been
in the air, with no hope of survival, when the crisis had come. Now she had to
tell the waiting nation something.
  “I won't say it's the only thing that makes sense,” the young woman went on,
“because it certainly doesn't, but as near as anyone can tell, 99.9% of all
males over the age of fifteen have disappeared off the face of the Earth. It
appears, at least from the reports we  are  getting and from anecdotal evidence
to be a world-wide phenomena. And well, it would almost have to be because, our
combat units are completely gone and close combat support units are at 12%
fighting strength on average and... well... we haven't been invaded yet.”
  “Yet,” the Acting President replied grimly.
  “In contrast,” the young woman went on nervously, “less than 2% of women and
children appear to be missing and that appears... easily explained by the
estimated uncounted dead and displaced due to all transportation related
causes.”
  “Alright,” the Acting President declared decisively, “alert Secretary Tracey
and General Kennedy to join us in the Oval Office for the live broadcast. Get
Ginsberg and O’Connor both back in here and round me up a Senator and MC from
each Party. Keep working on rounding up the ranking officers in each of the
Cabinet level departments, and as many as you have by the time we go live, send
them in. We need to project as much strength and continuity at the top as
possible. We need to look like a government that hasn't just been decapitated.
Because we are about to declare Martial Law!”
~~~~
“Excuse me, young man,” Mr. Beach simpered, “If … Do you think it's possible...
if someone could help me get my car out of the ditch...” Summoning all his
courage, he managed to tap the kneeling figure on the shoulder. It was only
when it turned ,blood staining it's mouth, that he saw what it was kneeling
over, the body of a savaged, dying girl. Mr. Beach wanted to scream, but
somehow, at that moment, he couldn't find his voice. He wanted to run, but his
feet stood rooted to the street. With a casual flick of the monster's elbow,
it's hard, densely muscled forearm caught him in the face and he was
permanently silenced.
~~~~
 “Another pocket,” Willow called over her shoulder to Devon, “Slow down and be
ready to stop. Now!” Buffy leapt from the back of the van while the wheels were
still in motion. “Tardus!” Willow and Amy shouted in unison. They stood in the
back of the van, hands clasped, each extending her free hand towards the open
cargo bay doors. Buffy flew in the face of the six suddenly sluggish vampires,
coming at them from all sides at once like a fast-motion movie ninja. In
seconds they were dust. Five victims, two women and three children, were hauled
into the van. At a nod from Buffy, Willow gave the word and Devon took off.
 “Where do you live?” Buffy asked the older of the two women, the one who was
least badly injured and seemed the most composed.
 “In Elmwood!” she gasped, “We were just here visiting—”
 “Safe house X,” Willow instructed Devon. It was the closest. And Jessica was
confirmed to be alive, and home.
 “Alright,” Mrs. Harris groused as the newcomers were rushed in, under cover of
crosses, “but that's all I can take. This makes ten and even with the basement,
this is only a three bedroom house!”
 “Buffy's house is just as full,” Amy pointed out to Willow as they went in
search of the next clump of civilians to rescue, “and yours, and Devon's and
both of mine.” They were putting as many people as they could back in their own
houses, but they couldn't afford to go more than a couple of miles to do it. It
would loose them too much time.
 “Well we can't just dump them at random houses,” Buffy pointed out. “The
owners might be dead. Or they might come home and throw them out.”
 “We've got to find a way to identify more safe houses,” Willow agreed.
 “Or make more,” said Amy. “I mean... what makes a house a home? If we can
figure that out... It's not just ownership, because they can come right in to
rent houses when there's no one living there. But they can't come into either
of my houses, even though I don't really still live in both.”
 “But you used to,” Willow pointed out, “and you still own... or your mom does,
in theory, the one you don't anymore.”
 “Hey,” said Buffy, “That's a point! None of us technically legally owns our
houses, even though we mostly live in them, so why do the vampires treat us
like we own them?”
 “Because we say we do!” Willow concluded wonderingly. “These are our homes
because we made them that way by living in them, knowing we had a right! We...
claim them, through our parents, like everybody expects! I bet, if we adjust
our expectation, we can claim other places too!”
  “But the claiming is only part of it,” Buffy worried, “What about the living
in?”
  “Um, that's kinda what we need it for(?)” Amy pointed out. Then, before Buffy
could decide how to respond, “Devon! Another pocket!”
  “Take Hazelnut,” Willow instructed, when they were once again in motion with
a cargo of six eleven-to-thirteen-year-olds who had been wandering the streets
since they fled the devastated Mall. “Then left on second.”
  “Where are we going,” Buffy asked, worried she already knew the answer.
  “I thought of one other place we already have a claim to,” Willow said. “Or
you do anyway,” she added apologetically.
  “Oh, no,” Buffy shook her head, “Giles is not my—Willow I'm not claiming—I
don't –I'm not the one to inher—Oh, God!”
  “Buffy, I'm not saying...” Willow let her voice trail off. Amy was staring at
both of them, her mouth hanging open in shock. Willow tried to find her tongue,
to explain to Amy about the guardianship Hank had put in place that very
afternoon, but seeing the way Buffy was already looking back at Amy, she could
see there wasn't a point. “Buffy,” she said instead, “these kids need a home,
at least for the five more hours until sunrise.  We need to get off the
streets. Amy and I are exhausted, and there's more vampires out there than you
can fight alone. We need a place we can work from and get ready for tomorrow
night and and, to try and figure out what  happened . To see if... To see if—We
need  books . Buffy, we need that Condo.”
  Buffy knew where Giles hid his key, which Willow assured her was just further
evidence the house was hers to claim. “Believe it,” she said, the way they tell
you to believe in Tinkerbell when you watch Peter Pan on stage. “Buffy, this
house is yours. It's blood Buffy, it's family.”
  “We should cook something,” Amy advised, “the three of us. Then we'll all sit
down and eat.” Willow nodded. That met her definition of living in. The kids
went to bed after supper, three little girls in Giles' bed, Devon on the couch,
three little boys on the living room floor. It was two-thirty in the morning.
They'd been off the streets a little over an hour.
  “I should get back out there!” Buffy declared with quiet fervor. “I can feel
them out there. Hunting.”
  “Most people are either inside or dead by now Amy argued.”
  “She's right,” Willow said. “The best thing we can do now is try to sleep a
few hours. Then maybe we'll be able to think a little better and... figure out
what's going on.”
  The last place Amy could find to sleep was the little sliver of rug-lined
floor under the table in Giles's study. Gamely, she searched a linen closet and
came up with a sheet to lay on, a couple of extra pillow cases she could stuff
with towels and a bedspread to go on top. She invited Willow to join her. “I...
think I'll sleep in the bathtub,” Willow mumbled nervous, uncomfortable,
distressed.
  “Oh come on,” Amy said exasperated, “We've slept on the floor together lots
of times. It never bothered you before.”
  “Oh, well, you know what?” Willow said defensively, getting agitated, because
she was, indeed she was, as  'embarrassed' as she had ever been before. “It
bothers me now!”
  “No fair,” Amy said, smiling and shaking her head. “You're the guy. That's my
line.”
  “Oh, yeah, well, then 'as you wish' is my line too if we're gonna quote
movies at each other. And anyways, I'm not a guy and you know it, there's
nothing I've got that you want to buy sell or process, so just don't alright
(?)” With that, Willow stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door, leaving
Amy to sigh over her temporary setback. And that was all it was. All it could
be. Things had to work out for them, they just had to. Because she had found
something even more amazing in these crazy times than just 'true love'. She
held the secret to the heart of the last 'man' in the world.
  Willow came out of the bathroom and looked at Amy, miserably, accusingly, as
if she somehow could have arranged all this and said, “There is no bathtub. He
only has a shower.” Amy smiled and held open the bedspread for Willow to crawl
under. She neglected to mention that there was another bathroom downstairs.
Willow lay down on her side with her back to Amy, a few inches away from her.
There was no reason they had to touch at all. There was plenty of room. But
Willow was waiting. She could feel herself waiting. She whimpered guiltily,
miserably.
  Suddenly as if in answer to a half intended prayer, she found herself
embraced in Amy's arms. Amy's breasts rubbing against her back, Amy's...
everything else against her butt, like two spoons in a drawer. “You can kiss me
if you want,” Amy whispered. “Touch me, finger me, anything you've ever wanted
to try. And I'll do anything you want, too. I love you Willow. Any way you want
it. Let me be your girl.”
  “But Oz...” Willow began.
  “Would understand,” Amy assured her. And oh, how Willow wanted to believe!
“It's just you and me now, Wil,” she whispered, her lips brushing Willows ear,
her hands roving over her breasts, belly and thighs, so far, only outside her
clothes. “There's no one else in the world.”
  “But we can't just give up,” Willow whined, trying, just for a moment,
halfheartedly to rise, to pull away.
  “No,”Amy agreed, holding her tight, not letting her go. “Tomorrow is
tomorrow. Tomorrow we try again, to bring them all back, and tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow. But tonight, we are the only two people in the world.”
  Sighing, helpless in her embrace, Willow rolled to face her lover. Amy closed
her eyes when they kissed, but Willow kept hers open, gazing at the perfect
brow of the beautiful woman in her arms. Her kiss was soft and wet and sweet,
but also hungry passionate. It made Willow feel truly wanted, truly loved. The
fact the Amy loved her  even though  she was a girl, and not because of it
suddenly didn't feel sad or wrong anymore. It felt special, extraordinary,
miraculous. It made her want to please Amy even more.
  “Let me do it with my mouth,” Willow whispered, “Let me taste you while you
come,” Her tongue was braver, there in the dark, in more ways than one. “Let me
taste you,” she whispered, “and then I will change, for little while, if you
want.”
  “Yes,” Amy whispered, kissing and nibbling her ear as she sighed that
precious word into it. “Touch me. Kiss me. Lick me. Make me come.”
  “Let's get undressed first,” Willow whispered.
  “Let's,” Amy agreed, a smug smile evident in her voice. Slowly, carefully,
they pulled each other's T-shirts over their heads, each caressing the sides
and arms and breasts of the other. They were both already without bras. Bare
chested, they spent some time exploring, warming up, kissing and fondling. This
was something two giggling little girls had done before. There were no giggles,
no nervous titters now. They were not little girls.
  Willow put her hands on Amy's ass under her pants and panties, kneading and
massaging it, before pulling them down. Amy wriggle the rest of the way out of
her pants as Willow got out of her own, impatient to be naked in her arms. “Oh,
God, Amy, I love you!” she groaned as their bare flesh, damp already with sweat
and desire, fell together in glorious unity.
  Amy pulled Willows hand to her lips and kissed it, then sucked one and
another of her fingers inside, loving them with her tongue, sensuous as a cat
bathing lazily in the sunshine. Willow took her damp fingers from Amy's mouth
and rubbed them against her thighs, her pubis, her lips her clit. Then she
tasted them, caressed them and wetted them in her own mouth before sliding them
inside the open, waiting, flower of pink flesh at the center of Amy's
spreadwide, welcoming thighs.
  Carefully, gently, appreciatively, she thrust and rubbed and wriggled her
fingers inside Amy's cunt, rubbing her stiff little clit with her thumb. If Amy
spent more and more of their time with her eyes closed, this could be
overlooked. Willow found herself closing her own eyes again and again after
all, briefly at least, as she was overcome with passion and sensation. It
didn't mean anything. Girls don't make love with their eyes.
  Amy was shuddering now, and breathing hard. The wet smell of her sex was
intoxicating. Willow lowered her head and pulled back her hand, breathing her
in. Anticipation of that taste was like a drug. At last, when she could stand
it no more, on the verge of overdose, she dove in. Oh the way that soft, pink,
female flesh curled and slid around her hungry lips and parted before her eager
tongue! “Emmm!” Amy moaned, “Oh, Wil, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, Willard! Willard!
Willard! You're the one!”
  A tiny piece of Willows heart broke. Fat tears of resignation, of regret
rolled down her face, ignored in the dark. “Okay,” Amy whispered, “time to
change.”
~~~~
  When dawn came, Buffy finally slept, on the floor between Giles' bed and the
wall, so none of the girls would have to step over her when they got up.
Anyway, in a weird way, it felt sort of secure in there. Tight. Womblike.
 By noon, when she woke, there were Humvees on the streets, as the television
and radio had told them to expect. Not so many in Sunnydale. Only a couple.
More of a symbolic presence. But live broadcasts from L.A. looked something
like an invasion. Or a desperate bid to deter one.     Around the nation, there
were already 250,000 uniformed women and girls aged 17-55 in the streets and
bearing arms. The call had already gone out for reservists and veterans to
report to be reassigned to active duty and for all good women to enlist and
come to the aid of their country. The Acting President and her newly minted
Joint Chiefs of Staff were boasting plans to have two million pairs of boots on
the ground by the end of the month.  There was debate over whether recruiting
would be high enough.  There was talk of a draft for anyone over seventeen who
was not already pregnant or raising a child under five.
  Schools were being touted as the place to go to connect with missing loved
ones and to obtain vital supplies, teachers pressed into service as the
logistical backbone of the disaster stricken country, doing the jobs the
National Guard might if what remained of that force were not otherwise
occupied. Devon had taken the children that morning and gone, hoping to help
get them back to their mothers. Too late, Willow had heard the rumor on the
internet and instantly known it must be true. It made too much sense. All boys
over ten years old were being taken into protective custody. They were too
valuable a resource. And too much a temptation for women and girls who might
soon be looking for a means to avoid national service.
  “We'd better call the other safe houses,” Willow suggested to the other two
girls, “If no one has gone to the schools yet, they might need to know they're
proceeding at their on risk.” No one answered at Devon's or Amy's dad's or
Amy's mom's and Jessica Harris reported that all refuges had left her house for
places unknown. There was still a thriving little community making itself at
home in the house on Revello Drive. For now Buffy left them to it.
  But at Willow's the girls got a real shock. As the one remaining stranger
with no place left to go home to reported, there had been a search for more
space, the better to comfortably spend the night. The one locked door which
they knew they must not open, they had opened. And so, in the morning, when the
school buses had come around, seeking those in need, they had put in for an
ambulance to take Sheila Rosenberg to the hospital, to try to assess her
medical condition. Her daughter, the one who had told them not to unlock that
door, was now wanted by the District Military Police Command, for questioning.
If she could please stay, make the house her own and open it to relatives of
hers who might be in need, the woman would tell no one they had been seen. They
spent the next half hour loading up all of the magical supplies, computer
equipment, clothes and keepsakes they could get into Sheila and Ira's cars.
They headed back to Giles', to Buffy's, Condo.
  Buffy made sure to ride back with Willow while Amy drove the other car.
“Alright,” she said, when the door closed and they were alone, “I didn't ask
any questions in front of that woman, but now do you want to tell your best
friend what the hell is going on?” Willow explained. Buffy asked questions at
first, but then she stopped. Because every answer she got only left her feeling
more in shock. And more alone. More like she was not sure anymore if there was
anyone she knew or should trust. Because even though Willow still seemed like
Willow, even though she had always been a very good friend, a very good person,
or acted like one, how could you not  want your mom to wake up?
  “Should we be staying here?” Willow wondered, when they got back to Giles's
and started to unpack. “I mean, Amy, you're mom's place is a  lot bigger.”
  Buffy and Amy both shuttered and exchanged a look of complete agreement.
“That place creeps me,” Buffy said. Amy nodded. They stayed at the Condo.
  They had their work cut out for them (even with all of Giles's personal
library, Amy's volumes from Katherine and the worldwide web at their disposal)
finding an explanation, let alone a remedy, for this suddenly all wrong world.
But first, Amy showed Willow how to perform a glamour on herself, for a
disguise.
  “If it's got a hope of working when we're apart,” Amy explained, “the power
has to come through you. It might not work right away the first time. Major
glamours can take months, even years of practice” she warned, “We'll try a full
makeover, but if you don't have enough juice, especially after all of that mojo
we worked last night, we might have to focus on one major feature, like your
nose or eyes and then dye your hair or something.” It wasn't a problem. Willow
thought of different features of different people she knew or had seen, women
who looked as little like her as possible, women who would be a thousand times
as unsought after by the new regime. Then she burned the herbs and said the
words that Amy told her. Soon, she looked like a forty-year-old brunette with
gray roots and crooked teeth, six months pregnant with coke-bottle glasses and
flat feet.
  “Wow,” Amy said, “I'm impressed.” She sounded impressed, but maybe just a
little jealous as she added, “Pretty soon, you'll be the one teaching me.”
~~~~ 
  “Honey?” Ms. Kendall ventured uncertainly, her nervous smile painted on. “The
doctor says I can take you home now. What with... everything that's going on.
They think you can rest better at home.”
  Slowly, Harmony looked up from where she sat on her bed, as far back in the
corner as she could sit, knees pulled up to her chin, her back and right side
pressed against the wall. Tears streamed down her face. “He raped me!” she
wailed angrily, “and  you  put me in here! I wouldn't go home with you if you
were the last mom on Earth! I want to call Cordelia's mom! I want her to take
me home!”
  “Please,” Ms. Kendall pleaded, “I'm sorry, please come home. It'll be getting
dark soon. You weren't out last night, Honey. You didn't see... those  things
.”
  “I don't care if it get's dark!” Harmony declared. “I don't care if I get
killed! I'm not going home with you!”
 ~~~~
  “Still no answer at Cordelia's?” Buffy asked.
  “None,” Willow confirmed. “Do you think we should go check on her?” she asked
doubtfully.
  Buffy shrugged. “No, she probably just left town. Jetted off to some private
island where you'd never know if all the men fell off the face of the Earth or
not. That's what I'd do if I had a metric crap-ton of money.”
  “Still,” Willow persisted. “I think we should at least check. I mean she has
been pretty much like a friend these last couple of months.”
  “Cordelia's not anything like a friend,” Amy put in derisively, “Not to
anyone. Not unless she can get something from them. She's spiteful and rude and
hateful and a force for evil in the world! Jesus! Am I the  only  one who
remembers why we started  the We Hate Cordelia Club?"
  “Oh my God!” Buffy was flabbergasted. “Wow, what are we like twelve? In case
you haven't noticed, Amy, this is not a test!  This  is an actual emergency(!)
The T.V. did that, like, emergency signal thing, and then it was followed by
actual instructions! From crazy, terrified women with guns! This is what those
of us who've been dealing with this stuff for years like to call 'an
apocalypse', the really bad, already way past local kind! I think it might be
time to get the hell over the We Hate Cordelia Club!”
  “You just said we didn't need to check on her,” Amy pointed out. “I was
backing you up!”
  “Well I didn't ask you to back me up!” Buffy snapped back at her. “I can
handle... I can handle....”
  “Oh!” Amy breathed out, relishing her epiphany. “I know what this is about!
You're pissed because you finally ran into a problem bigger than you are!
Bigger than some little vampire you can back down with your holier-than-thou
attitude or some dime-store prophesy you got from your Senior Division toy-boy!
It hurts to know it might not always be all about you! Like you might not be
the special queen of everything if you actually need some  help  to save the
world!”
“You know,” said Buffy acidly, clamping down hard on her temper and harder on
the grief that was bubbling under it, threatening to push it to the surface.
“If it wasn’t for Giles, the best thing you couldhope to be by now is dead. He
gave you your life back after your own mother took it from you. Don’t you
darespeak of him like that to me! Not—especially not—!” Buffy collapsed sobbing
into Willow's arms. Willow glared at Amy over her shoulder.
 Amy sighed, chastened, but not very. “Say,” she said, only a slight sarcastic
edge to her voice, “we've got about a half an hour before curfew. I think I'll
go check on Cordelia.” After   all, Amy thought sardonically, she's our
'friend' now, not at all the biggest bitch in the entire world.
~~~~
  “Professor Walsh,” said the young lieutenant grimly, entering the desert
bunker, her shoulders thrown back, at attention, resisting the urge to salute,
“We just got confirmation from NORAD. General Mutter is on base and the site is
secure. They have not been able to determine any... method of attack. Nothing
has come at us from the sky but our own falling aircraft. Whatever this is
Professor, it's on your turf.”
 “No,” Walsh shook her head. “No HST is capable of this. None I've ever
studied. There are a few that can cause small distortions in Space-Time...
but... This is a completely different world.”
  “Never-the-less, ma'am,” the younger woman replied, “my orders are to escort
you to Washington. The President, the Acting  President, wishes to see you at
once.”
