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Chapter Text

Sunnydale Park, late afternoon, September 2000 

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In a twisted way Willow would find it merciful that the Hellions' destroying the Bot made it impossible to do the spell as she'd originally intended to. She had every reason to fear, in the end, that if they had she might have started the spell and had it interrupted halfway through. It's not like a halfway done spell would have resurrected Buff as was, but it did mean that in the end the first shadow of events had fallen when that biker boss had proven somewhat smarter than his looks showed, and had dug into the bot's head to decipher just who was in charge of those keeping Sunnydale safe. That meant that in the wake of having collected the vino, with a bloodstained white dress and still shaken by the cost of that spell that she was suddenly facing a demon biker on a motorcycle, with his gang around her. 

Clever girl. 

She stood still, her magic starting to fill her hands and that relief that the vino itself had been safely teleported to Buff's house so she could use it there, too. 

Nice trick you pulled with that robot, but not nearly clever enough. We pulled it apart, you see. 

He held up in his right hand something that made Willow wince, and then he turned off the bike and stepped down from it, walking toward her slow and menacing, as he tossed down the head and he continued to stride toward her. 

Don't fight it too much, darling. Some of my boys got things that'll tear up little girls. He grinned, as the last two steps were a blur and then he feathered the back of his hand down her cheek. 

Me personally? I don't. 

He'd shoved her to the ground hard enough that she winced, then, and had lowered himself on top of her, as his clawed hand dug deep into her side and her mouth opened in a silent scream. 

That's a girl-

And then he paused when the magic around her seemed to change and he looked down to see that her eyes were dark as night and lightning erupted from her fingers. He could only make a single strangled sound and a smoking carbonized corpse fell to his side as she rose, lightning coursing further and burning another of the Hellions to death. She was swaying on her feet, bleeding from her side, but the casual brutality that had slain the first of them and had destroyed the second face-first meant that what had been an intended joyride to terrorize not just a town, but this town saw the Hellions flee. She had just enough presence of mind to break the container on Tara's healing potion and to apply it before the wooziness took her and she fell, too, in the grass, bled by a deed born in darkness as the fawn that lay beyond her and the corpses of the Hellions did. 

--------

She awoke later, when it was closer to nightfall but not entirely there, and with a calm presence of mind decided that it was now or never. Her friends wouldn't understand and that potion had worked, even if her side still stung, but she couldn't leave Buffy in Hell, and wouldn't. And she couldn't take a gamble after this that they could survive that crisis, she'd come as close to that as she had when Spike-her eye twitched and she shivered, and crawled across the cemetery, leaving streaks of green to join the red and the tear in the dress. But she'd made it, and realizing at least in part that the light-headedness and fuzzy thoughts she felt were from the blood loss and that unlike a Slayer she couldn't just restore that easily even if magic allowed means (and with how often hers could go wrong, she didn't trust her own enough to heal her). 

And so came the spell and all its attendant horrors. Her blood boiled in her veins, her skin becoming lumpen and lit with a strange light. She felt herself vomiting up a snake that stared at her with keen eyes and as she continued the incantation her eyes seemed to droop closed-and she was on a barge, on a river in a tropical heat. 

The sound of insects intertwined with the motions of fans, servants in the shape of ancient Egyptians in the one sense and animal-headed beings in another. 

"Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one." 

She muttered it to herself, semi-delirious even here but she would not risk death without saying the Shema, even facing the actual deities of Ancient Egypt itself. The very ones from which her ancestors had fled in the working of those plagues by the great Moses. And at the center, sat on a great throne, was the green patchwork-god that was Osiris, the deity's eyes strangely stone-like and detached and yet all-seeing and in his own ways all knowing. 

"Osiris, I have come to bargain." 

The god nodded. 

You have come a long way, daughter of Israel. It is Anubis who weighs hearts with a feather, yet mine the domain of the dead. Seldom do those who do this rite manage to get this far and of all who have done so, alone among the daughters of Israel, servants of Yahweh, you stand here. 

She could only nod at that, biting her lip. 