***** They're Baaack! *****
Chapter Summary
     The geists are still poltering, but Buffy and her friends (and
     enemies) have bigger fish to fry. But when Buffy interrupts Willow
     and Amy at an.... ummmm 'delicate' moment magic ensues with
     surprising results. I just know you're all shocked to hear that!
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
 “It's time we were getting home,” Ms. Barton, the Acting Principal said,
firmly, courageously to the Officer in Charge. Her teachers were behind her.
Way, way behind her. But she stood firm for them all the same. “It's after five
o'clock. It'll be getting dark soon.” No citizens had dared to come to them for
help in almost an hour.
 “You think we're punching a time-clock here?” the power-mad twenty-year-old
barked back at her. “This is a National Crisis and you will do as you are
told!” For emphasis, she gestured with the point of her assault rifle of
authority.
 Mr. Barton stood her ground. “I won't have my teachers in this place after
dark,” she insisted. “Not on tonight of all nights. There have been incidents
all day long.”
 The girl in the uniform laughed loudly, then stopped abruptly. “You're all
staying and that's an order!” she snapped. There had been a few (hundred)
snakes in the building when they'd first come in this morning. Obviously
something to do with their spring mating season being disrupted by chaos and
fire. But that had all been cleared out. Since then? Hysterical women and
children, hearing strange sounds, seeing strange sights. Music coming from
radios that no one could find. A dead man behind them in the mirror. Yearbooks
that threw themselves off of shelves and hit people in the head to get
attention. All nonsense of course. All the result of terror and a sleepless
night.
 “There are six of you and twenty-three of us,” Ms. Barton retorted. “The only
way to keep us here is to shoot us all. Are you prepared to do that?”
 “Try me, old lady,” the girl snarled, leveling her gun at Ms. Barton's face.
She too had had a sleepless night. Teachers and soldiers alike eyed the
standoff uneasily, wanting to intervene, not daring, afraid for their lives.
Suddenly, from far way, slowly building as it came towards them down the hall,
a faint then ever increasing buzzing sound was heard. Soon it was too loud to
be ignored, one by one, those assembled turned and saw, then struggled for a
long moment to understand, to believe what they were seeing.
The moment broke. One woman then another shouted “Run!” All threats of
interpersonal violence forgotten, they abandoned their equipment and supplies
and fled the oncoming swarm. They watched from across the street as the cloud
of wasps surrounded and enveloped Sunnydale High.
****
When Cordelia's phone rang, yet again, yet again she chose to let her machine
pick up. She did not want to talk to Willow or Buffy or anyone else. Not yet,
maybe not ever again. She was not sure exactly how she had done... whatever it
was she had done, but she knew damn well that she was the one who had done it.
She had just been rambling on, bawling her stupid eyes out about Xander Stupid
Harris and how all men should just die or disappear or something when all of a
sudden that sweet good-listener girl Anna has turned all scary and veiny and
said, “Wish granted!”
And suddenly, they were gone. In a flash, Anna had snatched her necklace back
and disappeared, just as suddenly as she had come. To the sounds of planes
trains and auto mobiles crashing, making thousands of people die.
After a moment, Cordelia realized she was not hearing her answering machine
pick up. It wasn't her line ringing. It was her mom's. Mrs. Harris didn't have
an answering machine. She didn't need one. She never left the house.
“Cordelia,” she called miserably, “Will you get that? I'm not up to talking to
anyone.” The phone rang for about the fourth or fifth time. “Please,” her mom
said, “It might be important.”
“Hello,” Cordelia huffed resentfully into the phone. Her ear was met with the
wrenchingly familiar sound of a certain girl crying. “Harmony!” she gasped. She
stopped short of asking what was wrong.
“Cordelia! Cordelia!” Harmony wailed, “Oh God! Oh God! Come pick me up!”
 Cordelia didn't hesitate or argue. She wouldn't have if she'd wanted to. There
was no time. In half an hour, direct sunlight would be in dangerously short
supply. Besides, it was almost Curfew, and from the look of the hardware they
were packing, these women meant serious business.
****
 Mrs. Dunstan Chaired the meeting. She wasn't elected Chair. She just came in
and sat in the middle one of the seven tall, throne-like chair that occupied
the high dais that had always been reserved for the Equals of the Inner
Council. She just happened to bring a gavel. No one challenged her. She was
sitting as the newly acclaimed head of the House of Flavia, her husband's
House, not the House in which she had been Enrolled half a century ago, a house
that had never until yesterday, despite it's name and history, Enrolled a
female Watcher. But she was Peter Travers' daughter. At seventy-six, she was
also the oldest actual Watcher in the Council Chamber. Someone had to Chair the
meeting.
 On her right, from the inside out, she was flanked by Bridget Smith, the new
head of the House of Hippolytus, Elizabeth Marle, who had been chosen to lead
the House of Facundus largely on the grounds that she had a strong claim to
that Seat through neither of the usual lines of decent, and the enterprising
Dr. Laura Sterling, who upon losing her bid for the Facunian Seat has suddenly
rediscovered her deep roots in the now otherwise non-existent House of
Weregelder, the 'Giles' Seat. It wasn't as though there were so much
competition for the honor of coping with this disaster that a determined and
experienced Watcher could be lightly turned away. On her left, Emma was flanked
by Constance Hathaway, her second cousin and the actual head of the Travers
House, Lydia Hawthorne, a girl of thirty-two who had accepted her ascension to
the Gaudencio Seat with a chilling combination of self-importance and
insecurity, and Meredith Spooner, head of the newly restored House of Lucianus,
replacing the daughters of the House of Ezariah, who, having been called to
Council, refused to come.
 The room was packed, row on row, with perhaps two hundred grim-faced women and
children. The dozen remaining Watchers of the Outer Council, together with two
dozen Candidates and Senior Staffers who were presently to be Enrolled, crowded
near the front. Behind them sat forty-two girls aged nine to fifteen possessed
of a certain uncertain destiny. Wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of the
Watching families, for whom the work of the Council had been nothing but a
vague shadow that fell, almost unnoticed, across their otherwise ordinary
lives, had spontaneous formed a third level of Council, listening, but also
asking questions, voicing their concerns. A score of somber boys and their
mothers had come primarily seeking the Council's protection from the rapidly
solidifying military government. They had heard what was already happening in
America and elsewhere. And in the midst of them all, arms folded, leaned back
in her chair, feet propped on the rail in front of her with studied, defiant
nonchalance, sat The Slayer.
 “The Ezarian women know nothing,” Ms. Smith explained impatiently when the
meeting had lingered too long on the topic of the various things rumored to
have gone missing in the keeping of that House. “I myself spoke with the mother
and sister of their senior American representative, Mr. Crowley, and I tell you
they hadn't the dimmest notion what I was getting at. Were not all the events
of the last two days so extraordinary as to render anything plausible by
comparison, they'd have written me off as insane.”
 Ms. Smith just had made a swift but tiring and at times quite harrowing
journey from Boston with her unruly charge in tow, obtaining authority to leave
the United States under false pretenses and crossing Ireland's hostile airspace
under the mercifully hollow threat of anti-aircraft fire. She was impatient to
get down to what she saw as the real business in hand. “We may as well pine for
the ancient records of the Council of Rome as those things which the now
extinct House of Ezariah has lost. We must attend to the present crisis, which
is no doubt just beginning. Does it strike no one as more than coincidental
that humanity has lost it's good right arm and most of its means of
perpetuation at the exact moment in history at which we find ourselves with an
unprecedented number of Potential Slayers in our ranks? Sisters, I would
venture to suggest that The End—” a hostile murmur anticipated her
pronouncement of doom before she could complete it.
 “Ladies! Ladies!” Emma cried severely, banging her gavel, directing her
harshest scowl at Bridget herself. “There's no sense losing our heads. Whatever
these events portend, we must be prepared to face it as it comes! Now then,
whatever else we may face, we are here today, first and foremost, to deal with
issues of Enrollment and assignment of Watchers. Then we must address the issue
of identifying and finding the survivor, if any, of the two previous Slayers.”
 This remark set off another dull roar, the loud aggregate of much quiet
disputation about the mechanism of the the activation of Slayers and what the
existence of Faith did or did not suggest about Kendra and Buffy's fates,
together with several somewhat louder expression of consternation that such a
thing should be discussed in the presence of the Potentials. “Well, considering
the interference of this new regime in the United States with
telecommunications, it may be some time before we are able to determine any of
this definitively,” Lydia pointed out. She judiciously refrained from
explaining the insurmountable evidence that existed in support of the grim
truth of the Gaudencian Hypothesis, by which it could clearly be demonstrated
that Faith's calling proved that both Buffy and Kendra were no more, the
absence of a living Slayer being the obvious catalyst for the calling of
another. It was enough that she knew her Sisters in the Inner Council shared
this view and would act accordingly in setting policy and allocating resourced.
“Indeed,” Emma agreed, grateful for the invitation to close the subject. “What
we must now address is the issue of Enrollment, or more to the point,” she
said, her eyes falling heavily upon a tiny knot of women from whom the others
had managed, ever so slightly, to distance themselves even under these crowed
conditions, “Re-Enrollement.” Her steely gaze lingered a long moment upon a
figure who stood apart, shunned, even by these, but by no means humbled by
their shunning. As desperate as they were for personnel, the Inner Council's
vote to recommend had been so close that the entirely inexperienced membership
of that body had been obliged to spend precious time studying the records of
previous sessions on the issue of procedures and percents for vetoing. But
there were far too many women in the Watching Families, not privy to all the
details of what had gone on before, who would have seen a refusal to Re-Enroll
any willing Watcher as a spiteful squandering of priceless resources. Besides,
in light of the need to maintain the appearance, for the benefit of these same
women, that not all of the Council's assets in the Americas had been given up
as lost, Emma has just the assignment in mind to keep her wayward kinswoman
occupied, far, far away from the secrets and power sources of the Council. And
therefore, with the gravest of misgivings, the Equals of the Inner Council had
at last voted to recommend the Re-Enrollment, as a Watcher in Good Standing, of
one Gwendolyn Post, Mrs.
****
“She'll be fine,” Amy assured Willow yet again. “I talked to her mom. It took
her like forever to come to the door. She looked like a wreck, but then I
guess... we all are sort of. She said Cordelia went to pick Harmony up from the
hospital. Score one point for the collapse of Patriarchy anyway. She said they
promised to be home by dark and she'd tell them I stopped by in case they want
to give us a call. Where's Buffy?”
“Out on patrol,” Willow said tensely, worriedly, trying and failing to focus
her attention on whatever it was she was looking up on line. She was trying to
research the idea of a space-time disturbance that might only affect men, but
it was coming up all feminist theory and thought exercises. Sighing, she shut
off her laptop. “I don't think we're going to find anything on the internet for
this,” she said miserably. “So far, the only cause that's been discussed for a
world without men is women wishing them away.”
Amy sighed. “I don't know what she thinks she's doing out there,” she groused.
“What if she gets spotted? Even Buffy can't fight the Army, not even what's
left of it. And if she tries, she's going to get us all in trouble.”
Willow smiled wanly. “I wouldn't worry too much about Buffy,” she advised. “She
can be stealthier than you'd think when she actually wants to be.”
****
As much as he resented it after last night's free-for-all, Spike kept to the
shadows. For one thing, it was still twilight. But really he was avoiding the
patrols and he knew it. He tried to tell himself there was no shame in it. He
was just being prudent. Or maybe streetwise was a better word. He liked that
idea a lot more. Only a bloody piker would let himself be caught out in the
open on a night like this. Spike just plain had better sense than to let
himself in for that kind of trouble. He never liked getting shot in any case,
but these ladies had the kind of guns that could take a bloke's head off.
He might not have gone out at all. He wasn't particularly hungry. But Dru was
still hell bent on trying to revive Angel, and the days were slipping by. With
Sunnydale High converted to other uses (possibly for the duration) and the
female population scared off the streets by last nights revelry, a new strategy
was needed for virgin hunting. So, Spike made his way, stealthily, by tunnels
and back alleys, to the campus of UC Sunnydale, to a freshman dorm.
There were no guards here save a token presence at the campus perimeter,
enforcing Curfew. He casually broke open the locked back door of Stevenson Hall
and walked in. He strolled down the hallway until he found a very likely
looking door. One that bore a poster of several tiny kittens, frolicking
against a pink background, savaging balls of string.
Spike knocked quietly on the door, with calculated hesitance, then,
deliberately waiting not quite long enough to reasonably expect a response, he
knocked again, his strikes rapid and irregular but still not loud, speaking of
fear and urgency. A slightly pudgy sandy-haired girl of about eighteen soon
opened the door, looking very shocked indeed. She wore a hip-length, faded
Sunnydale High tee-shirt over a pair of baggy pink shorts with a pair of fuzzy
pink slippers bearing the faces of pigs rather than bunnies. Obviously dressed
for bed.
“Please,” Spike begged, casting a theatrical glace over his shoulder, “they're
after me. I need a place to hide!”
The girl did her own quick inspection of the proverbial coast before
whispering, “Come on!” and ushering him in. “You should be safe here, for
tonight anyway,” she assured him. “My roommate already went and enlisted. So,”
she added with one very nervous smile, “It's just us.”
“Hey,” he said philosophically, “the more of that kind the better. If they have
enough volunteers, maybe there won't be a draft after all. Me, I like my
freedom a little too much, I guess. Besides, it's not my nation to service.” He
allowed himself a shyly flirtatious grin. The target blushed very auspiciously,
but of course, that alone was not a conclusive test.
“William,” he introduced himself, offering his hand.
“Megan,” she replied, squeezing it. Spike held on to Megan's hand a fraction of
a second too long, gazing deeply into her eyes. She blushed even more, turning
from him slightly. He pretended similar embarrassment, as if feeling something
as surprising to him as it was to her.
He was enjoying this game, coaxing her innocence out of hiding, testing it's
totality. He was her kitten and she was his bright pink ball of string, waiting
to be pounced on and unraveled.
 “I didn't bring any pajamas,” he apologized. More blushing. Almost too much to
be believed. Almost. She offered him a long tee-shirt and her roommate's
abandoned bathrobe. She turned around so he could change, but he caught her
resisting the urge to peak. He took off his shirt but then 'hesitated' to
remove his tee-shirt. “Can I ask you something?” he asked, sounding as wistful
and he could remember ever feeling. “Do you... did you, have a boyfriend,
someone special.”
 “No,” Megan said quietly, with the kind of tiny, sneaking, needy hope that
told him he could press his luck a little harder. People get hungry not knowing
where their next meal is coming from. And sweet young girls who love kittens
believe in fate.
 “Have you ever had a boyfriend?” Spike asked.
 Megan shook her head. She was still bushing, but she was also looking him
straight in the eye, growing bolder. “I'm a virgin,” she said. He believed her,
certainly, completely. Each took two steps towards the other. He leaned in. She
tilted her face upward and closed her eyes.
 Spike softly placed his left hand on the back of Megan's head, stroking her
hair. With his right hand, he twisted her face hard to the left, snapping her
neck. Grinning as he watched her lifeless body crumple to the floor, Spike
crowed to himself, “Thank Heaven for little girls!”
****
 When Buffy saw it, she almost laughed. She didn't. She was in no fit state for
laughing. That way lay hysteria and breaking down into a puddle of gibbering
flesh on the sidewalk. Still, a swarm of angry wasps enveloping Sunnydale High
School? A knot of terrified soldier girls huddled together in the park across
the street, watching as if for an explosion? The fact that all of this was a
manifestation of a temper tantrum being thrown by a couple of ghosts locked in
an eternal lover's spat? The impossible reality that 36 hours ago she had
beenconsumed by the immediate need to solve such a 'major crisis'? She almost
laughed. Sell tragic someplace else; we're all stocked up here!
Otherwise, the streets were quiet. The vampires were either too sated from last
night's feast to bother with the slim pickings offered by these embargoed
streets, or else they too had been scared off by the patrols that kept the
women and children indoors, obeying Curfew. By eight o'clock, the Slayer was
ready to call it a night. Along the way, she walked past the house on Revello
Drive. Lights were on inside. Standing under her window, between the house and
the tree, Buffy could hear soft music and a murmur of voices too low to
distinguish words or feelings. She almost cried. But she was in no fit state
for crying, either. She vomited on the roots of the tree and went home.
 The door to the condo was in it's typical unlocked state. Something about that
fact made Buffy more than typically tense. One tiny, plaintive Willow-whine/
cry/sigh, and she was in motion, leaping over the high back of the green sofa,
not daring to waste time to walk around it, too much lost already. She landed
on top of them, stake raised. Naked, pungent, dripping flesh collapsed beneath
her, sucking her into their heap of tangled limbs like spittle into lips not
damp enough.
 Amy screamed, then shouted, “What the fuck!?!” over Willow's panicked
incantation.
 “Tardus!” from the Latin, meaning to slow. But now everything was happening
too fast. Light and sound swirled around Buffy like madness. Flesh flew from
beneath her and she fell hard against the shaggy green almost-velvet cushions.
The rodent squeak of voices sped up beyond deciphering filled her ears and set
her teeth on edge. The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat.
Moonlight through the windows suddenly ceased as if a switch had been flipped.
 Then things started to get weird.
****
 It was midnight when Spike left Stevenson Hall the second time. He threw the
huge burlap sacks from the physical plant down into the tiny bed of the
miniature lawn tending truck (an electric contraption half again the size of a
golf cart) and hopped down after them, whistling cheerfully. Then he stopped.
 The night was so quiet that the tolling of the bell in the old clock tower
reverberated in the silence like the death knell of mankind. Spike shuddered,
imagining a world without humans. The thought caught him off guard. The catch.
The down side to the end of the world.
 But it would never come to that, he tried to reassure himself. After all, the
first thing the Bitch Fascista had done, even before ferreting out the few
timid masculine souls left on the planet, was to nationalize all the sperm
banks. He was sure the youth of the nation would soon be popping out babies for
Truth, Justice, the Honor of the Grand Republic, the Greater Glory of Om,
etc.... And for the eventual consumption of hungry vampires.
 Truthfully, the herd had been due to be thinned a little. In fact (Spike
smiled at the fanciful thought) maybe this was all the unintended consequence
of some novice wizard’s attempt at ecofriendliness. Or intended for that
matter. You never could tell with humans. They were, after all, as one of their
contemporary (well recent) luminaries had so succinctly put it, only mostly
harmless.
****
 Oh please, oh please! Please, God, let this work! Willow repeated in her head
over and over; a dull, incessant internal murmur playing over, under and round
the very different Latin words that she was chanted aloud in unison with Amy
but barely heard. Oh please, oh please, God, if you ever loved me, let this
work!
It was well past one a.m. Buffy remained prone on the couch. She had turned and
lifted her head somewhat over time, but at this rate, sitting up would take her
at least another day or two. Willow and Amy had spent the better part of five
hours researching and experimenting and had finally come up with one or two
spell removal possibilities worth trying.The first (a simple cry to the gods to
undo the Retardation spell the two girls had ginned up from bits of other
spells without thinking of the need for a limiting condition) had failed with a
spectacular lack-of-even-a-thunk, like an engine not even trying to turn over.
The second (a countervailing speed-up spell) had scared Willow too much even to
try. If they overshot, she had realized with sudden horror, Buffy could die of
starvation or even old age before the two witches would have time to react.
 And so they had skipped ahead to Plan C, the current incantation. Oh please,
oh please! Please, God, let this work!Loudly, forcefully, in disconnected
mouthfuls, in rhythm without reason or rhyme, the two girls hurtled words at
the Great Powers of the Universe. Words which, as near as they could tell,
spoke of calling upon the spirit of one paralyzed with illness, grief, madness
or enchantment to requicken to abundant life, though the distinction between
waking and returning was so muddy in the light of their imperfect understanding
of the language, that Willow felt a forlorn, wistful, wishful hope that somehow
the spell might 'backfire' and bring back all the men instead. Maybe even her
father. Oh Please! Oh Please! Oh Please, God!
Buffy remained motionless, another unexplainably inert body for the now ever
present authorities to stumble upon. Amy wished she had her mother's deep
sources of power at her disposal. She wished it so badly that for a moment, she
even wished for her mother. It was a terrible thing to be without a mother,
even a terrible mother. Even a nearly useless mother like Sheila Rosenberg,
would have been at least something to lean again in a world where all the
fathers were gone. Poor Buffy could certainly have used a mother's love in her
state of acute and utter fatherlessness, and her mom, at least, had been, by
all reports, up to the job.
 “Please God!” Willow cried aloud in sudden, startled, startling English,
“Please, Dear God, BRING THEM BACK!”
 The air stirred, the barometric pressure dropped. This time there was no
question but that the engine turned over.
****
 Zanya watched. Quietly. She had ceased to speak more than a day ago but her
eyes seemed more alert. Edwards tried to take it as a good sign. At any rate,
Drusilla's ceaseless, lunatic prattling was madness enough. And if it were not,
their was the howling, chittering counterpoint of the demonlings at play. Most
days, Edwards didn't mind them. Sometimes he found them comfortingly familiar,
an echo of a bygone life. Maybe of more than one. With his Zanya. But today he
was tense and they set his teeth on edge, the way children do when they caper
obliviously about you while the world goes to shit and you have to hold it
together by some as yet undiscovered means that you are trying desperately to
figure out.
 “Pst! The Witching Hour!” Drusilla suddenly declared, a new bounce to her
endless elliptical capering step, giggling with glee. “I can hear the witches
witching!” It was well past midnight, but if that had anything to do with what
she meant she'd never know it. That was, assuming she 'meant' anything. Edwards
shook his head and laughed a dry mirthless laugh.
 Zanya Watched. Quietly.
 “The dead rise and writhe and boil and coil! Spss! Spss! Whispering like
snakes. But no one hears them. They are all alone. Calling... always calling,”
her mood swung suddenly from amusement to distress. “Mummy! Mummy! Where are
you hiding? Come out please! I give up! I'll be good! I'll be good! I promise!
I promise! Come back!” Just as suddenly, her hysterical wailing broke into fits
of renewed laughter like waves breaking on shore. “An apple! Spread wide and
free! Invite him in just once for tea!”
 “Invite the monsters nice and mean!” shouted Caris, a girl of maybe six taking
up the rhyme with gusto, clapping her little hands, “The pedlar or the wicked
queen!”
 “Shush!” Drusilla chided with sudden school-marm harshness that surprised
everyone. Even Zanya sat up a little straighter. “You're talking out of turn,”
she went on, shaking her head and wagging her finger, her voice taking on a
eery sing-song quality, gentle yet censorious, like a nursery school scolding.
 She took three slow steps towards the child as she spoke. Caris smiled
uncertainly. She had no idea who she was dealing with but Edwards certainly
did, and Ryan (bright boy that he was) was catching on. He tensed at Edwards'
tension and all the children with him. Morah, a girl of four, began to whimper
and then to cry. The other three gawked expectantly, eyes shining with the hope
of witnessing something horrific. They were not disappointed.
 With a sudden, catlike pounce Drusilla was on the child. Caris shrieked once,
high and wordless as a rabbit. Drusilla's claws dug into the sides of her head
as she twisted and pulled it from her tiny neck while her chubby, little-girl
legs dangled and kicked helplessly. Ryan opened his mouth and raised his fist,
ready to shout his outrage at this arbitrary and purposeless destruction, but
in the face of his sire's shameless, predatory glee, his courage failed him and
precocious wisdom kicked in. He turned his rage on Morah, clouting her on the
side of the head and telling her to hush and quit being a baby.
 Drusilla held the little head aloft by the hair, grinning triumphantly, as it
burned to smoke and dust. The tiny body disintegrated as it fell away, never
reaching the floor. “We need to be quiet while Mummy's talking,” she all but
sang, her tone one of gentle, loving reproof. The three gawkers lost there
smiles and stood blinking at the sobering reality of extinction, subdued.
 Suppressing a shudder at his own thrill of blood lust and spiteful amusement
at the tiny creature's demise, Edwards turned and left the room, wheeling Zanya
with him. 'Dear God!' He thought, and almost literally prayed, 'It cannot be
that this is what I am. How is it? How has it come to pass? That I am not a
man!'
 Zanya was speaking again, quietly but urgently, authoritatively. In her own
language. 'Escaped!' The idea struck Edwards in the heart and filled him with
longing. 'You are free at last my darling!' He formed a conviction. A quiet
certainty. There was no such thing as the next best thing to being alive. For
centuries the gray world had tasted like ashes on his tongue and he had been a
slave to desires the satisfaction of which brought him no joy. Taking Zanya in
his arms, leaving behind the wheelchair that she would not be needing any
longer, he headed down the tunnel towards the mausoleum entrance. To find a
pleasant spot to wait for morning.
 “NOW!” a voice shouted as he made his was across the graveyard. Edwards was
just about to be annoyed with himself for the silliness of being startled, when
a very different feeling jolted him like a few thousand volts of electricity.
Exactly like.
****
 Lighting didn't flash. In fact, there was no light at all, but it happened as
suddenly. Ira Rosenberg's once empty brain was suddenly full of terrible truth
and memory. His eyes flew open but this made no difference. The darkness was
total. His heartbeat went from zero to sixty in an instant and kept going,
passing a hundred beats in less than a minute. He didn't so much hold his
breath as have no air whatsoever from which to draw another. He remembered well
where he should be. But he had no idea what to do about it. No one was coming
for him.
****
 “Ira!” the patient cried out, as if in the throws of terror, sitting bolt
upright in her bed.
 “Oh my god!” cried the horrified orderly-volunteer-whatever and ran to fetch
someone who might be able to explain.
 “I do,” said Dr. Rosenberg, quietly, bitterly, when a young nurse had finished
explaining that they had no idea why she had awakened or what was wrong with
her in the first place. The two other women waited expectantly, but she did not
elaborate. Instead she asked, in a clam, clear voice that for some reason made
them both uneasy, “Where is my daughter?”
****
 Where is she? Where is that wretched, ungrateful, pubescent bitch!?!
Katherine growled in frustration, nearly blind with rage. Fire shot from her
eyes. Literally. If the halls of Sunnaydale High had been made of anything but
institutional tile work and hidden asbestos, the building would have been set
ablaze.
  Katherine held out her hand and reached across the room with her mind. The ax
shattered it's glass cabinet in it's eagerness to obey, to come to her. She
grasped it firmly, more for the way that the having of a tight grip on
something assuaged a tiny bit of her rage and made it easier to think than
because she really needed a weapon. Her enemies were no match for her. They
were dead as soon as she got within casting range.
  Her mouth twisting into a horrid grin at the sweet thought of vengeance,
Katherine turned the corner and … walked right into an impenetrable wall of
angry wasps?
****
 Okay, this is weird.Suddenly, Joyce wasn't in her prison, wasn't in her 'room'
or 'on stage'. She was... lying on a pile of garbage? It stank like garbage. It
felt like garbage. It looked like garbage. Did the demon world have garbage?
Okay, it probably did, but somehow Joyce doubted it had quite so many rusted
out appliances.
 Getting cautiously to her feet, expecting at any moment to be shouted at and
dragged back into line, Joyce cast a guarded, hesitantly hopeful eye to the
sky. She wept at the sight of familiar stars. Orion! And Sirius! Like a boy and
his dog! Polaris and it's beautiful long-handled constellation! Close enough to
grab and take a drink!
 There in the midst of the mountains of refuse, Joyce Nuland laughed and sang
and jumped for joy. She was free! She was alive! She was home! On Earth!
****
 “Damn it!” Amy cried, “Nothing!”
 “Don't say that!” Willow pleaded, near tears. “I felt something happen! I know
it! We just have to... wait. Another minute. Or two.”
 The clock ticked. A fly buzzed. Crickets chirped outside in the courtyard.
Buffy remained motionless.
Chapter End Notes
     If the Councilly parts have you going "WTF, who are these people and
     What on Earth are they talking about?" There is a lot of exposition
     about the structure, history and function of the Council in "Who Do
     You Think You Are?" which I've decided to consider as read for
     purposes of this story.
***** Someplace That's Else *****
Chapter Summary
     Cordelia just said 'off the face of the Earth'. She didn't exactly
     say where. So, Anyanka reasons, it's not cheating to take the
     opportunity to put them somewhere... interesting.
"Where the Hell are we?” Hank demanded. He sounded as if he might not have been
asking for the first time.
“What the devil?” Giles not-exactly-answered. A moment ago he had been test
driving a sporty-looking little red convertible along the streets of Sunnydale
at a frustratingly uninformative 35 miles per hour. Now he was standing in the
desert on a very cold night. With Hank Summers, of all people. The sky was
filled with unfamiliar stars. He supposed the most logical explanation would be
that he was dreaming. But it didn't feel like a dream. It felt like real life.
And like real life, it continued to roll slowly forward, moment by moment,
without skipping.
“We must have past through... some kind of portal... for some reason,” Mr.
Giles mused aloud.
“Well,” Hank sneered, “that clears everything right up(!) What the fuck is
going on?”
“Well, if I knew, I would certainly tell you,” Giles countered with suffering
dignity. “God knows it's none of my doing.”
“Bah!” said the horribly familiar voice of a professorial old gentleman,
appearing around an outcropping of rock and approaching them. “If there's
sorcery being done (and so it would seem) I've no doubt who's behind it!”
“Father!?!” Giles spat, almost as angry as he was flabbergasted.
“Yes, you fool,” Andrew Giles all but snarled, aneducatedsnarl. “Who'd you
think it was? And who's this then?” he added with a small, cruel laugh. “Your
'partner'? Is that the polite term for you chaps these days?” Hank cleared his
throat, looking both confused and uncomfortable, not to mention angry. Giles
didn't know if he was trying to process the idea of whether it was better,
worse or even possible for his daughter's lover (or victimizer or however he
thought of Giles) to be 'gay' or just struggling in his Californian way with
the political incorrectness of resenting being mistakenly called queer.
Giles put on a small, carefully ironic smile of his own before replying, a
deliberate hint of boredom rather than hurt in his voice, projecting mild
annoyance, almost indifference, rather than anger. He made his eyes participate
in this smiling. “To wound, the stoke must first land,” he said lightly. Which
should have been true. But there is something inherently crippling in the
knowledge that one's only parent would like very much to run him through, even
if words happen to be his weapon of choice. Most especially if they haven't
always been.
Besides, even though they both knew that the stroke was not quite to the heart,
they both also knew that it landed close enough to draw a little blood, and
that Andrew was empowered to reveal the details of why this should be so, which
were sordid enough to damage a man's reputation, even in the most liberal
quarter of San Francisco. Perhaps especially their, actually. Certainly it was
nothing he wanted Hank Summers to ever know.
“Doyouknow where the hell we are?” Hank demanded of Andrew, changing the
subject while finding a way to express his own hostility and instant dislike to
the old gentleman that was acceptable by his own lights. “Or how the hell you
got here?”
“Perhaps we've all died and gone to hell,” suggested yet another appallingly
familiar and ironically amused voice, somewhere between a purr and a yawn.
Ethan Rayne oozed into view from amongst a thicket of scrubby little trees,
moving as unhurriedly and as unseemly fluidly as a cat. He was wearing nothing
but a geometrically patterned black and silver silk robe, which fell only to
his mid thigh and clung so smoothly against his flesh as to leave no doubt
whatsoever regarding his otherwise nakedness.
Giles blinked, startled yet again for a moment, then found a little space to
sigh with resignation and to coolly appreciate the biting humor of the
situation before the icy-hot anger began to spread through his veins. Indeed,
Sartre himself could not have chosen him three better companions for an
eternity of torment. “Ethan,” he began in a hard, hot voice of barely
suppressed rage, tempered by dignity rather than mercy, “Whatever you've done,
undo it this instant or I will thrash you within an inch of your miserable
life!”
“Ripper,Darling,” Ethan cooed sardonically, ganging up on him with Andrew just
for a vicious laugh like the spiteful little imp he was. “You ought to know me
better after all these years. If I were going to dump you on a desert moon 70
light years from Earth, do you think there is one single chance in hell that
Iwould be here with you?”
“70...wait, what?” Hank was nearly apoplectic. Normally, he'd have dismissed
the idea too easily to be alarmed or shocked by it. But the sudden and
unfathomable means by which he had been transported here made anything seem
plausible enough to get worked up about, especially coming from someone who
seemed to possess the very rare quality of having a fucking clue what was going
on.
Andrew Giles wasn't buying. “What's this burk on about, 'light years'?” he
demanded of his son. “This looks precisely like an Earth to me.”
“AnEarth,” Hank mumbled numbly. He was much too sure that he had heard the old
man correctly.
“In fact, I'm quite certain that I felt myself pulled through a
dimensionaldisturbance,” Mr. Tweedier-than-thou was insisting indignantly. Hank
shook his head but kept his mouth shut this time. A dimensional disturbance.
Sure, why not?
“How do you know where we are, exactly?” Giles asked Ethan skeptically, his
temper cooling a little in the face of the apparent probability of what Ethan
had said, specifically that he'd be watching any torment he himself inflicted
from a very safe distance if at all possible.
“I maintain a location charm which gives me instant and perfect knowledge of my
exact location relative to the center of the Earth at all times. The Earth, not
An Earth. I don't pretend to know how we got here and if you say it felt like a
dimensional disturbance, Professor, I can't argue with you, because that is one
thing I've never actually tried myself, but I know where we are,with absolute
certainty. Not that I can attach a name to the place, mind. I don't even know
if it has one, but we are just about exactly 70.236 light years (he smiled a
little more impishly, genuinely amused) North by Northwest of Earth, navigating
from a point extending out from the North Pole and relative to Good old
Greenwich as the Earth happens to be turned at this moment. Or to put it
another way,” he added, momentarily frowning a little at the thought, “someone
very powerful and with a keen sense of humor hates us all quite a lot. Which, I
would say, puts our exact location somewhere between the ass end of nowhere and
in very deep shit.”
This man, whoever he was, seemed to Hank to be not nearly displeased enough
with his assessment of the situation. He wasn't thrilled, but he was something
considerably to the cheerful side of resigned. That and the confident way he
stood at his ease, half-naked, and casually lectured three men in suits and
ties, two of whom clearly knew and hated him, was unnerving to say the least.
“Who the hellareyou?” Hank wondered aloud, feeling something akin to genuine
awe.
“Ethan Rayne,” he said, smiling in a sort of privately amused way that made
Hank reluctant to grasp the hand he extended. “I'm an old mate of Ripper's from
better days. When he wasn't such a stiff old closet case.”
“You can stop calling me that any time,” said Mr. Giles tersely. Hank found his
hand enveloped in the other man's for the lack of any clear direction to take
in avoiding it. Something about being touched by this man felt indescribably,
unpleasantly intimate. Hank tried to tell himself that it wasn't because he was
putting such a fine point on the fact that he was gay but rather because of
the-not-quite-the-same-thing-as-friendly way he managed to turn an handshake
into a sort of digital caress. That and the fact that he clearly had an
unpleasant history, apparently at least to some degree a sexual one, with the
man who was currently banging Buffy. Or had been until they had found
themselves seventy fucking light years away from Earth!
Hank felt a strange combination of numb acceptance and defensive anger. Both of
these feelings were seeping in the direction on blind panic. Never mind about
magic and dimensions and any of the rest of it. Never mind that Buffy's cradle-
robbing, hell-n-gone-from-being-a-boy 'friend' had a gay ex-lover who called
him by a nickname worthy of a serial killer. They were not the fuck on Earth.
They were someplace else. There was a big, gravely looking planet hanging in
the night sky bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the moon. “How are we going
to get home?” he demanded of no one in particular. “I mean, what are we
supposed to do? Stick out our thumbs and hope for a damn UFO to come along?”
At that exact moment, the ground began to shake. Not more than a quarter mile
away, a dark, clunky looking spacecraft, lit from beneath by a blue-white
light, began to ascend into the sky. Hank didn't know whether to climb on a
rock and wave or to throw himself to the ground. Then, suddenly, the sky was
filled with a loud, gruff, gravelly, anguished, amplified voice. “Damn you
Bridget! Damn you to Hades! You broke my heart in a million pieces! You made me
love you, and then you—I SHAVED OFF MY BEARD FOR YOU! Devil woman!!!!”
“Well,” said Ethan nonchalantly, “that sounds like the end of a conversion it
might have been interesting to hear the beginning of.”
“It sounds like perfect English!” Giles countered excitedly. “Bloody hell, I'd
kill for a flare gun!” His eyes darted around the dark, baron landscape in the
frantic but vain hope of discovering some means by which to make their presence
known before the craft departed. It was already very nearly too late. “Damn it,
Ethan,” he shouted in frustration. “Use magic! Do... something!” It was too
late; the craft was gone.
“Might I suggest,” Andrew suggested coolly, deliberately, hiding from all but
his son the fact that he was shaken, “that we ask this 'Bridget' to suggest a
mean of transportation.” No one had a better suggestion to make. They all
started walking briskly in the direction from which they had seen the ship
arise and depart. They had covered more than half the distance but were still
not in sight of anyone when a pistol shot rung through the night, from
precisely the direction in which they were headed.
Hank threw himself to the ground. The first shot was followed almost
immediately by another. Andrew froze and waited. Ethan brought himself more
casually but no less quickly to a stop, becoming visibly more alert. Rupert, of
course, both Andrew and Ethan noted with what was very nearly a shared sigh,
was already gone, throwing himself through the night like a third bullet.
Towards the danger.
****
Oz felt strange. Stranger than usual. Stranger even than what was usual lately.
All of his senses were open wide. He knew that it was dark from the quality of
the lights and shadows around him, but he could see as well as day. He looked
down at his hands, half expecting to see fur and claws, half assuming that this
was what it was like on the nights that he couldn't remember and that this must
be one of those times. Where had the rest of the month gone? he wondered. He
had thought he had a few more days.
He had been right. His arms were still covered in casts, of course, but his
hands were no hairier than any other young man's. His fingernails were round
and pink. Still, Oz felt strange. His pain, though still ever present, was
dull, almost seeming distant, while the world around was drawn into him or he
out into it, turning his perspective inside out. A whole world of smells
enveloped him, so thick and close he could taste them all. He was not in a wild
wood, as his eyes tried to tell him, but rather, in a large park, surrounded by
a city packed with mice and men, crawling over one another to find a tiny bit
of space, of peace; pissing and shitting and eating and fucking, vomiting and
giving birth, killing each other and dying of cancer, stinking of hard work,
fear and lust. The noise they all made was a collective hiss, just at the edge
of hearing.
Oz lifted his face to the sky, trying to orient himself. He didn't exactly
disbelieve what he saw, but he sniffed repeatedly for confirmation and found
that once again the evidence of his senses remained in conflict. Either that,
or he was behind the times, he realized. He must have (they must have, he
corrected as a familiar scent suddenly registered, cutting through the general
stench) traveled through time! What else could explain the fact that he was
standing at the heart of a human city, beneath an alien sky.
****
Giles's impulse was to warn the man, to order him to drop the gun. But armed as
he was only with a fist sized rock, having nothing whatsoever to his advantage
but the element of surprise, he didn't dare. As it was, the man dodged at the
last second, taking the blow in the shoulder rather than the temple. He did
not; however, drop his gun. He leveled it at Giles but kept his eyes on the
girl. He cursed copiously in some sort of garbled pidgin of Mandarin before
demanding of her, perhaps ironically, “Good lord, woman, what have you got, a
waiting list? Are you the next ex,” he asked Giles failing to sound casual
rather than caustic, “or the last one?”
“Only a man who disapproves of holding women at gunpoint,” Giles replied
crisply, warping his terror in defiance.
“Delicate, helpless creatures that they are(!)” the gunman sneered.
“I never said that,” Giles replied coolly. “I don't really approve of holding
men at gunpoint either.”
“No,” Ethan agreed, sauntering through the treeline and into view, “never did.
Ripper always prefers a knife or an ax, don't you, Ripper?” He sounded
intolerably amused and pleased with himself.
Mal looked both men up and down thoroughly for the first time. The one who
the... he was going to go out on a limb and say 'high class male escort'...
kept calling Ripper didn't look much like someone who'd earned a name like
that. He looked like a Gorram librarian. But then again, so did Niska. People
mostly look how they want to look, not how they are. Then again, guys like
Niska didn't go around spontaneously risking their lives to save damsels in
distress. Only idiots like Malcolm Reynolds did stupid things like that.