This spell has been known since Old Khemet was young, since the first of the rulers with their Horus-names built their great monumental tombs. Thousands of years, and yet none have risen from the dead in facing it. And the reason for this is what you now face. For every such deed, there must be an equivalent exchange. A soul for a soul, a life for a life. Or a gift, in this case, valued as much as the soul restored to flesh, and then to life. 

She was dying- 

You do not die here, Miss Rosenberg of the house of Israel, that is not your fate. 

She straightened at that. 

I am a God of the dead, I would know when those who face my domain face that risk. What then is it that you offer? 

She was silent for a long moment. She had a chance to live and she would not die here but she'd lost a lot of blood and her side hurt and what would it matter, really, if Buff got to live and she didn't? 

"My happiness, for Buffy's life." 

A long silence. 

You shall not lose that for the duration, Miss Rosenberg. A gift of an emotion does not last, but an inspired gift indeed that shall be. 

And in her delirium she rasped "Just get her out of Hell" and yet she had offered her happiness and the God had smiled then and leaned forward. 

As you have already given your happiness for her life, she was never in Hell, Miss Rosenberg. She was in a place of peace, and light. Not the Elysium of the Hellenes but a realm very like it, a reward fitting to the daughters of Sineya. 

And then she was rising as she had fallen- 

--------

Buffy Anne Summers had been dead, in a place of peace and light, sure that all was right in the world. Buffy Anne Summers had awakened, freed of her grave, and sat on the grass, and smelled the odor of scorched demon and stared in mute horror at a pair of abandoned bikes and the burned carbonized bodies of two demons and found her best friend lying on the grass with a torn dress and blood from a healed wound in her side that left scars the bloodstained claw on the bigger corpse made horribly clear where that had come from. She had thought her friends were fine but finding Willow all but dead on grass when she came back and the traces of this was a mute answer as to why she'd actually been brought back. 

And in its own way that meant as she sat, staring at her and at the bodies, that she closed her eyes, leaned forward, and smacked her fist against the ground. It was starting to be night, now, she knew that. She also had wondered, and more than wondered, about the types of demons and so she made a very specific choice, first. She left the demons' bodies where they were, put Willow into the side-seat of one of the motorcycles, both of which had been left with their keys, and decided to take the bloodstained witch back to her house. Something had very clearly gone wrong and realizing she'd been lied to, that she wasn't in Heaven after all but in a place where her soul had been left in a false peace? 

And Sunnydale's streets were far more silent than usual even for a Sunnydale night. That confirmed it, and the sickening feeling in its own way was marked with an understanding. If the peace was false, then what else might be? So she took her best friend up, gently, in a posture that was more bridal than not, and strode to the front porch where she set Willow down, not really caring that her blood had smeared to her, and had then stooped and had made a soft "Ah ha!" right when her Slayer-senses brought the tinglies and she'd turned to find Spike staring at her, at Willow, at the bike.....

"Hellions." 

His voice had a faint dismay. 

"That's what happened to-" 

"To?" 

"A victim," was all he'd said, then. He stared at her. "Oh God, Red really went and did it, didn't she?" 

Buffy's nose twitched. 

"147 days." 

"Huh." It was a reaction more like that of Oz than not, and that made Spike warier in some ways, and he had gone up to her and had seemed to steel himself. 

"Pardon me, Slayer-" and as she'd tilted her head he'd struck her nose only to stare as did she when there was no reaction. For a moment his game face was visible as he looked down at Willow but Buffy shook her head. 

"I'm me, Spike. Believe me." 

There was something in her gaze, and in her tone, that left the vampire to stare at this, and then after visibly gathering himself, he nodded. And then he'd sniffed, and had taken a sudden look back at that bike and let his vampire senses guide him as he moved with vampiric speed. For that much Buffy was grateful, whatever was going to happen tonight with her friends would only be complicated if the usual Xander and Spike show started. So she put the key into the lock and turned it. 