Mal sighed. “I think we have a misunderstanding brewing here, boys,” he said,
lowering his gun but not putting it away. “See, where you're thinking you see
an innocent girl, I'm seeing the cold-blooded pirate who tried to kill me and
my crew to steal my ship out from under me about a half a year back. Now, I'd
offer to leave her here with you when my ship comes back for me, but I wouldn't
be doing you any favors seeing as how she's liable to turn around and do the
exact same thing to you.
“So I'll make you a deal. You boys get on back to your ship, finish up whatever
shenanigans brought you out here to this lonely little rock in the first place,
and get on with your business while I get on with mine. Do we understand each
other?”
“We have no ship,” Giles confided. He didn't have a great deal of reason to
trust this man, but he didn't see that he had a lot of options. Anyone could
see that this was the kind of place people came only to avoid being
interrupted. God alone knew how infrequent opportunities to get off this moon
might be. Even if it wasn't for the risk of starving or being killed by some
unknown alien creature, he did not fancy the thought of spending days, months
or years stranded in the wilderness with Ethan, Hank and Andrew.
The gunman was incredulous. “You mean you've got your...” he used a Chinese
word that could have meant 'friend' but clearly didn't “...out here prancing
around the scrub brush, in that getup,with no place to bed down? Pardon me for
saying so, and what you boys do is your business, but I just don't see the
point in that.”
“I told you we should have just gone back to my place,” Ethan teased, clearly
enjoying the whole 'misunderstanding farce' a little too much.
Giles gave him his very best exacerbated look, but he was unchastened. “Look
here,” he said to the owner of a mode of transport that appeared to be set to
arrive soon, “Ethan is not my... paramour. This is not some sort of... romantic
rendezvous. We are stranded out here, and I won't bore you with the detail, but
it is vitally important that we get to Earth at once and we will see to it that
anyone who helps us is richly rewarded.”
“Earth?” Mal asked puzzled, “What Gorram planet is that on? Who'd go and give a
place a bad-luck name like 'Earth'.”
“I'm not exactly superstitious,” Bridget agreed, “but that? That's just plain
bad taste.”
“I don't recall asking for your opinion,” Mal reminded her coolly, raising the
muzzle of his gun slightly for a moment. He lowered it again when he saw the
uneasy look exchanged by the two 'just friends' from 'Earth.'
“Look here, mate,” the one in his nightgown started in in a lets-be-reasonable-
about-this kind of tone that Mal hated hearing almost as much as he hated
having to use, clearly in talk this lunatic out of killing us mode. “All we
need is to get to the nearest place with a working commercial space port. Can
you help us out with that?”
“We'd be most appreciative, I assure you,” Andrew chimed in, strolling up to
the group with Hank in tow, ready to contribute to the resolution of the crisis
now that discussion instead of gunfire seemed to be the order of the day.
Mal cursed fluently in about two and a half languages concluding with, “who in
the rutting verse are you?” He spoke most directly to the gray-bearded
seventyish gentlemen with the authoritative attitude about bravely showing up
once it was pretty clear he wouldn't have to fight, but he didn't exclude any
of the four of them. “How did you get out here anyway?”
“That's not important,” said the old man smugly, extending a hand. “Andrew
Giles,” he explained. “This is Mr. Henry Summers, Mr. Ethan Rayne and... my
son. Rupert.” The old man's distaste increased exponentially with each name he
spoke. His hand hung in the air, untouched, until had last he had no practical
choice to withdraw it.
“No offense,” the cocksure, self-important young fool explained, “but I find
shaking hands with my piece drawn to be something hypocritical not to mention
dangerous, and anyhow, since I am the one with the gun, that means I get to
decide what's important, so now, I'm going to ask one more time very politely,
then I'm liable to get impatient: Who are all you people and what are you
really doing out here?”
****
“How'd you get up there?” Oz asked.
Xander looked down from the top of the twenty-foot lamppost onto which he had
materialized. He was pretty sure Oz was being a smart ass, but his delivery was
so deadpan there was no way to be really sure. “Look,” he said crossly, for
once in no joking mood, “ just find me a latter or something alright?” It was
hard to tell from where he was clinging, but Xander would have almost sworn
that he saw Oz smile, just a little. But even if he did, it wasn't for long.
“Unknown Citizens!” shouted a loud voice supplemented by a megaphone, “This is
a restricted access area. You are bound by law to stand down!”
“Stand Down?” Xander cried, beside himself, “Don't you think I would if I
could?” The man with the megaphone ignored this, and started yelling in
Chinese. Oz spread his hands wide and held them as high as his casts would
allow. He could smell the excitement of their four unseen attackers, their
bored but still vaguely hopeful blood-lust, not really expecting to get to kill
or even kick ass, but ready. They lived in the confidence of those who know
they will always be obeyed. There was not a whiff of fear or uncertainty among
them.
“Chill,” Oz advised Xander firmly but quietly, “These are cops. We're getting
arrested. Don't make trouble.”
 ****
He hadn't meant to take them onto his ship, not a one of the five of them. It
had just... happened. Things seemed to just happen a lot lately, a circumstance
Mal was growing mighty tired of. Saffron (or whatever her name was) was locked
in a cabin for everyone's safety, but the other four were roaming around the
passenger dorm, doing that trying-hard-not-to-say-something-that-let's-on-
we're-not-what-we-seem thing that made him so very nervous about all of them.
How it had just happened was also troubling. They had still been discussing
things, getting in no kind of rush, while the crew loaded the ship. They had
been tossing around the idea of Mal sending word to some localish merchant to
fetch them within a day or two in exchange for a pair of genuine 'Earth That
Was' artifact pocket watches and trying to ignore the little woman's constant
interjections that she knew where they could get their hand on far more
priceless memorabilia of that era. Then, suddenly, River Tam, who had wanted to
help load 'so she could feel some sky on her skin', had gone more than usually
crazy.
River had started screaming and carrying on like she had done back on Ariel
when she knew the Fed's were coming. No kind of plan had been reached for how
else anyone might ever be getting off that moon alive except aboard Serenity.
Also, Mal didn't love the idea of leaving four or five hostile, betrayed-
feeling folk behind to have a chat with the Alliance about his activities if
they did happen to show up. Besides, they had all seen and heard River. About
the only two things his could have done were to kill them or take them on
board, and he had not one shred of evidence for the concept that a one of them,
outside of Saffron, had ever done a thing worth dying over. Certainly not to
him or his they hadn't.
“This is crazy, Mal,” Zoe said, coming up to him privately, quietly, after they
were in the black. “Sir,” she added at the look he gave her, but she didn't
back down. “Sir, we have to quit doing this. They got nothing to offer us but
trouble. And if we keep taking on broke, stranded passengers, how are we going
to feed them? How are we going to feed ourselves, Sir? Never mind that the
minute we sit them down, they got no reason not to call the Feds as soon as
they hear about the reward.”
“They're here now,” Mal pointed out. “They're on board. What do you want me to
do, tell them to take a walk?”
“Maybe just one of them, Sir,” she said, not quite as much joking as not
joking.
“And then the other four would all be witnesses to that,” he pointed out.
Zoe had said her piece, and so she walked away. She knew what Mal had just said
was true. He'd been wrong, but he was right about it. There was nothing right
they could do at this point. Things were in motion that had to be let to 'just
happen' themselves out.
But she resented it, resented the way Mal always assumed everyone's lives were
his to risk and to protect, that every single choice was his to make and to
live with. And she knew that there were others on board who resented it more
than she did, who resented Maland trusted him less, felt less loyal to him
because of incidents like this in a way she never could, but which she
understood. She also knew her husband, Wash, was one of them. It frustrated her
that Mal would never listen, never let a word to the wise be enough to teach
him to take a few easy precautions to make other people feel heard and
respected, not just cared about the way children and other incompetents are.
****
“Damn it, Mal,” Inara stormed quietly, “You're not hearing what I'm saying.
You're not trying to hear what I'm saying! There are plenty of worlds where we
both can work. You have to let me work, or this arrangement can't.”
“Threats, is it now?” Mal asked with carefully suppressed heat. “You figure to
change how I run my ship be threatening to leave?”
“I didn't mean it like that,” Inara tried to explain, conciliatory, but still
frustrated.
“Yeah?” Mal challenged bitterly, “Just exactly how did you mean it?” Inara
turned away. There was no arguing with him when he was like this. At times like
this in fact, she often wondered why she didn't just leave. She'd never thought
much of women who explained staying beholden to men who called them whores and
tried to run their lives, to horde them like gorram platinum, with the old
standard excuse of 'I love him.' “Well, maybe next time you should just stick
to wiles,” Mal was saying as he turned to huff self-righteously away. And in a
way, she though, maybe he was right. She should have.
“Beloved of the Goddess!” she heard a smooth, silken, warmly amused voice
declare, “Why do you let him speak to you that way? He should be on his knees
to worship at your alter, dear priestess!” As the man continued to speak, the
amusement in his voice was rapidly being replaced by passion. It was Ethan, the
still nearly naked one of the latest basket of stray humans Mal had adopted.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded, much less harshly than she had meant
to.
“I'm quiet,” Ethan said with a trying-too-hard-to-be-charming-but-succeeding-
anyway kind of smile, clearly amused again.
“If you think you can come here for sex, that you can demand my company in
exchange for some trinket...” she started to launch into her standard lecture.
She had been told that he was sly, that he was the lover or at least the ex-
lover of one of the men he traveled with, but the way he was appraising her,
undressing her with his eyes just for beginners, she knew that wasn't the
truth, at least not the whole truth.
“Dear lady!” Ethan assured her, sounding genuinely if only slightly wounded,
and amused at himself even for that, “Let me assure you, I make no such
assumption. I mean, I'd be honored, don't get me wrong. But I think we both
know that what you do is a bit more complicated than that.”
“What do you know about my work?” Inara asked. It was her turn to be amused
now.
“About your profession,” he replied, “probably even less than I think. About
what you are, your role as the vessel of the Goddess in this world, quite a
lot, actually.
“Of course, my own religion is a bit more... unorthodox,” he went on more or
less mock philosophically (or maybe not so mock?) but I respect your work very,
very much. Most of us are on a side, you see, but you, you are the priestess of
the Goddess of the Union of Law and Chaos, the One True Mother! I can see her
aura all around you, you know.”
“Who is that?” Inara guessed, truly amuse now by what she saw as an nothing
more than a stretching exercise in playful flattery, the kind of for fun more
than for sex flirting that she also enjoyed and was very good at. “Is it Kali?”
she guessed.
“No,” he said, sounding suddenly serious. “You, my dear are the Acolyte of
Venus! Kali and all that death crowd...” he went on, amused again, playfully
superior, “well, Rupert and his lot... that's more their line.”
****
“Two By Two,” she was only mumbling sleepily now, weeping softly, no longer
howling and shrieking in terror. “Two By Two/Hands of Blue. They Come Out of
the Bike. They Come When You Call.” River should have been out cold from all
the drugs Simon had given her, but she wasn't, and he didn't dare to give her
any more. So on she carried, in that eerie, sing-song murmur.
“Two By Two/Hands of Blue. Two By Two, and he is one. Just one, just one and
not the other. One hand claps the other, makes it make that sound, but he
doesn't mean it. Doesn't wear the gloves. Doesn't need them. Hands already
soaked in blood, soaked through the skin and in. Two By Two/Hands that Knew.
Same Song. Same Song, Different Verse.”
***** INSIDE, OUTSIDE, UPSIDE DOWN *****
Chapter Summary
     As Buffy's condition appears to remain unchanged, Willow and Amy seek
     help from someone older and wiser. Ethan parries with Inara over the
     possibility of a thrust. Oz learns what it means to be a werewolf
     unfettered by The Moon That Was. The men of Buffy's life discuss
     plans to get back to her. And familiar people keep turning up in
     strange places, much to everyone's peril.
Ira was hallucinating; he knew that much. A bright white light filled the
darkness within but not the darkness without. He could here a woman singing
silently. She sounded like Sheila but she was not Sheila, nor was she Willow.
Not entirely. There was... not an image exactly, but the idea of an image. A
menorah. But instead of the candles being lighted one by one, one by one they
were blinking out.
                                     *****
 “Ummm, I think you can come down now,” Oz said awkwardly. “I... feel better.”
'Embarrassed' seemed like an odd emotional response to what he had just done,
but that was definitely what he was feeling. Maybe he was in shock, he thought
vaguely, maybe to horror of it all would hit him later.
 “I'm fine here, thanks,” said Xander stiffly from where he was still clinging,
fingers and heels dug in, to the top to the lamppost. “This is very comfortable
really... so...”
 “That's not the last of them,” Oz pointed out reasonably, his eyes sweeping
the corpse strewn greenery, alert for the appearance of more officers. He
counted fourteen dead, most with their throats torn out and several much more
badly mauled even than that. Fourteen cops. That was a hanging matter anywhere
there was such a thing and a locked-up-forever-with-chance-of-lobotomy matter
anywhere else. He couldn't leave Xander sitting in the middle of this like a
goat with its horns tangled in the brush.
 But besides Xanders (objectively somewhat reasonable) misgivings about coming
down to join him in making his escape, there was also the practical difficulty
of how he was even supposed to get down. They still had nothing like a ladder.
And time was bound to be of the serious essence. Oz suppressed a groan. Even
knowing it was likely to complicated Xander's... trust issue with him, there
was only one thing he could see to do.
 Hurriedly, but carefully, positioning them for maximum stability, Oz began
piling the corpses one on top of the other at the base of the lamppost. His
arms hurt like hell even through the clamber of sensory data that enveloped
him, but they seemed to work alright. The casts had broken off during the fight
apparently, which he suspected was a very bad thing, but he so didn't have time
to worry about that right now.
 “Oh God!” Xander groaned, when he saw what was happening. He squeezed his eyes
shut and began mumbling a muddle of confused prayers.
 “Shut up!” Oz snapped, suddenly so cross, so near to being truly angry with
the other boy, that it frightened him. “I'm trying to concentrate here!” he
snarled. He'd been trying for a firm but slightly apologetic tone, but that
wasn't it. Xander was beyond frightened, now, Oz knew. He was terrified. He was
sick with dread. Oz hated to be the cause of such fear, hated to be thought of
as a monster, especially by someone he knew, and even more especially when
there was so much evidence that he really was something to be afraid of. But
Xander did shut up. And that made the world, whatever world it was, just a
little bit of a better place.
 For the moment, if just barely, Oz was able to think. He let his mind run as
the task of stacking the bodies of his slain enemies into a ladder became rote
and mechanical. And Run his mind did. It roved the landscape inside and outside
his head, pawing and sniffing at the universe, turning it over and looking at
it from every possible angle. Trying to find a way back home. To Earth, to
Sunnydale, to twentieth century America. The land where you could hang out in a
park at night if you wanted to, without fear of heavily armed bands of
Government Agents roaming the streets in search of enemies.
                                     *****
 On Agent Bender's shout of “Now!”, white hot arcs of power flew from their
outstretched weapons. It was only when the monster was down on the ground that
they saw the body cradled in his arms.
 “Holy shit!” one green recruit gasped, “I think we killed her.”
 “Not a chance,” Bender assured her. “He already sucked her dry. Otherwise she
would have showed hot on the scanners.” The young soldier looked at the older
girl skeptically for a moment, then shrugged in the face of her superior's
certainty. They hauled the stunned vampire into his specially reenforce
Transport and Containment Box (TCB) and called a meat wagon for the victim.
 “Alright,” Bender said, all gung ho, pleased with her night's work, “let's get
this handsome fella back to The Professor.”
                                     *****
 “You're not supposed to be in here,” she said. But she didn't say it in a way
that meant leave. He had gone to some trouble to get clean, she saw. It was the
least he could do, since he was lying on her bed, uninvited. But it was no easy
trick aboard ship, especially in the now somewhat crowded passenger dorm. He
was wearing some fairly nondescript clothing that she though might have
belonged to Wash, but he seemed to wear it on his own terms. The way he seemed
to do everything.
 “I'm not supposed to be anywhere anymore,” Ethan pointed out.
 Inara smiled, on guard yet relaxed, as if for a battle of wits. A battle in
which she felt she could hold her own and that nothing much was at stake. “So
I've heard.”
 Ethan's smile said he felt he'd won a point just by getting her into the ring.
Inara felt her heart quicken to the chase. It really had been too long. Too
long since she'd had a good spar even, never mind actual sex. Which was
probably not where this was going, she reminded herself. But still, the not
being one hundred percent sure, one way or the other.... She'd forgotten to
notice how much she'd missed that, how much fun it could be not to know where
things were going, with almost nothing at stake.
 Ethan sensed her thoughts drifting away from from him. And though it was
nothing crucial, though he could walk away from her, never have her and not
lose any sleep, he didn't want to. She was a sweet that savored back, a feat
well worth attempting because it would appreciate being accomplished. But she
wasn't going to be seduced today, nor disarmed by the pretense that that wasn't
what he was ultimately up to. The lady was a pro, whatever else, more than a
match for him. She had to see all his cards on the table, know she held the
winning hand, and still want to fold.
 “This is pretty wild country for a companion,” he said. Changing the subject
completely. Not confirming or denying what River had said about them, what Hank
had foolishly admitted, letting his could-be-ironic tease in that direction be
enough for now.
 Her smile returned. Her eyes danced. She wasn't letting him get away with
that. “I'm surprised you know that,” she said, “coming from five-hundred years
in the past.”
 Oldest profession, he thought. But that was the wrong tack. “We had wild
country though,” he said. “Almost two dozen hectares in my neighborhood, all
with paths and benches, right between the zoo and the tree museum.”
 Inara's smile softened just a little. “That sounds like Xenon,” she said.
 He shrugged, projecting catlike indifference. “All cities, I suppose,” he
said. He made his eyes sad. Inara wasn't buying it, but she wasn't letting on,
allowing herself to appear to reserve judgment on his sincerity and not just on
what her response should be. She was now almost though still not entirely sure
that sex with Ethan was in her power to choose at any moment. He was working
just a little too hard at not seeming to work at it. But like everything else,
at least at this point, it would have to seem and perhaps to be on on his own
terms. Inara was far from sure that she was willing to give him that, even if
she ultimately decided that sex with him was what she wanted... or what she was
willing to do to get what she needed.
 Still, she didn't see the harm in giving him a little encouragement, just to
make things interesting, just to keep events in motion. “Much as I'd love for
you to stay and regale me with tales of Earth That Was,” she said with a 'shy-
trying-to-be-bold'-but-in-a-clearly-ironic-and-calculated-way-unless-you-
desperately-don't-want-it-to-be smile, “I need to give myself a sponge bath.
I've gotten terribly sweaty, sitting in this warm, stale, close little Shuttle
all alone for weeks on end.”
 His own smile was somehow both frank and sly, both impressed and amused. She
was teasing him with the idea that she thought him an easy mark, one to be
driven mad with arousal like a little school boy by images of her hands moving
like a lover's over her own naked flesh, warm soapy water running in glistening
rivulets around the mounds of her breasts and down over her thighs. It was the
more amusing, the more pleasantly chaffing, the more arousing still, because,
despite the strong primary subtext that they both 'knew' it wasn't working,
they both also knew that it actually was. 'Well played,' Ethan thought, and
might have said aloud. But that would have burst the delicate suspensions of
acknowledgment that kept the game going. And he was far from ready for this to
end. Especially while she was winning.
 “Anon, then,” he said instead, tipping an imaginary hat to her as he stood and
walked to the door. When he had completely exited and partly shut the door,
when she had half slid out of her outermost garment, he leaned back in again.
She let out a startled breath and hurried to pulled the silken material back
around her shoulders, as if genuinely surprised. It was a touch Ethan
appreciated, the perfect non-verbal set up for his carefully chosen line. “Just
one bit of advice, from 'Earth That Was',” he offered in a voice velvety with
the suggestion of dangerous secret knowledge of something as powerful as magic
or sex, “Be ware of Hitchhikers.”
 Inara waited for the door to close and lock behind him before she smiled.
                                     *****
 When Joyce saw the lights coming up the road, her first impulse was to flag
them down for a ride, but for a moment, she almost didn't dare. There was
something about this place, something about this night. Something she couldn't
put her finger on. Something that scared her. Then again, walking along this
dark road at night with no idea how to get back to town or where town even was,
let alone what town she would be in if she ever got there, was also pretty
scary.
 Although... Joyce had heard about things that happened to girls who hitched
rides. On the other hand, her odds were probably better with someone she chose
to flag down than with someone who, unprompted, chose to stop. Deciding to risk
it, Joyce stepped out into the roadway, arm and thumb outstretched. She had to
step back much more quickly. The driver sped up rather than slowing down. Joyce
fought the urge to curse and scream at the rapidly disappearing vehicle. But
really! What kind of a person would practically try to run down an obviously
pregnant woman on the side of a desert road at night?
                                     ~~~~~
 “Where are you, you vicious brat!?!” Katherine raged and howled. She had
locked herself in a classroom, but wasps were still coming in, a few at a time,
through the ceiling. She was covered in a least a dozen stings, one of which
had swollen her left eye nearly shut. “I'll kill you for this,” she railed.
“I'll finally be rid of you once and for all!”
 Then, for a moment, it was as if something had been released. For a moment,
she thought of Tim, the way they were, here, together when everything fit and
worked and made sense. And for a moment, just for a moment, before the rage
returned, there was longing. Longing to begin again, not to correct but to
appreciate the past for the present it had been. And to be loved.
 But when the rage returned, it was a sick, sorry, impotent thing. A thing that
wanted to break, to crush, to kill, but was itself too broken to bother. James
raised the gun to his head. The past that had been his seemingly eternal
present was gone. All that remained was a hopeless future, one he didn't want.
He held the gun to his temple and squeezed the trigger. He felt the body,
Katherine's body, fall and shutter with release. But once again, it had been
only her suffering that ended. James was still dead, still beyond hope, still
unable to be saved. But still not gone. Still trapped.
                                     ~~~~~
 Amy stiffened in Willow's embrace. They lay in Giles bed, had lain there for
hours, trying to get a little sleep, at most dozing. Neither of them was dozing
now. “What is it?” Willow asked.
 “How should I know?” Amy snapped, her voice startlingly harsh, brittle. She
sat up suddenly and jerked away, but just as suddenly she found herself
enfolded in Willow's arms again, melting into her embrace. Sobbing. She wept a
good long while, then pulled away, wiped her eyes, stood, and got dressed, not
saying anything. Willow watched her nervously for a little while, not seeming
to find the courage to ask what was wrong again. Besides, whatwasn'twrong?
 Turning her face aside, Willow mumbled, “I'm going to go check on Buffy.”
Buffy seemed to be making little progress, even in her own context. She had
fallen onto her face again, losing the tiny gains she had earlier made towards
sitting up, gravity pulling at her faster than she could shift position. Amy
came and stood beside Willow, now fully dressed, now perfectly composed. “We
should hit the books again,” Willow said.
 Amy shook her head. “This is too much for us,” she said grimly. “We should
find someone who knows what she's doing.”
                                    ~~~~~
 The shopkeeper looked up confused. “Did you come in through the back?” she
asked nervously. She hadn't heard the bells that warned her when the front door
was opening. But, then, she knew that she had locked the back.
 Agent Garner pulled back the slide action on her Desert Eagle and shoved it in
the other woman's face. “I'll ask the questions,” she said. “I want to know
what kind of magic you've been doing?”
 Ms. Waddle was quiet for a moment, which was as long as she dared. She could
see no way forward but to employ a small measure of honesty. “Nothing more than
monitoring what's been done by others,” she assured the young woman. “The
first... vortex,” she explained, groping for terms that were comprehensible
without being analogized to the point of pure fiction, “the one in which the
men were... shifted away, that was something demonic. But this latest... time
flow disruption, this is a witches spell. It just isn't mine.”
 There, that was enough truth, enough to give everything she said a feel of
authenticity, enough to let her explain the physical phenomena around them in
accurate terms that would be shown true to the extent they could be tested by
magical or non-magical means. This measure of honesty gave her license to lie
with confidence and credibility when the young officer asked, “Who is this
witch? Where can I find her?”
 “I wish I knew,” Ms. Waddled replied.
 “Ha!” Garner scoffed, “We'll see about that when The Professor gets through
questioning you!”
                                     ~~~~~
 Sheila had driven the invaders from her Condo with the eager assistance of the
local authorities, who were tripping over the troops of the new Federal
Garrison to be of assistance to a member of the Medical profession, no matter
her specialty. She thanked and dismissed them, pretending not to hear their
entreaties to take up a position at the local hospital or their 'subtle hints'
that refusal would eventually mean being pressganged into National Service.
There was no sign of Willow. Sheila was unsurprised.
 The house on Crawford Street was still boarded up, same as ever. That
surprised her at first, but she supposed it should not have. The power was not
in the house. It was of the House. She should have known better than to
reproduce. Some things could only be destroyed, not changed. Most things, in
fact, and especially most people. They were what they were. And what Willow
was, what she almost would have had to be, was a witch.
                                     *****
 “Do you think she's on the level?” Wash asked skeptically, as the five of them
huddled together at the table, speaking in low voices. Pretty much everyone
gave him a look. “You know what I mean,” he countered. “Do you think her
information is accurate, about the Lassiter.” If it was, and especially if it
was true about the 'solid buyer' part, they all knew that was a retirement
level score. The thought smacked Wash in the heart. Not that Zoe would ever
really retire.
 Mal shrugged, responding to wash's question without noticing his subtly
changed expression. “I'd bet a lot on it,” he said, “but not my life if I could
help it. If she really did get crossed up in her plans to pull a big job like
that, I figure she'd be goin' on about it about like she is. Trying to get
another bunch of suckers to help her. If not, there's less complicated ways to
sucker someone into just letting you go. She'd have tried at least on one of
'em first I expect.”
 “So what do we do about it?” Zoe asked reasonably. “Even if we do believe her.
We can't pull a job like that with a crowd of tourists on board.”
 “Tourists?” Jayne grumbled, “Gorram lunatics is what they are. Crazier 'en she
is.”
 “They ain't,” Kaylee argued. “They're just scared to say who they are is all,
someone lookin' for 'em maybe, 'an River givin' 'em an out like that, couldn't
help themselves, is what I reckon.”
 “That's the comforting thought?” Wash countered, surprising even Jayne by
lining up on his side, “that we just picked up four fugitives who're lying to
us?”
 “We're overrun with fugitives here anyway,” Zoe pointed out, frustrated, but
hard to say with who, “What's four more?”
 “What do you wantme to do?” Mal demanded of the three of them, getting
frustrated himself. “We can't run 'em all though the Gorram engine!”
 “What about just her?” Jayne asked. Zoe kept her face carefully neutral, but
Mal know what she was thinking anyway.
 “She's the one with the Gorram job!” Mal pointed out. “Anybody else around
here got any leads on how to make a quick fortune or two with the Feds already
on our ass at every turn, 'cause I sure as hell don't!”
 “That's just great, Mal(!)” Wash fumed, “Meanwhile, what do we do about these
four crazy people? Even if we find a decent place to leave them, how do we know
they won't sell us out to the Alliance in exchange for a ride to 'Earth'!?!”
 “Well, why don't we hand 'em over to our resident expert on crazy?” Jayne
suggested, more joking than not. “Let him sort 'em out.”
 Mal started to shout something back at him, then he stopped. His mouth snapped
shut. Zoe, Kaylee and Wash exchanged a familiar, uneasy look. A look that said
they all agreed they could see him actually thinking about it. Thinking about
what had been said and what had been meant and how they related but weren't the
same as one another. And having some bold new idea because of it. Hatching some
scheme he wasn't ready to let them in on yet. Planning something brilliant or
crazy or both that he naturally expected them all to stake their lives on
without even thinking they deserved to know what it was. After all, he was 'the
Captain' and they were all aboard 'his ship.'
                                     *****
 Spike maneuvered his little vehicle across town by a long, halting, circuitous
route, avoiding the patrols. He was mindful of the time, wary of the
approaching sunrise. He had just driven onto the high school campus when he
heard the shot. He was still nearer the main building than to the pool complex,
by which rout he had meant to make his way back to the Hellmouth with his cargo
of blessed virgins.
 Without really knowing why, Spike parked the tiny truck near a back entrance
and went to investigate. The moment he stepped inside, something felt
different. There was an eerie calm, a waiting hush beyond what could be
explained merely by the stillness of being indoors. Far in the distance, he
heard the clock tower chime midnight.
                                     ~~~~~
 Frustrated, Janice hit the side of her TV again, just a little harder. Her
mother sighed, but didn't bother to chastise her again. The picture remained,
as ever, stuck. It was perfectly clear, mind, not a bit snowy. Just stuck. Like
nothing she had seen before. Captain Kirk stood frozen forever on the verge of
demanding of his beautiful enemy why his crew sat frozen forever. Every other
station was the same. Finally, Janice decided to ignore it by playing her
Nintendo. There was no school, of course, it being Saturday, not that anyone
knew what to expect on Monday. Regardless, the idea of going anywhere, of
playing outside even, was out of the question. Nobody's mother wanted to let
them out of their sight.
                                     *****
 “So what's the plan?” Hank asked earnestly. He looked at each of his three
companions in turn, but his eyes lingering especially, desperately, on Ethan.
“How are we getting back to Earth?” They were all gathered around the small
metal table in his tiny room in the passenger dorm, at his request.
 “Don't you mean 'Earth That Was'?” Ethan asked sardonically.
 “You'll excuse me if I don't find that terribly funny,” Rupert snapped at him,
sounding vicious and stiff at the same time. Exactly like his father, Ethan
thought. Except that, in this case, Andrew seemed very much amused, if bitterly
so.
 “It's still there,” Hank insisted stubbornly. “You said so yourself,” he
pleaded with Ethan. “We just have to find a way back, and when we get there,
then we can find whoever... or whatever—”
 “When we get there indeed!” Andrew interrupted with a cruel chuckle, “That's
the rub, isn't it! Putting aside all practical obstacles, it does still take 70
years to travel 70 lightyears, you know. You'll forgive me, I hope, for
pointing out that there are no spring chickens among us, and so, we don't quite
have 70 years to spare! Never mind that 70 years for now will be 600 years
after the event in question, assuming it even happened on that end, and if not,
Earth is hardly the place to start looking for answers in any case! Not that we
have the slightest idea of any place that might be better!”
 “But we came here in an instant!” Hank insisted hotly. “That means there's got
to be a way—there's got—If it works one way, it has to work the other way too!
We jus—”
 “Don't be silly,” Ethan purred. “People travel forward through time all day
every day—at varying rates of speed by the way, if you believe Einstein at all.
I've never yet met one who's come back the other way, and I've met some
interesting people, believe you me!”
 “Look,” Rupert started in in that trying-to-fashion-calm-from-insistent-
rationality tone that Ethan had used to mistake for intelligent, cool and
commanding and therefore to find irresistibly appealing. “Father's right!”
 “I may die of shock,” Andrew mumbled, taking a drink from a flask that he
quickly tucked back into his inside coat pocket.
 “In that,” Rupert continued, giving the old gentleman a look of supreme
disdain, “our only practicable course of action is to start looking for the
cause—or at least the solution to this predicament—in the here and now.”
 “I don't recall suggesting that we had any practicable course of action,”
Andrew replied with a grim smile. “In deed, Occam's Razor would suggest,” he
began to lecture pompously, “given the fact that none of us is likely to know
or to be known by anyone in this little corner of spacetime, whomever did this
to us, by whatever means, lived and likely died on Earth hundreds of years ago.
Rare is even the demon of the terrestrial variety that could count on living so
long, especially without a thriving human population to live off of one way or
another. In deed, the whole point might well have been to send us so far into
the future that we'd never cross paths with the perpetrator again and to
thereby avoid the karmic price of killing us while gaining the same practical
effect. Which would explain why we arrived at a time and place in which we
could be found and brought back into the flow of human events, allowing
supervening causes to bear the spiritual brunt of our eventual, inevitable
deaths.”
 “Nevertheless,” Rupert replied thinly, “the place we must look for an answer
(whether mystical or technological) is here, now,within the compass of this
'verse' as they call it. First, we must learn as much as we can, as quickly as
possible, from the people aboard this ship and the information to which they
have access. Then, we need to find a place to establish ourselves more
permanently, somewhere where we can have access to adequate research
facilities, to learn what sources of power might be—”
 “Whoa, slow down there!” Hank objected. “Or should I say, speed up. We don't
have time to put down roots and look for research facilities. Joyce is still
missing, and now so are we. Which means Buffy is going to get arrested any
day!” Ethan and Andrew shared an uneasy look, while Rupert had an acutely
anguished expression all to himself. Heedless, Hank continued to rant, “And
even if she doesn't; she is alone, and pregnant,and... and, you know, she's
never been the best at making decisions on her own! God knows what kind of
trouble she'll get her self into by the time we—!”
 Finally, Rupert couldn't stand it anymore. “BUFFY'S DEAD!!!” he shouted,
standing up so abruptly that he knocked over the glasses on the tiny, bolted
down table and sent his spindly folding chair clattering to the floor. For a
moment, Hank was too shocked to speak and the others too apprehensive of the
imminent threat of violence. Rupert spoke into the silence he had created in a
hushed, heavy voice that struggled to be calm. “Buffy has been dead for
centuries,” he all but whispered, pinning Hank with his eyes. “or she is
waiting for us as though we had never left. It all depends upon how we open the
box. As this is without a doubt the most important thing that either of us will
ever do, I suggest we take our time and try to get it right.”
                                     *****
 Willow stared gloomily, worriedly at the closed sign on the door of the Magic
Box. Amy crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. “She lives upstairs,” she
pointed out, stepping up to the door and knocking. But when knocking progressed
to banging, and still continued far too long with no response from within, she
too began to worry. Ms. Waddle, the proprietor of the Magic Box was, to her
knowledge, the only practicing witch (of the human and more or less
approachable variety anyway) in all of Sunnydale. Katherine had always spoken
of Ms. Waddle disparagingly as a 'goody two shoes', which Amy took as a
powerful and positive endorsement of her character. Besides, her aura simply
stank of power. If there was anyone in the Godforsaken town who could help...
 “You there!” The Day Patrol Officer demanded, coming around the corner.
“What's all this racket about?”
 “Nothing Officer,” Amy assured her hurriedly, “We were just moving along.”
                                     ~~~~~
 Seeing no other choice, Joyce continued walking in the direction that the car
had gone, on the very shaky theory that there must be something in that
direction. But something was wrong. She had been certain that she was headed
west and all but certain that the night was young. And yet, in the distance
ahead of her, day began to dawn. The brightness towards which she walked
contrasted sharply with the starry night around and behind her. Oddly, it
didn't seem quite flush with the horizon somehow.
 She must be more disoriented than she thought, Joyce decided. It didn't
matter, she told herself. She kept moving. No direction but forward. One foot
in front of the other, smiling as she remembered one of her mother's favorite
(warning) statements: 'When you don't know where you're going, any road will
take you there.'
                                     *****
 Wash sat on the bridge looking out at the stars. He didn't want to think of
that other night, when Saffron (or whoever she was) had watched the stars with
him. He didn't want to, but he couldn't help it. He was agitated. Of course,
the fact that he was sharing a tiny spaceship in the dead ass center of nowhere
with everyone he cared about, an evil mechanical genius who had already tried
to kill them all once, two fed-magnet fugitives, and four way too mysterious
strangers (some or all of the above being clinically insane) should have been
enough to explain any level of agitation. Yeah, it was enough. But it wasn't
all, and he knew it.
 He could say whatever he wanted about it. Even if there had been a video of
the whole thing (which there wasn't) he had been Ceaser's wife. He had behaved
himself. No poison kisses for Wash, no sirree. The rogue companion from hell
had had to cold cock him the old fashioned way. And Zoe, his knight in shining
leather pants, had been there to rescue and reward him. But for a moment (and
itwas only for a moment) he had wished she wasn't. She didn't know it, but he
did. And even though it had only been a moment, in that moment, he had wished
away the one thing in life he was sure about, the one thing in life that
mattered. And thinking of life without her, even for a moment, had shown him
how empty, how pointless, how utterly without direction, without an 'end of the
tunnel' his life (even his life with her) already was.
 And now Zoe was talking about having a baby again, acting like he was
rejecting her, like he was saying something about their marriage every time he
pointed out how unfair it would be to put a helpless little kid in the fix that
they were already in. Every time he didn't say what she knew he was thinking
anyway. That it was time to bail. Time to find another boat to drive while they
still weren't the ones the Feds were specifically looking for.
 Of course, she saw it too. How could she not see it. Even if, by some miracle,
Mal managed to get disentangled from the Tams without anyone getting killed
over it one way or the other, it wasn't like he was ever going to stop looking
for trouble or it was ever going to stop finding him.
 But Zoe would never leave Mal. They both knew it, despite the big show she'd
made of choosing him over Mal when push came to shove with Niska. That was what
she was really saying when she said 'not now' wasn't an answer. She didn't look
for there to be a someday. There was never going to be a 'home'. This was the
life she had chosen, not for now but for good and all. Wherever Malcolm
Reynolds was, there would Zoe be also, for better or for wore, for rich or for
poor, in sickness and in health until death parted them. It didn't really
matter that Zoe hadn't fucked Mal or that she never even wanted to, any more
than it would matter if she had. They were what his people (or his mother's
people anyway) would have called 'sealed', joined at the soul. And her
'husband' could like it, lump it, or leave her behind, but he could never come
between them.
 Husband wasn't really even the word for it, Wash ruminated morosely. That
would mean she belonged to him or they belonged to each other, or something.
The truth was, he was her concubine. Because even if she wasn't his, he was
definitely hers. He had been hers from the first minute he'd laid eyes on her.
She was the only reason he'd ever set foot on this gorram ship in the first
place. She was the only reason he was still here now. Living his life for a
woman who lived her life for someone else. And now she was giving him shit for
shirking a concubines second principal duty. And every new approach to the
topic felt like a repetition of the same unacceptable answer to the question
that had plagued him since that night on the bridge with Saffron. 'Where is any
of this going?'
 “Any road will take you there,” River nearly sang. She was standing at his
elbow, having walked up, quiet as a cat, while he was lost in thought.
 “You're not supposed to be on the bridge,” he reminded her harshly, his voice
sounding childishly petulant in his own ears.
 River only smiled her knowing little smile. “It's okay,” she said. “Not like
I'm going to try to tell you myths and fairytale or anything.”
                                     *****
 Clouds obscured the moon and stars in the desert night. The old man was near
tears of confusion, but one of the boys took him by the hand and whispered
words of encouragement, of reassurance, in a language he didn't understand. The
words didn't matter. The message was clear enough. Thisway was South. To
Mexico. Home for some of their party, a strange land to others. But for all of
them, the land of freedom.
 He drank of the boys' confidence and pressed onward. In Mexico, men and boys
were being tagged and released. A woman on the radio had said so.
 
***** Priority Check *****
Chapter Summary
     Everyone struggles with issues like "When the hell are we?", "Where
     do we go from here?" and "Who's on top of what (or whom)?"
                                        
 “...the fuck!?!” Spike hissed. It was damn near broad morning! At least... it
had been. He had practically raced the bloody sun here! And Yet. Though he
could see well enough through undead eyes, the interior of the school was dark,
not merely dim. Pools of light like the one around the (always lit) trophy case
were isolated, bounded, like a candle's glow. By darkness.
 It seemed to seep in through every window. As if it were a positive thing in
its own right. As the sound of the midnight bell faded to a distant echo and
was gone, the silent dark proclaimed its affirmation of the truth that the bell
had spoken. It was midnight. Twelve a.m. On what was only just becoming the
seventh day of March, in the year of someone's Lord nineteen and ninety-eight.
 Time seemed to have skipped briefly backward and then begin moving forward
again, like a slightly scratched CD. And like a scratched CD, Spike realized,
he didn't know if he could completely trust it not to skip again at another
spot. He needed to get underground, and quickly, before the sun popped out at
him unexpectedly from around some hidden corner of the space-time continuum.
Then and only then could he expend time (or something like it) and energy in
figuring out what the Hell was going on.
 But suddenly, Spike didn't dare make the sprint to the pool complex that he
had intended to makeknowing the sun was about to rise, but also knowing how
fast. He'd make his way to the basement, Spike deiced. That would be a safe
place to think. For that matter, there might even be a hidden passage down
there that he had yet to discover, a way into the bowels of the town, perhaps,
if not into the sacred place itself.