--------

"See?" Dawn's voice had the same false optimism that Tara tried to pull off but not quite so well. "That's Will, she's fine. She's been the boss of us and is keeping-" her voice trailed off but where Dawnie was she could see the door and then her face went white and her hands went to her mouth and that had Tara whirling around and her own blood drained from her own face. 

"Oh Goddess." 

"Hi." Buffy stared at them both, alive, well, and marked with blood. The blood on Willow's dress and where it was made it clear that it had been- 

"How-" 

"How do you think? Will brought me back." 

Tara sprang and ran over to her and helped her in as Buffy followed. 

"From Hell?" There was a quavering tone to Dawn's voice. 

"I......I think so." 

Buffy frowned. "Very weird kind of Hell, but it was Hell." 

-------

Spike found the other bike, deciding that he'd nab it for himself, and dumped the Hellions into some of the neatly open graves in Sunnydale, seeing the carbonized burns on them and the blood on the one's set of claws and a sudden pall of fear briefly took him. Things suddenly made an all too horrifying kind of sense, Sunnydale's protector these last four months had almost died and in the wake of the kind of injury he'd seen, the blood on that dress and on Buffy's jeans.....at least, he mused, Red hadn't been entirely aware of what she was doing and was doing it for the right reason. With magic like this that mattered for more than most and so taking the other bike, which was now his motorcycle by right of finders' keepers, he drove back to 1630 Revello. And he had stepped in to that lingering silence mixed with disbelief and awe in the one hand and Glinda taking care of Red. 

"What did this?" 

Her voice was marked with fury. 

"Hellions." 

Eyes turned to him. 

"Bikers. Dross of the demon world." 

He winced. 

"They seek out vulnerable towns and they must have realized that-" 

Buffy frowned. 

"What do they do?"

Spike was reluctant to answer. 

"Spike," Tara's voice had a tone of steel, "what do they do?" 

"Well..." he cleared his throat, "they rather do like to do a bit of rape and other ultra-violence." 

Tara's face became almost corpse-grey for a moment. 

"And it's very clear that wound on Red's side was from one of them. They must have figured out she's been Sunnydale's protector and thought they'd kill her." 

Buffy bit her lip. 

"That matches what I saw-" and in all of this the Lil' Bit had gone over with Tara to the unconscious Willow. 

That silence lingered, and Buffy seemed to have her eyes go wide in that moment as she looked at him. 

"They've-" 

"Been livin' here. Takin' care o' the Bit along with me. Red...." he paused for a long moment. "Red took up where you left off. Did a good job of it, too. We stopped a cult and one mini-apocalypse and her magic's become..." he shook his head. 

"Obviously." Buffy's words were wary. 

"She wasn't-" 

"Don't smell it." Spike was wary. "Burned demon, yeah. That wound was right above her hip. They didn't, but they were goin' to. That's why she killed them, beyond the rest." 

He grimaced at that. Buffy was silent for a long time. 

"Slayer-" 

She just looked at him. 

"Yes?" There was a strange vulnerability in her voice. 

"If I had known I would have stopped it." 

She gave him a very long look. 

"I believe you," and there was a kind of warmth there. 

--------

Willow did not wake up that night, and it was eerie. Everyone else went to sleep, Tara sleeping on the floor beside her, but Buffy didn't. The sight of the almost-corpse in front of her and the carbonized demons had been frightening even by her own line of work. And the truth was that while things were loud, that she was....alive. Alive and well. She could rebuild her life, even. And other words, the ones spoken by her and Spike in tones Slayers and vampires could hear but the sleeping witch and the almost-coma one couldn't, left her thinking. Her friends were not fine but Willow had been able to take her place. Destiny had decreed for her, twice, a glorious death on behalf of a grand cause, the second time going from banishing a dark lord among vampires to a Hellgod. 

If her best friend had taken her place......the thought had been born in that first sleepless night. She could choose and the choice was even easy, straightforward. Normal life had never really been a possibility, but Willow had faced, and beaten, if at a terrible price, a demon-lord of some kind of demon criminal gang. Willow had kept Sunnydale looking....as bright and perky as it ever did, and with that the decision was most easily made. Her best friend had been doing her job, and doing it as well as she did. And the luxuries of choice and freedom.......so she kept sitting there and then as the dawn rose, she kept that vigil and there was a bit of a greater worry when Willow was breathing, at least, still, but nothing else. And she was pale.

-------

Waking up to see that Willow looked about as well in that morning as she had the night Buffy had brought her back, Tara had taken a deep breath and had then smiled, said "Good morning, Buffy," and had gone upstairs. It was a simple task with the supplies they had on hand, and with experience, to mix a second, stronger potion. The blood loss......that couldn't be as readily fixed but Willow was strong, the strongest person she knew, and magic only a very little part of it. She was able to have her brought to their bedroom, quietly but firmly bundling out Dawnie and their resurrected Slayer, and then stripped her girl and winced. The blood on the top of the dress was clearly not Willow's and her eyes had narrowed at that. 

She was pretty sure what spell that meant and that meant worry, in its own right, but.....another deep breath and she applied that potion carefully, and devotedly, and waited. And not long after Willow's eyes began to flutter and she springboarded up. 

"Buffy-" 

"Is alive." Tara's voice was hesitant. "You brought her out of Hell." 

There was a strange sadness in Willow's eyes, and she stood up, wincing, and slowly got dressed. Tara just sat there watching, drinking in the sight of her girl alive and feeling a bit of bitter resentment that her girl had been in that kind of danger and she hadn't been able to keep her safe. But in the end she was also dressed, a maxiskirt, a longer-sleeved shirt that hid her midriff and the scars. And with a kiss that was very genuine and yet that strange element of grey in her aura, something much denser and near to black than the cloud over her that summer, she took a deep breath and would walk out and then over to Buffy's room, where Buffy had nodded, let her in, and then shut the door and locked it. 

------

Willow did pull down the skirt just a bit to show that scar to her. 

"I'm sorry, Buff. I realize, now, that it was selfish." 

She winced, and then pulled the skirt back up. 

"But that's why the selfishness when I actually did it. Not when I thought it through. When I did that spell I had to talk to the god of the dead, and he told me you were in Heaven." 

Buffy winced and Willow's shoulders slumped. 

"If I'dve known I never would have done this, Buff. Never. You gave everything. Twice." 

She was staring at her feet. 

"Things were hard when you were gone. We were able to use your mom's insurance to pay off the medical bills but after that...." a shadow crossed her face. "In my free time I did.....a lot of coding. If I can sell that to the right places, that'll definitely help. I would never bring you back and then just dump all of that on you." 

Buffy had blinked at that. 

"Of course you wouldn't." 

Will's tone was strange, subdued, but at the time Buffy attributed it to the nightmare the demon had given her, as she took a deep breath. 

"But the biggest selfishness, and I know this is wrong, now, is that I spent the last four months being..." her hand waved. "You. Paid all the bills, kept up everything with the house. Patrolled at night, went to school." 

A thousand yard stare at that. 

"I wanted that to stop but as I said, Osiris told me where you were. That you weren't in Hell, but in Heaven, and I took that from you, in the end, because I was..." 

She paused. 

"I do listen to you Buff, you know that. I know you wanted the normal life." 

In months to come Buffy Summers would think back to this moment, in the first hours of her return, when this had seemingly been the wisest thing she could have wanted, and did want. Life, to live. To be the older version of the girl with the younger sister who had met, and seen, Merrick when he had told her of a greater and more terrible destiny. At the time it not only made sense, it was the fulfillment of one of her oldest, secret wishes. 

"So you can have it." 

She got up and gave Willow a single firm hug and let the other girl cry it out, and in that Buffy felt that sense of relief. She was alive and for the first time since Merrick had first entered her life, her life was in her hands, to do with what she would. And with that thought there was a smile, soft and very real. "To live," she whispered in a tone only Spike could have heard, if he were in the room with her, in a quote taken from one of the stories her mom had read her and Dawnie both when they were little girls and changed just slightly, "will be a great adventure." 