 But someone must have read his mind or his (arguably) future or something.
Someone who was actually pretty used to that sort of thing. Because there she
was, her pale skin and velvet gown caked with dirt, a filthy pick ax in her
hand, a mop of sweaty, filthy dark hair hanging in clumps and tangles around
her face, as she must have looked the day she arose, reborn, the devil's own.
 “Drusilla!” Spike breathed, and the word became a little prayer of homage.
“You... came for me! You made a way for my salvation! Oh, Dru,” he moaned, as
in the grip of sudden revelation, crossing to her as her heavy tool dropped to
the floor. “You're the one, the only one, I... To Hell with Angel!” he all but
snarled, grabbing her fiercely by both arms. “We don't need him or any of the
rest of them! Let's get out of Sunnydale tonight, you and me! You're the only
one I care about! The only one who understands me, the only one I can...” his
voice broke with emotion. Honestly near tears, he willed her, just this once,
to see the truth: that they and only they belonged together, that nothing and
no one else mattered!
 But something was wrong. Something more complicated than her inevitable
rejection of the idea of ditching Angel. Drusilla tilted her head just a little
and gave him a strange, slightly sad, very human, look. “Oh, James,” she said,
“I understand, believe me I understand. But it's over.”
 'Who the fuck is James?' Spike opened his mouth to ask, but instead he found
himself demanding, with a harsh laugh, “Over!?! Do you honestly think this can
ever be over! You can't make me disappear just because you say it's 'over'!!!”
 “There's no way!” the bitch wailed back at him, trying to plow under the wall
of his righteous anger with her martyrous, self-indulgent grief. “No way we can
ever be together. No way people will ever understand. Accept it!”
 James had only thought he'd been pissed off until she'd said that. “ISTHATWHAT
THIS IS ABOUT!?!?”he screamed at her, going nearly apoplectic,stooping to grab
the pickax that lay on the floor between them, brandishing it high in his right
hand as he closed on her,“WHAT OTHER PEOPLETHINK!!!!!”
                                     ~~~~~
 “I looks like the world is frozen in time,” Ms. Waddle explained nervously,
hurriedly, not for the first time, though it had taken some pretty rough
persuasion to get her beyond the pat little song of uncertainty she had been
chirping at first, “But it's not. It's us. The whole town, in fact. We are
moving through time very rapidly relative to the rest of the universe.”
 The anti-magical restraints still chafed her wrists and ankles, but at least
she had been allowed to put her clothes back on before being dragged before The
Professor herself, though she suspected this was as much to hide the
unseemliness of her battered body as anything else. “It's that new witch,” she
repeated desperately for the benefit of this stone-faced, lab-coated little
Lordling, “Willow Rosenberg. She lives with her mother in those big condos off
Wilmont Street, or she used to, anyway.
 "The spell was cast from somewhere else in town though. I honestly don't know
where because I wasn't expecting to have to know, and I can't check without
doing magic. The main reason I know it's her is because it's too powerful a
spell for any other so called witches in this town and— oh, now there's a
thought, you could try checking the Levine House. You can't miss it, really.
It's that huge mansion, right at the end of Crawford Street! I could take you
there!” she wheedled desperately, “Please!”
 The Professor seemed thoughtful for a moment. Ms. Waddle dared to hope against
hope that the woman was considering her suggestion. If she could just get to a
place where the balance of power was more in her favor, where the mystical
forces outweighed the mundane physical ones and the restraining cuffs would be
relatively weakened.... “Oh,” said Professor Walsh, rousing from her thoughts
for just a moment, just long enough to spare a single glance at the broken
witch. “Agent, put her in a containment cell until we know for sure if we're
going to need her for anything else.”
                                     ~~~~~
 “Sheila... Sheila,” the ghostly voice whispered. “Sheila, I need you!”Dr.
Rosenberg sat bolt upright in bed. For a moment she expected to find Ira there
in the room with her. Sunday morning was dawning outside their window, a
morning they could have spent wrapped up in one an other's arms as had once
been their custom, long ago.
 She felt the sense that a part of him was there, in fact, that he needed her
help. But the voice she remembered from her vague, auditory dream was a woman's
voice. If not her mother's voice then... one like it. Besides, other memories
told her that Ira was beyond her help and that she had spent her last happy
morning in his arms. She was a widow in a widowed world. Dr. Rosenberg was
dead. And her top priority right now had to be to find and confront Willow.
                                     ~~~~~
“Oh!My!Goddess!” Willow cried as her head fell back against Giles's pillow. Amy
giggled into her cunt, but didn't let up, not even for the chance to say the
very clever line she'd just thought of in response, 'No one's ever called me
that before!' She pressed on, licking and kissing and tonguing and very
slightly nibbling, driving Willow to yet another orgasm.
 It was her dirty little secret that she thought it probably really was better
to give than to receive, especially if Willow didn't know she thought so.
Everyday, the increasing imbalance in orgasms put Willow (and especially
Willard) ever more in her debt. Which was sort of a delicious feeling.
 Amy wasn't used to being in a position of strength. Relative to anyone really.
But it seemed like something she could get used to pretty fast. So it surprised
her a little, and bothered her something like a lot when, as they lay gasping
in each other's arms, Willow sighed, “I think you should have to be the guy
this time. I like getting fucked as much as you do, you know.”
“It's too dangerous,” Amy suggested quickly. “With men being rounded up...” It
was a thoughtless tactical blunder.
Willow sat bolt upright and gave Amy a look. “It's too dangerous for you but
not for me?” she asked, angry-hurt.
“That's... not what I meant,” Amy managed, though she was more than a little
hard put to say what she had actually meant. “Look, you can do a glamour in a
heartbeat,” she pointed out defensively, changing tack instead of explaining.
“If I was a guy... I wouldn't have the power to hide it when it mattered or to
change back fast enough, and you know it!”
Willow looked Amy firmly, appraisingly in the eye. She was bullshitting,
grasping at straws to excuse the fact that she wasn't willing to do what Willow
was doing (sometimes twice a day) for her. But she wasn't lying about the power
thing. Willow hadn't really realized it until just that very moment, how far
the student had surpassed the teacher in almost every way. And how much Amy
clearly resented it.
 Suddenly, Willow was in no mood to fuck or to be fucked. “We shouldn't be
wasting the whole day in bed anyway,” she pointed out. “We need to get back to
work. We have to find a way to help Buffy.” But she didn't say, 'and Oz.'
                                    *****
 The practical strategizing part of the meeting didn't last long. Hank remained
quietly in shock, doing a lot of nodding as Giles described, in general terms,
how they should go about frankly but politely inquiring of the crew as to the
overall lay of the land where they might find a home, without making any
further outlandish claims about their origins or calling any more attention to
the claims that had already been made. Which made Hank easily the second most
active participant in the meeting.
 Andrew's participation was limited to the occasional sarcastic comment or
derisive snort, all between sips from his flask. Ethan stretched out on the
empty bunk opposite the one Hank sat on, yawning with abandon. “Well, that was
a stimulating hour,” Ethan declared at last, though it hadn't been nearly that.
Languidly oozing to his feet he added, with an ostentatious show of
indifference, which Giles knew was being made mostly to exasperate him, “but I
think I'll go and see if I can find myself something to eat on this tub.”
Without another word, he swaggered out the door, leaving Hank looking stricken
and Andrew (as ever) disdainful.
 Even knowing Ethan's motives, Giles was exasperated, very much so. Because the
bastard was not entirely faking his lack of concern for whether they ever saw
Merry Old Sol again, just rubbing it in his 'old friend's' face. Well, and
obviously exaggerating it a little for maximal effect.
 Even Ethan was bound to be unsettled, to feel some sense of vulnerability and
apprehension, upon finding himself in a strange new world without a penny or a
compass. But to his way of thinking (if you'd even call it that) these
inconveniences were certain to be largely balanced by the fact that what was
happening to them was unusual, uncontrolled and therefore just plain
interesting. This, after all, was the same person who, as a relative innocent
of seventeen, had once answered his exhortations to help break the locks that
confined them to the torture chamber of a cannibalistic sorcerer with, 'You go
if you want; I'm not done looking around yet.'
 “There's probably not a lot more we can accomplish until we've learned a
little more about who's who and what's what,” Giles told Hank, half
apologetically. “In fact, I suggest you try and get some rest, if you can.
We've got our work cut out for us.”
 For a moment Hank stood with his mouth open and one hand partly raised, as
though he were about to object. Then he close his mouth, nodded once, eyes
downcast and lay back on his bunk, staring at the very low ceiling. “Yeah,” he
agreed with an odd little smile. “We might as well call it a night.”
 Andrew stood and waited while his son maneuver awkwardly around the table and
two chairs that filled the narrow space between the bunks. Each cabin in the
tiny passenger dorm was evidently designed for double occupancy, but only just.
Andrew, for one, was grateful for the small mercy fate had shown them in the
fact that the ship was not so full as to require them to double up. Of course,
he had damn little else to be grateful for at this point. But not being forced
to share the runtish bother of a monastic cell with Rupert was really quite a
blessing when you thought about it carefully. Still, he followed his son back
to his 'bunk'.
 “Did you want something?” Rupert asked shortly, when he had stooped in the
open doorway to his tiny quarters and it was evident that his father meant to
follow him in.
 “A word,” Andrew said just as shortly, casting an eye about to be certain they
were not being observed, by Ethan Rayne particularly.
 “Make it a quick one,” Rupert advised, walking to his bunk and sitting down.
“I'm bloody exhausted. And I could frankly use some solitude to... adjust to
things.”
 Andrew nodded vaguely and closed the door. “I won't bother pointing out,” he
said grimly, “how unseemly it is that you've so clearly if tacitly admitted to
fornicating with your Slayer—”
 “Oh for God's sake,” Rupert groaned indignantly. “In the first place, even you
don't call it that unless you're trying to be a stiff old codger! And in the
second... Unseemly? Honestly? To whom?” he demanded. “I mean, do you truly
believe that the Council has actuallysurvived the destruction of the entire
planet?”
 “When Rome fell, we carried on,” Andrew answered grimly, helping himself to a
seat on the spare bunk, just as if he'd been invited. Because, in all courtesy,
he should have been. “Or do you think the mystical forces surrounding the
Chosen One are bound to a damp, dusty ball of iron?”
 Rupert actually looked offended at that! As though someone had insulted his
mother! The thought stopped Andrew in mid-sneer. Familiar horrors and regrets
jumped at him from the shadows of his suddenly ancient past, sobering and
chastening him just a little. You'd have though that the realization that she
should have been long dead by now in any case might have blunted the edge of
memory a bit, but it didn't.
 Andrew's hand shook just a little as he reached into his coat pocket for his
much too light flask. He was going to have to find a means of refilling it, and
soon. But first, he had to make his position clear to Rupert, to plant the
seeds of reason that would hopefully take root as he calmed and reflected. “Our
first priority should be to find the Council and report,” he advised his son
quietly, “Regardless of the mechanism, fate has brought us here, and so it
stands to reason that we may be needed very urgently in some way we do not yet
understand.”
 Rupert snorted his contempt. “You're mad!” he scoffed bitterly. The fire
flashing in his green eyes sent a chill up Andrew's spine. “It might just as
easily be reasoned that fate, like whoever or whatever has intentionallysent us
hence, merely requires us out of the way! Everything about our destiny has
always had everything to do with the Slayer's destiny after all, not with
anything else!”
 The chill Andrew deeply resented, but the fire... that he bitterly understood.
He spent a moment looking down at the flask in his hands, fiddling with the cap
as an excuse to look away from those eyes. “My God!” he choked out at last,
“Spare us all! You're inlove with her!”
 Rupert lay back and looked up at the ceiling. “It does happen to some of us,
you know,” he said sardonically. He sounded both slightly embarrassed and
deeply annoyed. In other words, very much like young Rupert of old. “Look,” he
added agitatedly, turning on his side (for the first time it occurred to Andrew
that on, up, down, etc. had strikingly consistent values, given the context)
“could we... argue about this later. I don't feel like discussing it just now.”
 Andrew cursed quietly, more angry at the universe in general than at Rupert.
He pushed hard at an ugly recollection and found that he was shoving himself up
and off the bunk upon which he sat. He knew well enough now that it was no use
holding his breath for his son to clam and reflect. He remembered very well the
sudden and sustained shock of realizing that one is still desperately in love
with a girl who is stone dead. In fact, remember hardly seemed the word. But he
couldn't let his regrets take control of him again just now. “My goal is to
find the Council,” he told his son firmly, before opening the door. “You'll
have to sort out for yourself, I suppose, what your priorities are.”
                                     ~~~~~
 “Are you sure you're alright?” Xander asked Oz nervously, for at least the
fifteenth time.
 “No!” Oz hissed finally, exhausted, exasperated. “I am not alright. We are not
alright. We are squatting under a bridge in a fascist city where homeless
people apparently actually have ID or had better have, less than a mile from
the pile of dead cops who's blood we can't get to wash out of our clothes, and
your grafts are seeping something that smells greener than an F-sharp bell,
even from over here!”
 “I meant your arms, actually,” Xander half apologized, still sounding way too
close to cheerful for Oz's taste. “But hey, it's good to know that oratory
class is paying off for ya. I think that's the most words I've ever heard you
say all at once like that.”
 Oz just glared at him for a moment. “They're fine,” he fell back to repeating,
and this time he relented and explained. “Apparently, it's part of the whole
werewolves in space thing, crazy healing powers.”
 “Oh,” was all Xander managed to say. Because, of course, the idea could not
keep from popping into his head that with his three still splinted fingers on
his right hand and the skin grafts on his back not loving his rapid 'resumption
of vigorous activities' he could really use some monster healing power right
about now. But he wasn't about to say anything like that. At least not yet.
And, thankfully, neither was Oz.
 “The first thing we have to do is find a way to get clean and change clothes,”
Oz mused aloud, still acting, in Xander's humble opinion, very un-Oz. “If we
can walk down the street without automatically drawing attention, that might
cut down on the getting carded and give us time to figure something else out."
 “But shouldn't we be working on... getting back to Earth?” Xander asked,
feeling a dizzying sense of unreality even saying it.
 Oz gave him another one of those I'm-being-cool-about-the-fact-that-you're-a-
moron looks he'd seen so many of in the last few hours. “If we live long enough
to think of something to try,” he said, in his familiar calm, even, could-be-
ironic-but-won't-commit-to-it voice, “Then we'll try it.” He got decisively to
his feet, “right now,” he said, “we need to sniff out a nobody's-home to
burglarize.”
                                     ~~~~~
 “How did you get in here?” Bridget gasped breathily.
 She sat up in bed hugging her thin sheet to her chest so that it formed a
narrow triangular drape between her already nightgown covered breasts, almost
giving one the impression that he was seeing them exposed, seeing her exposed.
Vulnerable. Overall, she looked innocent and terrified.
 Though Ethan knew better... yet and still... it was convincing. It was like
watching a film and seeing with your own eyes sex and death that had never
happened. Ethan could have laughed. Instead, he silently warned himself to
watch his step. Aloud he said, “A good magician never tells his secrets.”
 The Lady smiles to herself, but only in her own mind. The rutting fool is
being ostentatiously cavalier, speaking in that oily, deliberately amused way
of his. He is spreading his 'cynicism' and the 'delight' he pretends to take in
it before her face like a baboons red ass cheeks, begging her to screw him.
 He is as cynical, as indifferent as a chubby cheeked little hick kid at a two
wagon carnival with onerealelephant. He will be as easy to take for what he has
worth taking. He will thank her. He will gawp, wide-eyed at the 'wonders' he
has been shown for his fist full of grubby coins and beg to be taken again. He
thinks that life holds mysteries.
 “What do you want?” she asked. The tiny quaver in her voice was a nice touch,
Ethan thought. But he wasn't going to play this game much longer. It didn't
suit him.
 “To rescue you, of course,” he said, his tone lightly mocking, “damsel that
you are(!)”
 “But... we're in deep space,” she projected worry and confusion at him, still
not giving up the pose.
 “So it would seem,” Ethan agreed, nearly yawning the words. “Is that a problem
for a woman of your... talents?”
 Innocent is the wrong tack with this one. He wants to out cynic a cynic. He
knows her shipboard reputation after all. From Mal and probably others.
 The Lady allows herself an exasperated sigh as she lets the pose drop. She
shows him the 'real' frustrated, angry pirate underneath. She curses in
Chinese, but it confuses the stupid fucker. She curses some more, in half a
dozen dead languages from Korean to Portuguese that can only be learned from
recordings. Not that there is one chance in a million hells that he will
understand a word of it, but, well... after all... showing some frustration is
nothing against her purpose here.
 “Alright you stupid gorram bastard son of Satan's oldest whore!” she seethes
in English at last. “Quit humping around the bush and tell me what you have in
mind!”
 Ethan smiled. He had broken her pose easily, but then she had so little
invested in it. A scrap of song flitted through his head, '♫...and she never
gives in; she just changes her mind...♪' Still, he let himself appear cocky, as
if he mistook the small point he had won for a major victory. Well, and his
swagger was not altogether fake at that. He hadscored a small point on her; she
could hardly say the same. In fact, he suddenly wondered how far he could push
the let-her-think-she-is-letting-me-think-I'm-winning game.
 The first round of his long slow spar with Inara, delicious as it was on an
intellectual level, had left in his body a diffuse but unpleasant sensation of
unfulfilled anticipation. He wondered if this one, whatever her name was, would
do him the favor of relieving his tension in the name of wrapping him around
her finger (wasn't that a nice image) or lulling him into a false sense of
security.
 Of course, sex was not what he had come here seeking. But he could see no way
in which it was incompatible with his more important plans. A subquest, then! A
pleasant diversion.
 To that end, he decided to try the trick he thought she was least likely to
expect. It was a maneuver he had learned from a Vampire he had had to stay with
for a few days (long story) the last time he was in Haiti. He decided to ring
her doorbell and ask if he could come in.
 “I want you to be my Christmas present,” he says. The Lady is not surprised by
what he wants of course, but by the way he says it. Is that some kind of
conventional fucking euphemism wherever the hell he really comes from? The look
and tone with which he begins to explain tell the Lady that he's aware of
having bemused her for a moment, and that he feels a slight sense of triumph
about it.
 She swallows her childish resentment. It is a good, from her perspective, that
he should feel triumphant. She realizes with a mixture of annoyance and amused
contempt that she'll be getting him off soon. And probably in the most
unimaginative way possible, the way the birds and the bees and the flees do it.
 She is bored and trying not to be. Boredom is a dangerous state. A near
occasion of sloppiness. She makes herself listen attentively.
 “Aboard this ship,” Ethan explained, amused at the cleverness of his own
conceit, “I find myself … pressed between a disagreeable past and an...
uncertain future. I want to 'come in my own time'.” She seemed annoyed, though
she was trying not to show it. Suddenly he felt a little less clever, wondering
if she had any clue what he was referring to.
 Seeing no better way forward, he pressed on, getting quickly to the what that
was in it for her. “Dear Lady!” he declared, his entreaty only slightly tinged
with irony, “I dare to suggest that you would find my embrace rather...
liberating?”
 The Lady's lip curls into something between a grin and a snarl. Whatever this
idiot is blathering about, the thrust of his argument (so to speak) is obvious
enough. She shouldn't give in too easily she decides. He wants to defeat her
and it is entirely to her advantage to have been defeated.
 “Shove a planet up your fuckhole, you walking pile of ass hair shavings!” she
shouts at him (in English since he's apparently linguistically retarded or
something) letting the resentment of someone who hates the fear and weakness
she is feeling edge her voice. For a moment she can feel his uncertainty, his
guilt.
 He blusters through a witty, suggestive comeback, but he has lost his footing
a little. He likes the idea of besting her, of making the attainment of sex a
victory against her; but not the thought of forcing himself on an unwilling
woman. He contradicts himself like most dumb fuckers do.
 He wants to make her want him, but letting him think he's really won that is
nothing to her peruse. Besides, it will take longer than either of them wants
to spend. She just has to make him feel enough better about her worthiness as a
competitor, that she's as good a player but he has better cards. Then she can
reel him in and obligate him. If she manages to leave a little hook of guilt in
the back of his mind for 'taking advantage of her', that's just a bonus,
another useful tool for controlling him later, not that she couldn't anyway.