Chapter Text

The Magic Box 

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As it turned out it took but 24 hours for her to sell the codes and to sell them at a grand enough price she could get started on things with Buff and taking care of this.....and as she sat here, she had written a check for Anya and had all these books. She was still pale and walked slowly and painedly with the aftermath of the wound, which hurt in what she suspected was a psychosomatic element as much as a real one. And as she would through so much of the year she had started to take to dressing in a mixture of gold and green. A group of books, very powerful ones. Spells that she could use to take things....well. 

Buff didn't want to be the Slayer anymore, and this was her punishment for bringing her back, for using the damned robot, for all of it. And as she began to drink in the books one by one, the power and knowledge flooded her. She had chosen these grimoires for these reasons, when she was done with this there would be no power on Earth that could stop her, and where Slayers had gifts granted them by fate she was not content to rely on what Anya would later call the 'dice-roll' of a call. She would enhance herself in a way that would keep her safe. Later, people would speculate the invulnerability and strength had always stemmed from one cause but that was not it, not then (and her own mind, lost as she always was to her own self-hatred and view of herself, would have agreed with them, too if she had been asked in that later point). 

It was being pinned beneath a demon, feeling that press between her legs. The claws that had ripped into her side, the fear that she could have died. She wouldn't put herself, or the people who loved her, through this again. And thus one by one she drank down that knowledge, and exhaled slowly and rapturously. 

Mears Residence, Basement

-------

"Holy fucking shitballs." 

Andrew and Jonathan turned to look at Warren as a look of admiration mixed with envy and fear crossed him. 

"Boys, I think we have a new target." 

"Not the Slayer?" 

Warren shook his head. 

"Girl was dead until yesterday, I think we can count her out for.....a while. You saw those looks on her face." 

They nodded, a bit surprised and reluctant. 

"Little miss Hoover here?" 

He grinned, a feral thing. 

"We go from facing Blade meets Daredevil to fighting Doctor Strange. A truly worthy challenge." 

Initial silence and then their grins mirrored his. 

1630 Revello Drive 

------

It was the tone of the call from Dawn that had brought Rupert Giles here, excited and yet wary. He had opened the door matter-of-factly and found himself staring in simple open-mouthed shock. His Slayer, alive, well, and eating cereal with that same sister, staring at her in a mixture of awe, relief, and shock that mirrored his own. 

"How?" 

Buffy turned to look at him and gestured with her head and he sat down and listened with a mixture of awe and trepidation and elements of sorrow intertwined with fear and rage that deepened. All the moreso when he would go, after listening to this story and spending the morning quite blissfully with his Slayer, fully restored to health as he was, in a resurrection that appeared in every single way....flawless....and that spike of fear that after so many months, and that long, quiet heroic career in those months when the rest of them had been injured in body or mind and recovering that could have ended in a single grisly few moments of terror. 

When it was done Buffy cleared her throat. 

"I'm fine, Giles. I mean that. I have my life back." 

The smile met her eyes. 

He could only dry-swallow, nod, and held his Slayer for a long moment. 

And then he'd quietly told her he wanted to know precisely what a Hellion was. 

------

That had brought him back to his apartment, to one of his books of demonology that he'd taken down and then he'd stared in growing comprehension and horror. Spike, in all probability from that strange kindness he showed Dawn, had understated how evil these things were. It didn't take much to consider why an attack by them and surviving it might have led Willow to one extreme and he felt a deep pall of a different fear. To do this kind of resurrection took very hidden objects, things supposedly thought lost. The urn, the bloodstained thing that Buffy had taken with her that had been in Willow's hand with the image of a green god in  Egyptian style on one side. 

A spell that used this scourged the body and the soul and yet it was the safest way, for all that, if done properly to resurrect someone. No trace of decay, none of the many unlovely ways in which a resurrection could and would turn upon those who sought to make one happen. It had taken him time to find that spell, too, using the resources in another of his books and then a set of words drew his attention and a very different kind of fear. 

"Above all else, to engage upon this spell requires a willingness that many have sought to wield and yet none have. To restore life to the dead, with the wine of the mother and the urn of Osiris, means the offerer must grant to the god a gift of equal value in their sight to the person whose resurrection they seek. All who tread the path of the river of death fall because here, none have been able, for the sake of love, to cross this line." 

He sat back, staring at the ceiling, and then formed his right hand into a fist and struck the table and decided to make his way to the Magic Box. 

The Magic Box 

-------

Anya Jenkins looked at the check, on the one hand, and then the array of emptied grimoires and the girl sitting there, staring at her hands for a long moment. She was human now, but traces of her old demon-self lingered and among them was the feeling of such powerful magic that it had every hair of her head standing on end. 

"Willow?" 

Her question was hesitant, marked by the quieter tone of a bird before a serpent, "what did you do?" 

"Something very bad." 

Anya frowned. "What?" 

"I brought Buffy back." 

Her eyes went wide and she exhaled. 

"The spell worked." 

"Too well." 

Willow winced. 

"Anya, are there heavenly dimensions?" 

She'd blinked at that. 

"Millions, yes." 

Willow's face went pale and then her head dipped. 

"Does everyone know that?" 

Anya pursed her own lips. 

"Enough do, yeah." 

Willow's lips were thin and she'd just exhaled and shaken her head and had leaned forward. 

"Buffy was in Hell, anyway. Why are you asking?" 

There was a bleakness in that gaze, a rueful laugh, and Willow just patted her shoulder. 

"Check should take care of everything." 

Anya stared at her, the figure in green and gold, and the immense aura of magic she had around her that was almost tangible, and kept staring long after Willlow had stepped by her and walked out the door, shutting it gently. 

-------

Giles, for his own part, paused when he saw Willow walking with her hands in her pockets and her head bowed. She had on bright green clothes with a golden stripe along her pants, a color theme that held surprisingly consistent in various ways through this year and it was also vivid enough that he'd called her name, three times, before she'd raised her head and blinked on the fourth. 

"Giles?" 

He'd gestured and she'd stared for a moment, biting her lip, and had then gotten in the car. They drove along the streets back to his apartment, where he got out and she followed him, walking with that same muted element that felt very unlike her, until he'd opened the door and then pointed her to that book. Willow looked at it dispassionately and then back to him. 

"Do you have any idea," his words were silken, "just how dangerous a path you took?" 

"Yes." The word was almost a whisper. "I know." 

He was silent, and then picked it up and read those sentences as she flinched slightly. 

"Everyone else who tried this spell failed." 

He looked at her with a worry she did not see because she wasn't looking at him, staring at her shoes. 

"How-" 

She cleared her throat. 

"I made an offering." 

That was all she said, and then she did look at him. 

"I know," her words were that same sepulchral whisper, "how much I messed up, Giles. You don't have to rub it in." Giles was silent for a moment. 

"What did you offer?" 

She shook her head. "It doesn't matter." 

"If it was your life-" 

"It wouldn't matter." A steel crept into her words, then, and she glared at him. "I fought a demon and it almost killed me, and I think being close to dying when I did that....helped." 

She took a deep breath. 

"If it wasn't for Tara and her own magic, I wouldn't be here now. I know what mistakes I made. I am lucky. We are lucky and we cannot count on luck, and I know and I understand all of that, too."

She'd winced at that, letting herself look at him. 

"But that price was worth paying." 

Giles gave her a long look. 

"Do you think we wouldn't mourn if it was you?" 

Silence greeted that and she shook her head. 

"I didn't offer my life, Giles. I won't tell you what I did, but it wasn't that. The god accepted, or Buff wouldn't be here." 

He felt a flare of that power within her then and he'd done a double-take. 

"What have you done to yourself?" 

There was a strange look on her face. 

"Fixed things." 

That was all she said and then she walked out and he was astonished to find her levitating for a moment before she'd closed her eyes and walked the rest of the way to the Summers house. 