 She backs off of the negativity. She emphasizes her stuckness and asks about
his obviously inability to do anything directly about it in such a way as to
help him argue the contrary without being too obvious. She lets him sit on the
bed while they talk, as though she is doing him a favor already.
 “Alright,” said Bridget finally, a wry smile playing at the edges of her lips,
“I'll be your pretty pink package to open. On three conditions.”
 “Isn't one the going rate?” Ethan drawled, trying to sound bored and superior.
 Bridget laughed. “It's a sellers market,” she said. “Besides,” she added,
suddenly leaning close, one hand on his infuriatingly clothed shoulder, lips so
near his ear that it was a crime not to touch him, but she didn't, “I'm that
good.”
 With a start, Ethan realized that his heart was pounding, his palms were
sweating, and he was hanging on her every word in a tragicomic state of aroused
anticipation. Mild resentment and self-censure mingled with artistic
appreciation and naked desire. She really was that good!
 “Alright,” he agreed, acknowledging her superior worth with a little nod of
glorious defeat, “Name your price.”
                                     ~~~~
 “Get the fuck inside!” the Transporting Officer snarled, poking his prisoner
in the back. “Hey!” he yelled to the Duty Guard, “We got another non-doc! It's
like there's a gorram convention in town or something.” Then the smirking
asshole, jerked Snyder forward by one of the completely unbeltlike loops that
protruded at several points from the approximate waistline of his shapeless,
incredibly oversized, white jumpsuit.
 It took every ounce of restraint Snyder had to bite his tongue and keep his
head down through this ongoing storm of indignities, indignities which had
already included both a strip search and a very public 'decontamination'. That
didn't even take into account the fact itself of being mistaken for some kind
of illegal or criminal or whatever it was these oddly dressed, highly
technologically equipped Federal Agents seemed to think he was. Which was
humiliation enough.
  Now the great, crewcutted beast of an officer who had brought him in was
shoving him down a narrow hallway and manhandling him through a door, though he
had offered no resistance stiffer than a look of hostile apprehension. The
larger man pushed Snyder hard from behind, dumping him unceremoniously onto the
concrete floor of a cell and slamming the door.
 Snyder did growl then, and curse under his breath, just a little. As his eyes
began to adjust to the near total darkness, he realized, as he might have
suspected, that he was not alone. “Who is that?” a familiar, not-all-that-
terribly masculine voice called quietly, startled, afraid.
 “R.C. Snyder,” he informed his distant cousin grudgingly. Allen, of course it
would be Allen, moved towards him, a vague shape in the dark.
 Snyder was embarrassed that this of all men should witness him brought to such
a low condition, but then, at least Fench didn't seem to be doing any better.
And, after all, things could have been worse. Someone more important could have
been here to see them both so disgraced as to blemish the collective honor of
the Greater Wilkins Clan.
 There was a yawn and another, much sleepier voice. Oh God, that voice! “Come
back to bed, Allen,” the Mayor mumble-whine-scolded, still more asleep than
awake. Then, His voice went suddenly cool, suddenly taunt. “Who's there?” he
demanded.
 “N-no one, sir,” Allen stammered, “J-just R.C.”
  “I apologize...” Snyder had almost said for intruding, but even that was too
much to say so he let the sentence die, ducking his head, even in the dark.
 There was a small amount of thin, oblique light making it's way into the tiny
room from somewhere. Enough to reveal that there were two bunks protruding from
each of two walls and therefore no overriding necessity for the two men to be
sharing one. Of course everyone  knew ... well within reason everyone knew....
But that didn't mean Snyder wanted to know about it, and he knew no good would
come of the Mayor realizing that he did.
  “Well Gosh,” Wilkins said, suddenly wrapping himself in a warm, cheerful tone
that sent a chill down Snyder's spine. He chuckled. “Isn't this pickle, we're
all in.”
 As his eyes adjusted further, Snyder realized (to his mingled relief and
apprehension) that, in fact, each of the other bunks was filled with an inert
or only slightly shifting mass that might have been a man or two. He had been
wrong in assuming that no more than two to four persons would be lodged in such
a small cell. It was enough to allow the supposition to be maintained that he
might have been wrong about... that other circumstance.
 “Who's all?” Snyder asked nervously, addressing Allen more than presuming to
address the Mayor himself. And true to form, it was Allen who answered. It was
the type of menial, factual question that was generally presumed to be his to
answer for the Mayor anyway.
 “Ron's here,” Allen explained, indicating the top bunk opposite the door,
above the one he and the Mayor were sharing. “And Bob,” still nodding at the
same bunk. Well, the Sheriff and Police Chief had been sharing tents and such
since they were cub scouts, so that made sense. “Garrett Chase,” Allen went on
indicating the higher of the two bunks to Snyder's left with a slight, nervous
laugh. “Mark Engels,” indicting the lower bunk, still sounding very pained.
“And Dr. Richard Kendall,” he concluded, his voice rising and trembling
slightly, indicating a man lying on the floor beneath the lower bunk.
  Allen was putting an unseemly if unintentional fine point on the fact that he
knew, that  everyone  knew, why Snyder could not possibly be pleased to find
himself sharing a cell with Harmony's father, the Prosecuting Attorney, and the
President of the School Board. Snyder bit his tongue to keep from cursing
again, knowing the now fully alert Mayor would not appreciate it.
 Snyder wasn't the only one displeased with what Allen had to say. Two or three
men groaned in annoyance. “Can't we can the introductions?” Engels pleaded on
behalf of the groaning faction. “I just got to sleep. Besides, we all know each
other, anyway. Let's just get some sleep.”
  “For now,” the Mayor agreed, closing all debate. “For now, we should sleep.”
  Snyder swallowed his useless frustration. He didn't bother pointing out that
he had no place to sleep. He wasn't about to climb into a bunk with any of
these men, even if they had offered. Besides, sleeping was the last thing
anyone ought to be doing at a time like this.
 They should have been talking; comparing what they knew, figuring out what was
really going on, what 'transgression' had brought them here, and what the rules
were for getting out. Wherever you were, there were always rules. If you wanted
to ever have anything other than trouble, the first two things you had to do
were learn the rules and follow them.
***** That Wasn't What I Meant At All *****
Chapter Summary
     Nothing is going to plan, but everything is coming to a resolution...
     of sorts, I guess. Hey, at least a certain someone isn't missing
     anymore.
The first condition, she has to help him meet. She has pretty good control in
that area anyway. Biorhythms, feedback. She can generate a response from that
part of her body without lifting a finger. But he doesn't know that, and his
touch is helping to speed things up... once she gives him enough subtle
guidance as to where and how to use it.
 “Ah, ah, ah!” she sighs/gasps/cries with calculated passion, biting her lip as
if trying to resist what is actually a quite measured response to moderately
intense sensation. Her smile is genuine though. Because even in paying her
price, he is putting himself in her debt. He is 'winning' by being of service
to her as much as he will be winning again in a moment when she serves him, and
so he will owe her two capitulations. That and a male lover's loyalty, which
isn't much, but is more than nothing.
 “Oh God!” Ethan groaned, breathing in the wet wonderful smell of her. He was
using both hands: two fingers on his right, deep inside, caressing, exploring;
the whole mitt of his left, pressing down to where the thumb was vigorously
rubbing the sweetest of all sweet spots.
 The way he was touching her, the way she had silently insisted on being
touched was more than most women would allow in his experience, too direct, too
aggressive, too relentless in applying pressure to that most sensitive little
organ. But this was what she wanted.
 Her clit poked up fat and red and hard under the constant rubbing and pressing
of his thumb. Her hips bucked and twisted and writhed and rubbed her cunt
against his other hand as it tried to draw him deeper into itself. Hard as she
was trying not too, unwilling yet to admit that his touch had so much effect on
her, biting her lip in a vain effort to reign herself in, Bridget gasped her
helpless, involuntary gasps of pleasure.
 Ethan wanted desperately to thrust his face between her thighs, not only for
the unspeakable joy of tasting her in such a state of intoxicating arousal, but
because he desperately wanted at least one of his hands back. His cock was
straining to be free of the much too tight pants that he had borrowed, begging
to be touched and stroked and rubbed against her. But none of that was allowed.
This was the first condition. This act was for her pleasure alone.
 Considering how secretly pleased he was with the other 'conditions' she had
set as 'payment', considering how much he couldn't help enjoying even this act
of self torment, he could hardly say it was too much to ask for the pleasure of
finally mounting her, never mind the much more important benefits that he'd be
getting by meeting her other two conditions. And well... there were worse
things for a man's ego than getting a beautiful woman off.
 This has gone on long enough to be convincing, long enough for the fool to
feel confident in taking the credit. Nothing is served by delaying any longer.
Finding her moment, The Lady lets go. She isn't faking it or even forcing it,
just letting it happen, a controlled surrender of control.
 Her body shudders and spasms and tightens around his gropy, greedy little
fingers. Her back arches and for a moment her whole being is stiff as rigor
mortis. She utters not that delicate, Ah...Ah...Ah... that clients like to hear
but a low almost guttural moan of complaint, “Oh, Great Gods!” It's the same
thing she groans face-down into a toilet when she's had much too much to drink,
and in the same inflection, as pleasure washes in and over her, bringing not
joy but disgust, resignation, and relief. Now that's done and she is glad it's
over.
 The man, 'Ethan', collapses with his drooling face against her thigh, sweaty
and weak as if exhausted by the ten minutes effort she has made him put in.
Disgusting pig. He laps at the thin fluid that he is no doubt congratulating
himself for bringing forth.
 Lapping turns to nuzzling and nuzzling back to licking and kissing and
sucking. She's mildly annoyed by his slobbering over her already overstimulated
genitals, but for the most part she couldn't care less. It's a waste of time is
all, delaying getting to the thing he's partly paid for that needs to be gotten
over with to get to the part where he keeps paying.
 “Ah... ah... ah...” She strategically fakes a second climax, convincingly
enough for most people but just shy of what she expects would convince him,
just close enough that he can't call her on it. This is one round she isn't
letting him win.
 Ethan felt a stab of disappointment. He knew damn well she wasn't coming
again. She was calling time on the round was what she was doing, spoiling his
fun. Well, but... 'let's pretend' was a game two could play at. “Mmmm, I think
you owe me a little something extra for that,” Ethan purred, sliding up to lay
beside her, embracing her, as she pretended to steady herself after her latest
'orgasm'.
 “You owe me, you sack of month-old, uncleaned bull intestines!” she reminded
him sharply. “One transfer from the brig to the helm of this tub and one assist
from you and your 'mates' in pulling the Lassiter job.”
 Ethan suppressed a smile at the colorful take on swearing that this culture
had as well as the unthinking politeness of translating for him when she really
didn't give a shit for him at all, a courtesy that must be second nature in
such a multilingual world. He could have laughed out loud at her insistence
that he help her do things she could have infinitely more easily managed
without his help than the other way round, but it would have done him no good
to show her his amusement and risk pissing her off even more, so he didn't.
 “You can't change the price or what you get by... throwing in a free spit
job,” she all but snarled. “You get exactly one good grapple, so get on with it
before I decide that slobberfest counts.”
 “By all means,” Ethan said, coolly expansive, making as if to rise. “We'll
call what's happened between us an even exchange (one act of your choosing and
one of mine) and I'll go on about my merry way, shall I?”
 “Motherless-son-of-a-ferret!” Bridget all but sighed in frustration,
surprising Ethan a millisecond later by grasping his erect penis through his
pants and pulling him back towards her, “That's nothing but a liar's bluff!
You'd sooner die than leave here without fucking me and you know it.”
 “Please,” Ethan sneered, firmly removing her hand and waving her back as he
got to his feet. “I'm just as good to wank about it, thanks all the same. Bit
safer too, I imagine, from an... erm epidemiological standpoint if nothing
else. So If you'll just excuse me...”
 That did it, the woman cursed long and loud in Chinese and maybe a few other
languages, all courtesy forgotten, ending in, “Fuck me, you son-of-a-bitch, and
then damn well do what you've promised before I bite your nut-sac off like a
jealous squirrel!”
 With that, she slammed Ethan's utterly unresisting body onto the tiny
mattress, straddled him, kissed him so hard that both of their mouths were
liable to be bruised, and began efficiently removing his pants at the same
time. With a low noise between a groan and a growl in which surrender mingled
indistinguishably with triumph, Ethan kissed her back just as forcefully, just
as hungrily.
 Her body relaxed and she smiled with friendly mockery as he rolled, pinning
her beneath him and plunged his cock into her tight, wet cunt. Bridget wrapped
her legs around Ethan's shanks and rolled her hips to meet his every thrust.
 They fucked hard and fast for a few moments, like eager, adolescent primates.
Then they slowed into a more sustainable rhythm of long, slow, deep, even
strokes. Every time he got close to orgasm, Ethan would change his pattern or
stop for a few seconds, ever delaying the moment.
 The Lady is more pleased than annoyed by the long slow, meandering path the
mark is taking to get to his little brass ring. She is in her element. She lets
him take his time, take his pleasure. She lets him, and there is no doubt who
is indebted to whom.
 When at last he mewls and squirts and collapses on top of her, she has never
felt more proud, more satisfied. “Alright,” she smiles, “I thought about it.
Fair's fair. When we get paid for the Lassiter... I'll give you a hell of a
send off. We square?”
 Still shuddering and gasping, Ethan nods jerkily. The Lady embraces him,
fondles him almost lovingly, without even really minding that he is lying there
long minutes in her arms sweating on her for no real purpose. At last, he is
hers. Whether the prize is worth having remains to be seen, but for now all
that matters is that once again, she's won.
                                     *****
 “Ah Ha!” Willow shouted in sudden, startled triumph. Amy lifted her head from
the books spread before her at the other end of Giles' kitchen table. “Well...
not so much 'Ah Ha' as 'Oh, that's what I did wrong,'” Willow admitted
sheepishly, realizing that she didn't have much to feel triumphant about, “But
at least it's a start toward figuring out how to undo it.”
 “So,” Amy prompted, “Why did the spell fail?”
 Willow made a sort of a pained face. “That's the thing,” she explained. “As
far as I can tell, it didn't. We sped Buffy up to exactly the same speed as the
rest universe... but we sped the rest of Sunnydale up even faster.”
 “What?” Amy asked stunned, “Why? I mean, howcome it would do that?”
 “I don't know... exactly,” Willow admitted, “but according to what it says
here about distribution of energy flows and the influence of... additional
motives... I think my wishing that all the... that everyone would come back,
sort of threw the spell out of whack and caused this huge side effect.
Except...” Willow's brow furrowed, “from what I understand, there shouldn't
have been side effects this big unless the contrary wish was at least partly
manifested, unless some of the men did come back.”
 “That's true,” Amy admitted. Then after a second's thought she added, “maybe
some of them did come back, just not in Sunnydale. Maybe they're frozen too...
relatively speaking... and so we just haven't heard about them yet.”
 “Maybe,” Willow mumbled, extremely doubtfully. As much as she had tried not to
express it, as shocked as she had been to feel it bursting from her mouth,
Willow's wish had been extremely clear and focused. She had wished for her men
back: Oz, Giles, Xander; most of all her father. Having enough random guys show
up somewhere else on the planet to cause such a large magical distortion around
Sunnydale didn't seem like a logical outcome of that.
 Still, if there was one thing Willow had learned about magic in the short time
she'd been practicing, it was that magic was unpredictable. But if she'd
learned two things, the second was that when you looked close enough at any
magical effect to make the connections to its causes, to see the pattern, it
always made a kind of sense, no matter how unexpected. There were always
connections, always a pattern. Magic was like math in that way. It just took
some figuring out.
 But now was not a time for figuring. There was a knock at the door. The kind
that wouldn't be ignored.
                                     *****
 “Could you... wait... just a moment?” Giles called out when the knocking
persisted. He hoped the muffling of the metal door would sufficiently obscure
the catch in his voice, but he really doubted it. Startled at an already
discomfited moment, it took him several minutes to coordinate the physical
necessities of drying his eyes, cleaning the semen off of his thighs, getting
his pants back on and opening the door. Getting into a half decent emotional
state was too much to be attempted.
He didn't know why he should be quite so ashamed and unsettled to find that the
man knocking on his door (looking every bit as miserable and confused as he
felt) had also clearly been crying. But he was.
 “H—M—Hank?” Rupert Giles addressed him uncertainly. Hank tried not to be
annoyed... then tried not to be sick with rage and grief instead as the thought
that he wouldn't be terribly comfortable to see a certain Mr. Lovell of Memphis
show up at his doorstep melted into the fresh realization that Los Angeles and
Memphis were dust and ash, if that.
He felt lost. The man before him seemed at once a total stranger and the last
living soul who might be close enough to touch. He was barefoot, wearing
rumpled tweed pants and a no-longer-clean white T-shirt; disheveled, stubbly,
tattooed. Nothing like the librarian he had seemed.
“Come in,” he managed at last, sounding almost as shaken as Hank felt. He must
have been exhausted as well. They had only parted about four hours earlier.
 “I couldn't sleep,” Hank found himself apologizing as as he collapsed onto the
bare mattress opposite the other man's very much unmade bank. They both sat
quietly for a moment. “The others don't give a shit,” Hank said at last, bitter
and deadly serious, certain at least of that. “We have to fix this. We have to
find a way somehow. The two of us.”
 “I agree,” Giles admitted. “I... wasn't getting much rest myself,” he added in
belated response to Hank's recent apology as his fuzzy 'morning' brain fumbled
towards a remembrance of basic courtesy. “What are your thoughts?”
 “This... thing... about Buffy...” Hank began, then, feeling the air thicken
with tension, he clarified, “the... 'Slayer'... thing.” Giles didn't seem at
all relieved. “She tried to tell me but... I'm still trying to understand. You
guys, you...Watchers? I mean, you deal with supernatural stuff a lot, right?”
 Giles rubbed his temples, still wishing to be more clear headed, more sure of
things. “We... research occult phenomena,” he seemed to apologize. “The Slayer
usually does most of the actual dealing with. But I... I could tell you a lot
of theoretical information about... alternate dimensions and mystical
convergences, but...” he shook his head forlornly. “I know sod-all about time
travel... of any sort that's not manifestly impossible, at any rate.
"I'd come closer to approaching it magically than scientifically, which is
probably how it was done in our case anyhow, but all my experience and training
tells me that there's no undoing powerful magic without being able to confront
the party responsible for it. I'm... not saying we won't find a way,” he added
hurriedly. “I can't... I won't believe that. But it may take years to make any
headway. We're starting completely from scratch... except without any... erm...
'scratch'.”
 “Well...” Hank mused, “Like you were saying before... Job One has to be to
find a stable place to work from. Someplace where we will have access to...
whatever stores of information these people have. But from the way everyone
freaked out about... the government or whoever catching up to them... and the
way they are clearly scrabbling for money just to say alive... we might have
kind of a dystopian frontier situation going on here, a bad combination of too
much government and not enough civilization. Somehow, I don't think they are
going to have open communal dining halls, attractive public housing and vast
elegant libraries that happily cater to undocumented strangers.”
 “That's... my impression also,” Giles admitted grimly.
 “Hell,” Hank said, “It's not like we're exactly safe where we are either. Much
as we seem to have lucked into a ride on the friendliest pirate ship in the
history of the universe, they're going to get tired of us soon if we can't
think of a way to be useful. Never mind they still have the problem of not
knowing whether we'll somehow turn the authorities on to them if they pitch us
out anywhere accessible to civilization. Which is another problem that is going
to turn out to be our problem pretty quick. I don't think all of them are as...
scrupulous as this Captain Reynolds seems to be.”
 “Yes,” Giles agreed, “We certainly need to be very—”
 The door slid open to reveal two armed crew members, the First Mate 'Zoe' and
that big thug everyone called 'Jane'. Their weapons were still strapped to
their hips, but their hands were resting on them. Hank had the very uneasy
feeling that their problems had just gotten a lot less theoretical.
                                     *****
 “Oh my God! Mom!” Willow gasped when she finally found her tongue. “C-come...”
Willow paused, yeah, it was daytime. The sun was shining. “Come in,” she
concluded haltingly.
 “A few people said I might find you here,” Sheila replied hostilely. “What was
he, a Wizard?” she demanded, “Is he the one who taught you to mettle with
this... these forces?”
 Willow could barely focus on what her mother was saying, never mind decipher
what she meant. She was still trying to process the fact of her awakening.