---------

She built the circle, and all of the candles, and took advice from another of the grimoires for the first time. Meditation and grounding. The power she had called into herself was awe-inspiring, but it was also a necessity. Buff wanted freedom from the Slayer? Very well. This too was a price she was willing to pay. 

-------

Her first day of normal life had started with the luxury of sleeping in, and then after that spending an extra hour lying in a bed, a bed, not a coffin staring at the ceiling. Counting each breath, feeling each of her toes and her fingers. Feeling the weight of her Slayer power that filled her. Alive, alive, alive. Not falling into light, not running the love of her life through with a sword. Not that gestalt being with the glowing golden eyes that had fought and taken down Adam. Alive, alive, alive. And she'd gotten up, taken a morning shower, had eaten. Had talked to Giles and had then gone back to her bedroom. Not to lie on the bed, this time. Studying things closely. 

147 days, Spike had told her. And yet not a bit of dust, not a thing out of place. Only faint hints of Dawn's perfume here that gave her an inkling as to that grief, and some of the ways her little sister coped with it. Well here too, as Buffy nodded, she had a chance. Their mom was dead, she was free. The kind of power Will had shown gave her that, she was going to use it. And yet she didn't think it some great sin to be a bit lazy when you'd risen from the grave after almost four months, empowered and freed by your very best friend. Yes, on the one hand, she had been in a place of peace, of light, of serenity. But there she had believed her friends were fine, fine in every way and waking up in a park well away from her grave next to her best friend almost bleeding to death and demon corpses had made it painfully clear that wasn't true. 

The small traces of grief, innate to smelling your sister's perfume near your bed, or on your clothes, things kept in memory of her? Nothing about that was fine. If it had been the actual heaven she would have been beyond enraged at Willow dragging her out of it. But the truth was that she didn't know where she was, and that being free to live again wasn't really that bad after all. Even moreso since she'd been brought back with that freedom. And when she let herself step out of her own room, she briefly looked into Dawn's. That hadn't changed much.  And then, after a long look and hesitation, toward the room that had been her mother's and was now Willow and Tara's. 

Tara herself was gone to school, Will had gone...somewhere, she wasn't entirely familiar. And she'd opened the door and had then stared for a long moment. The white dress from yesterday lingered in that special basket for bloodstained clothes and she'd gone back to it with that morbid fascination. It had been her buried but it was Willow who wore something more like a grave shroud and when she saw the tear and the bloodstains from the demon claws she winced. Beyond everything else, here was the greatest reason she couldn't find it in herself to be angry. It hadn't been a woman in the fullness of health and confidence who had done this. That wound could have killed her. It almost had. 

--------

And when she'd let herself go downstairs she paused. Will in the kitchen, fixing food for herself, and still pale and slow-moving. 

"Will?" 

"Oh, hey Buff." 

That same strangely detached tone, so very artificial in a voice that was usually far more animate. 

"How's life?" 

"Good." 

She meant that. Will ate and while the robot had been made in her own image it was like looking at a double, or something wearing her skin. 

"Buff, what is it?" 

The look on her face didn't match the tone of her words, that same strange detachment. 

"Sorry," she shrugged. 

"Look like you saw a ghost." A small hint of amusement in that and something in Buffy relaxed at those words 

"Nah." 

She'd shrugged at that. They sat in silence until Willow was done and went to clean up the food. 

"I did sell some of those codes." 

Buffy looked up at that. 

"I should have thought of it sooner, but I have a few more to sell, as well. You'll be able to live at least as well as you did before...." the words trailed off and her gaze had flickered to that couch for a moment and the mask of grief on Buffy's own face returned, as she dry-swallowed and nodded. 

Willow finished putting up the dishes and then turned to look at her. 

"I shouldn't have taken away your choices at all, Buff. I did. I can't unring that bell. But what I can do, and what I have done, is give you that chance, now. I was able to keep Sunnydale safe in one way. I can do so in a different one, a better one, now." 

Her nose twitched. 

"And so you can." 

Buffy nodded. 

"I know I can." 