“Mom! Thank God you're—” alive she almost said. 'Awake' she was going to say
instead and was trying hard to mean it, but it was difficult to mean that when
Sheila was looking at her the way she was at that moment, so hateful, so
accusing.
 “Don't you dare!” Sheila cut her off, moving forward, through the doorway,
forcing Willow to move back. “Don't drag God into your lies, you filthy,
blasphemous, disciple of Satan!” Willow blinked and stammered, unable to
organize a response.
Instinctively, Amy circled behind the couch in case she needed cover and
started running through spells in her head, trying to think of something that
would help. If push came to shove, she could always turn Sheila into a rat. But
no one was quite pushing and shoving yet, and getting too aggressive could
easily make things a whole lot worse. After all, having hostile magic done on
her pretty much had to be what Sheila was pissed about, as anyone would be.
 And boy, was she ever pissed! Amy had never seen her anything like this. If
she hadn't been seeing it now, she probably wouldn't have believed it. Sheila
could be self-righteous, sure, but it was always in that whiny, disdainful,
I'm-disappointed-in-the-foolish-inferior-world sort of way. And it had always
been in a more educated than thou sort of way too.
Amy had never heard her spout off about God and demons and blasphemy the way
she was now. Although she had to admit, she had never heard her say
anythingagainst religion, and Ira had used to spout off about it all the time.
Still, Amy was confident that if anyone else had ever dared to say the things
to her daughter that she was shouting at her now ('purity', defilement,
Commandments, etc.); Sheila would have blasted them as the knuckle dragging
minions of Patriarchy.
 Willow was doing more than stammering now, getting pissed herself, shouting
back. She was defiant, defensive. The term 'Patriarchy' was in deed being
hurtled accusingly in her mother's direction along with a couple of other two-
dollar words that Amy barely recognized. Then, in mid feminist invective,
Willow suddenly stopped and changed direction. “Wait just a damned minute!” She
demanded, “How did you even know that I did anything to you? You always told me
there was no such thing as magic!”
 What Amy did next had been meant to help, to break through Sheila's angry
insistence that how she knew what she knew didn't matter. It was a simple truth
spell, one which Amy maintained, like the rat spell, ready to use at a moment's
notice. However, she used it more sparingly even than the rat spell because it
was harder to set back up again. And because she was always selective about
calling on any gods besides Hecate.
It should have worked easily on an untrained non-adept like Sheila was supposed
to be. She shouldn't have even been aware of it. She should have felt that this
impulse (to say exactly everything she honestly thought and felt) had just
welled up from within her own soul. Instead, Sheila started, suddenly alert,
glaring hostilely in Amy's direction.
What was more, she actually resisted. The spell skidded and bumped up against
her aura and... something between 'shattered' and 'exploded'. It rained down
upon the three of them like an invisible dusting of particulate matter.
 “Frustration!” Amy swore, or tried to. “Unrighteous enveloping suckitude! Now
we'll all be telling each other the truth about everything!”
                                     ~~~~~
 “Oh, Cordelia!” Harmony wailed, cutting her friend off in mid-expalantion,
mid-confession. They were sitting up on the side of Cordelia's bed, the one
with the trundle tucked underneath, chosen specifically to facilitate their
mutual sleeping over, just as the two twin beds in Harmony’s room were.
Squealing with something shockingly like joy, Harmony threw her arms around
Cordelia. “I can't believe you'd do that for me!”
 “But I...” Cordelia didn't know what to say. Harmony's response was insane,
she thought. No one could possibly think that the literal disappearance of ever
man worth calling that (even along with most of the ones who weren't) was a
good thing. And yet her gratitude was so genuine, so warm and trusting and
pitiful.
She was hurt too badly to see anything but her own suffering, Cordelia
realized. That and the solid, enveloping, cling-toable comfort of the one
devoted friend who had saved her, had placed her above all the world. Crazy as
it was, it was a comfort Harmony desperately needed, and at that moment,
Cordelia couldn't take it from her.
“...I overdid it,” Cordelia concluded, sliding from her honest confession into
an Oscar worthy facsimile. “It was only supposed to get rid of Snyder and... a
few others. Just—all the men who'd ever hurt us.”
 “Well... that's okay,” Harmony tried to reassure her. “I mean, you said it
didn't get rid of Devon and guys like that, right? Or little boys.”
 “That's true,” Cordelia conceded apprehensively.
 “So it's probably just every guy who ever raped, or betrayed or cheated on
anyone. You got it exactly right. You can't help it if almost all the men in
the world are worthless scumbags.”
 “Were,” Cordelia mumbled numbly, with a feeling of deep defeat. She felt like
that guy in that book, American Psycho, a book she had read because her father
told her not to and which she could therefore never admit that she had hated,
that it terrified her and made her skin crawl and not just because of the
squishy parts.
Here she was trying to confess to destroying half the world, to killing
billions of men and millions of women. But Harmony didn't want to hear that in
what she was saying. She had an idea of a best friend, of a heroine undertaking
a righteous vendetta, and she expect Cordelia to fulfill it. She wouldn't see
what was not even hiding right under the surface of that, what a disaster this
half murdered world was.
Harmony was selectively blind, seeing only what fit what she already knew,
already wanted to know. The way Cordelia had been most of her life.
 Cordelia smiled and tried to be cheerful, to respond to Harmony in a way that
was appropriately comforting. Her performance remained Oscar worthy if she did
say so herself.
No good could come of her confessions being believed and understood for what
they were, she told herself. She was just lucky that Harmony had taken it the
way she had and was grateful enough to keep a secret. Maybe some things were
just too horrible to look too deeply under the surface of.
This was the real world now. This was the world she had to live in. What good
did it do to think that it was terrible or that it was her fault?
 “Hey!” Cordelia said brightly, “I hear April Fools opened back up this
morning. We should definitely go shopping!”
                                     ~~~~~
 The sign was ridiculously festive. But at least it was clear. “Welcome to
Sunnydale,” Joyce mumbled aloud. She repeated the name, “Sunnydale,” trying to
make it mean something to her. Suddenly, horribly, it did.
It was like another little luggage tag, only this time, when she pulled on it,
she found that there was a whole suitcase full of memories attached. “Oh Dear
Lord!” she gasped as the horrors of her life came rushing back to her,
including connections and realizations she had never consciously made before
now.
No wonder she had worked so hard at denying and repressing the facts of her
life. Part of her wished she could do it again, right now. But she could not
afford to deny who she was any longer. She had to find her daughter Buffy, the
vampire slayer.
  Joyce heard a car approaching from the desert behind her, headed towards
town. She stuck out her thumb, feeling ridiculous, but seeing no better option.
After walking through the desert for God only knew how long, she was too
exhausted and parched to be cautious about taking rides from strangers.
At least this time the vehicle didn't try to run her down. “Where are you
headed?” the lady truck driver asked her.
  “Revello Drive,” Joyce said.
  “You're kidding me!” the woman exclaimed. “Why would anyone want to stay in
Sunnydale?”
  Joyce sighed. “Family reasons,” she explained, thinking it best not to go
into too much detail. On either count.
                                     *****
 “Shhhhhh!” Oz hissed impatiently, warningly.
 “Sorry,” Xander whispered, still not quietly enough for Oz's taste. “It's
just... I heard something... I mean I think... did you—” Oz nodded, putting his
finger to his lips and looking stern.
Xander quieted. But the sound of someone very definitely stopping on the
landing outside the apartment where they now hid—right outside, more than one
someone, chatting and laughing and sounding like large young men—made it
difficult to stay quiet. The sound of something scrabbling at the door made it
impossible.
“Intruders!” Xander whispered frantically. Oz glared at him. Xander shrugged
and looked sheepish. Then it hit him like a fist in the stomach. “We have to
getout of here!” he hissed. There was no 911 when you were the intruders. There
was only getting caught or hurting people. People minding there own business.
People who lived here.
 Of course they had to get out of here. Only an idiot would think that needed
saying. Oz was just about at his wits end with the idiot fate (or whoever) had
saddled him with as a companion. He'd have liked very much to have been able to
give his full attention to the problem of getting out of here, if only Xander
would shut up. As it was, almost his full attention was focused on the very
important work of controlling his temper.
 At last there was a moment of relative quiet (not counting that sort of very
important key-turning-in-a-lock sound) and Oz was able to devote some portion
of his mind to actual strategic thinking. There was a window, which would lead
them out onto the roof. It was not exactly a long-term solution, but it was a
fast one, and that's what they needed right now.
At least it was still dark outside. And they had clean clothes on that
presumably met local fashion customs, though in Oz's case they were clearly
much too big, involving a lot of cinching and rolling up.
Underneath his much-closer-to-fitting clothes, Xander's wounds had been rinsed
with clean water and rebandaged with torn bedsheets, though they didn't smell
much better. He was still weak and feverish, in piss poor condition for
climbing around on roofs, but what other choice was there? Without a word, Oz
began pulling him in the direction of the window.
 Oz tried to steady Xander on his feet, tried to help him over the windowsill.
But Xander was swaying, obviously dizzy. Even an idiot could see that he was in
danger of falling, and it was a long way down. The idiot in question panicked.
He clung to the window frame instinctively and would not be pushed through.
It was too late. The door opened. There were men there, shouting. A truly
serious sounding alarm began to wail. There were more people outside, more
shouting. They were gathering.
Panic wasn't the word for it anymore. Oz felt a nauseous wave of dread and
regret. There was nothing he could do. The threshold he was crossing had no
frame to hang onto.
 As the shouting turned to screaming, Xander managed to get himself turned
around from the window in time to see Oz finish transforming, torn clothes
falling from his bulky, muscular, fur-clad physique. One of the newcomers fled,
but the other grabbed a long slender not-usually-a-weapon-but-it-could-be
looking something, maybe a floor lamp, and charged Oz.
“No! Don't!” Xander shouted warningly, not really sure who he meant to warn.
The wolf growled in rage and threw himself forward, colliding with the man,
knocking the man from his feet. The man was pinned beneath the snapping
snarling wolf, holding it at bay with his... whatever it was, barely keeping it
from ripping his throat out.
Xander looked into the strangers eyes. Those eyes were terrified, desperate,
begging for help. Without letting himself think about it too much, Xander leapt
onto Oz's back and tried to wrestle him off the stranger.
 Agony! Sharp. Sudden. He had gotten his hand too close to Oz's face. Solid
jaws clamped shut like a steal trap. For a moment, he thought his hand would be
ripped off. Then came the sudden relief of teeth letting go.
More men from outside had rushed inside to challenge Oz. Distracted, the
werewolf let go of Xander's hand and violently shrugged him off, slinging him
against a wall or furniture or something. Xander never completely lost
consciousness, but he was weak and disoriented. The room swam. His hand was
bleeding badly. He had to get something to stop the bleeding. That was all he
could think about.
 Xander tried to pull himself up against whatever he had been knocked into. His
knees buckled and he landed in a heap on the floor. He was aware that there was
a fight still going on around him or at least in the same room with him, a
really serious fight.
People were being killed. There was blood everywhere. He had to do something;
but what could he do? The monster was too strong, and he was too weak. Besides,
the monster was Oz. The monster was his friend.
 Suddenly, Xander's hand began to itch, and then to ache and then to burn. The
pain was excruciating. And it was spreading. It radiated up Xander's arm and
spread through his whole body. He cried out in torment. His body felt as though
it were being ripped apart, there was a ripping sound even.
By the time Xander half registered that that was the sound of clothing being
torn from his body, he was awash in a sea of overwhelming sensation. The hot-
savory smell of blood caught his attention making it hard to notice much else.
He growled eagerly and leapt into the fray.
Sound and motion swirled around him. Instinctive action was rewarded again and
again with the satisfying crack of bones and the wet, delicious rending of
flesh. By the time the world slowed down enough to start to make a little sense
again, Xander was standing next to Oz. They were both naked, panting, and
covered in blood.
There were bodies and body parts everywhere. The tiny apartment looked like the
scene of a massacre. Which was what it was.
Xander's eyes landed on the eyes of the guy who probably lived there, the guy
he had tried to help. They were blank, lifeless, staring from his bloodied face
into eternity.
 “Come on!” Oz snapped impatiently, obviously not for the first time and began
dragging him once again towards the window. “There'll be more coming.”
This time the roof didn't seem so dangerous. Fingers and toes gripped and held
instinctively to every tiny groove and bump that presented itself, as two pale
shapes made there way through the moonless night over the rooftops of the city.
                                     *****
 “Oh my God! How could you do that?” Willow shouted at Amy. “Why would you lie
to me about something this important?” Five minutes ago, they had been two
against Sheila, but as soon as all the honestly started, Amy had become the odd
woman out.
 “I knew I should have just turned you into a rat,” she said to Sheila, but she
couldn't help but follow that up with an answer to Willow's direct question,
which was, “Because if I told you the truth you would have used a condom or
something and then I'd have had almost no chance of getting pregnant! I mean,
how else was I supposed to keep you obligated to me after Oz and Xander come
back! It's bad enough having to watch you make moon eyes at Buffy!”
 “We can't let her do this,” Sheila admonished Willow harshly, while her head
was still spinning from trying to absorb what Amy had just said. “The child of
our blood, our power, born to the servant of Hecate! It would be the thing that
people saidwe were!”
 Willow didn't have time to ask her mother what that meant. “Tardis!” Amy
shouted, hurtling her intention in Sheila's direction. Instinctively,
defensively, Willow's mother, threw up her hands and her will between them. As
before the intended magic bounced and burst.
 “Son-of-a-bitch!” Buffy cursed as she fell from the couch and rolled onto the
floor. “What the hell is going on?” A tenth of a second to absorb the mood of
the room told her the answer. Nothing good.
                                     ~~~~~
 “Oh God No!” Spike sobbed. “Come on baby,” he urged, through his tears, trying
to pull Drusilla into a standing position. “Come on baby, get up. I didn't mean
it.” The arm he was tugging at came lose and fell to the floor next the the
rest of her pale, still, piecemeal body.
She was not dead. Well... no deader than usual. Her neck had not been severed.
It still held her head firmly to a torso that was still attached to most of one
leg.
All he had to do was to gather up the pieces, Spike told himself. All he had to
do was to sew them back on and get some blood in her. Then she'd be... well,
not good as new, of course not. But she'd be good enough to hold out until they
could do that damned healing ritual.
 Spike kicked the bloody pick ax aside and got to work. Carefully, lovingly, he
gathered up all of the bits he had hacked from his sire, his lover. He put them
in a drawstring trash bag, which was all he could find, and hung it around her
neck, not wanting the parts to have a chance of getting separated from the
body.
Gathering her thus into his arms, he made for the basement and the tunnels
below. He would have gone back for his little truck of virgins, but by the time
they had made it to the safety of the dark stairwell, the sky outside the
school had suddenly burst into broad daylight.
                                     ~~~~~
 If Buffy had ever shared a more awkward silence with anyone, she didn't know
when. She and Amy sat alone in Giles' kitchen, drinking tea. Willow and her
mother were upstairs, discussing there past present and future. A discussion
which Amy apparently had every reason to wish she were in on and some
justification for thinking she should be but which she might actually be safer
far, far away from.
“Maybe you should go,” Buffy said finally.
 Amy shrugged. “They'll find me if they're looking for me,” she said. “I'd
rather get things straight with them from the beginning. Besides,” she added
with a wan smile, “if we do this with you here, I'm at least pretty sure they
won't kill me.”
 Buffy opened her mouth to protest before she remembered that Amy was under a
truth spell. If that was how she really felt, there was probably no reassuring
her that Willow would never do that. “Well I am here,” she said instead. It was
meant as comfort, but as soon as the words left her lips, Buffy had the
sickening realization that she had just committed herself to protect Amy from
Willow. Amy and possibly her possible baby, whom some people were apparently
expecting to grow up powerful and evil.
 “God, I'm an idiot,” Amy murmured bleakly. “I didn't know, you know. Neither
of us did, who Willow's family were, where they came from. We just wanted to
use magic to make things easier, to have a little fun. I should have known
better than to trust anyone connected to my mother.”
 Buffy was puzzled. “Who are you talking about?” she asked.
 Amy laughed. “Of course it's not obvious to you,” Amy groused. “You pride
yourself on not paying attention to the other plains, even when they're all
around you. Slay first and ask question never(!)
"Hecate,” Amy clarified, when Buffy continued to look puzzled. “She set this
whole thing up, me and Willow. She has some kind of plan, I just don't know
what it is yet. I don't know whether it involves me being alive or not even. It
scares the hell out of me.
"She's a scary goddess if you really get to know Her at all. And possessive.
You don't go back to some other god after Hecate. Even calling on anyone else
is... complicated. You especially don't get involved with You Know Who. He's
Her worst enemy, has been for thousands of years. And He's nobody you want to
cross either. I'm so, so fucked here!”
 Amy looked up. Buffy was still looking at her like she was babbling nonsense.
“She belongs to Him,” Amy tried again to explain, “not just in a 'hey I've been
Bat Mitzvahed' kind of way. They all do. The Levines. They're something
special.
"Most gods call them Acolytes. Hecate calls Hers Witches, the kind I'm really,
really not. He calls them Prophets. Sheila isn't one, just part of the Line,
but Willow really might be. Magic comes so easy for her... I should have
known.”
 Buffy didn't have time to decide whether Amy was nuts or whether there was
actually something much more monumentally fucked up going on like Amy obviously
thought. Her distress was certainly real, and there was literally no way she
could be intentionally lying, so it had to be one or the other.
But now the doorbell was ringing, repeatedly, frantically. Buffy excused
herself and opened the door. She could hardly believe her eyes. She grabbed her
mother and hugged her.
Joyce was babbling an explanation of how the people encamped at her house had
suggested looking for her here, but Buffy paid it very little attention. Her
attention was suddenly drawn very sharply to something else. “You're pregnant!”
Buffy exclaimed. “Really, really pregnant. Mom, how is that possible? You've
only been gone two weeks!”
 “No,” Joyce shook her head, sounding worried. “That's not right. I've been
gone... I don't know. Seven or eight months at least. I was stuck in a demon
dimension.”
 “Well, that explains it,” Amy informed them. She had followed Buffy into the
living room, not wanting to be alone with her misery. “Time can move all kinds
of different ways in a demon dimension.”
 “That doesn't explain half of it!” Buffy objected. “Mom, you're pregnant. How
did this happen?”
Joyce gave her a tired, annoyed and yet somehow embarrassed look. “Okay, I know
how, but...” the next question caught in Buffy's throat. She was suddenly not
at all sure she wanted to open the door to the whole who got who pregnant
conversation right now.
 “Buffy's afraid to ask you who because she's pregnant by Giles and I might be
pregnant by Willow,” Amy supplied helpfully. “Sorry,” She added sheepishly,
“got caught in my own truth spell.”
Joyce opened her mouth to express indignation or something along those lines at
the idea of Buffy having sex with a man clearly several years older than her
mother. Almost instantly, she thought better of it. But even if she hadn't, she
would have been helpless to speak in the face of the claim this Amy girl had
just made. Without another word of protest, she let the girls lead her into the
kitchen for a cup of tea.
 Within a very few short minutes, Amy (who seemed incapable of actually
shutting up for long) had figured out and shared with both of them her
explanation of what had happened. “Oh my god!” she gasped, going suddenly pale,
deeply terrified. When she explained, Buffy felt she had a right to be
terrified.
“It was my wish, not Willow's that screwed up the spell. This means my mom is
probably on the loose somewhere right now!” Wow, Buffy thought, talk about, 'be
careful what you wish for.' There were some people, she thought, who should
really just stay missing.
                                     ~~~~~
 Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Ira watched as the last candle
flickered out. He couldn't hold his breath any longer. It rattled out of him in
one long, ragged sigh as he gave up the ghost and died.
End Notes
     The Sunnydale part of this story takes place during the time period
     of and immediately after BtVS 2.19 "I Only Have Eyes for You." but
     incorporates the premise, or at least the frame premise, of BtVS 3.9
     "The Wish". It has only a slight relationship to any of the events of
     Lady's Choice and is a serious departure for this series in that
     respect. The Firefly part takes place during Firefly 1.11 "Trash".
  Works inspired by this one
      In_Firefly_Order by MyEvilTwin_(ProtoNeoRomantic), Black_Market by
      MyEvilTwin_(ProtoNeoRomantic)
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