She smiled. 

"I do. I wanted this...." she paused. 

"Really since my first watcher spoke to me." 

Another hug between them and while her smile met her eyes Willow's were strangely blank, almost. Detached. 

---------

After Buff had stepped out that left Willow to stand in the house. The meditation had worked....well enough. But that power that flowed through her? She was strong, now, physically. More powerful than a Slayer. Invulnerable. She would never be left to almost bleed and die on grass again, and nobody who tried to hurt her that way would. And the meditation worked enough that she went back up to her room, and to Tara's, and into their shower, which she left off, and then curled up on her side in the shower and let herself cry it out. Nothing was destroyed, no lights flickered. She wasn't going to appeal to a kindness or a softness that she didn't feel she deserved, she just let herself cry it out, stood up, looking at her puffy eyes and her sorrowful face in the mirror, then washed her face again and took a deep breath. 

"Ok." 

She breathed. 

"Tonight'll be the first night, but you can do this. Who knows? Glory's gone. What's the worst the Hellmouth can throw at me?" 

She shook her head. 

"You made a mess of things, Willow." As she looked at herself. 

"And only you can fix it." 

Chapter Text

Sunnydale Cemetery 

--------

Enhancing her strength and her invulnerability worked. She'd found out the latter and ruined two shirts by leaving them over a hot stove and setting them on fire until she'd doused them in water and had never even known it happened. It meant she wouldn't be at risk of bleeding out in a cemetery anymore, and if she had thought to apply it to herself at all Buff wouldn't have to be alive now, and she could be doing this as she was doing it now, on her own. In the past it had been with groups but here, she wasn't bothering to have anyone with, or around, her. Vampires, plural, had tried to bite her and broken fangs for doing so and that invulnerability held up against the forces she actually fought. Nobody else had to endanger themselves here, and her best friend could go on living a normal life. 

And as she tapped her foot on the ground waiting for what would be the last vamp of the night to rise, she jumped with an 'eep' when a voice came up behind her. 

"Glinda not with you?" 

She whirled to see Spike. 

"In answer to that question you asked a long time ago about still being scary, yes you are." 

Spike preened at that, and his gaze flickered to the tears in her clothes and then the grin became a more worried expression. 

"Red-" 

By then the fledge had burst from the ground, game face visible and fangs shining with golden eyes gleaming. Willow let him run at her and struck him hard in the face, taking satisfaction from the cracking sound as Spike watched the fight that followed. The vamp was fast and her moves were more windmilling than trained (then, by a month later this would change along with so many other things but in this first week it was a painful amateur hour) but he was also a vamp and wanting the fight, which was how she was able to just stake him and dust him, kneeling and keeping her eyes closed over the dust for a moment. 

"Red-" she turned to open her eyes and look at him. "Where are they?"

"At home." She looked at him. "Giving Buff the choice to live her own life." She clicked her teeth. "I am, too. I brought her back." 

"That was-" 

"Inextricably stupid, risky, and dangerous? Tell me something I don't know." 

Spike had blinked at that and then he'd kept her company in silence as they walked home, until they'd reached Buff's house. 

"I know," he said quietly, "that you didn't intend to hurt anyone, but it was still a great risk. And I'll give you fair warning, the Watcher's sat on his words for a while but he's mad, too." 

Willow shrugged. 

"I can't make him un-mad." 

With that she would start to step into the house. 

--------

She could have a normal life, now. She had signed back up for school. She'd almost expected to see Will and she knew that she was taking a few classes with her but even with her Slayer senses it was.....hard to. She had signed back up for school, she had a part time job at the Magic Box, working with Anya.  And........she was still up because long experience with Slaying had primed her to be up at these hours and being freed of that, as Will had done, until or if she decided to start it back up again didn't magically give her the sleeping hours of an ordinary person. And she had felt a vampire outside the house but saw Spike walking away and had sighed in relief, the tinglies gone. When the door opened Will walked in, tired, various rips along her clothes, along with stains of grass and the like. 

"Still up?" 

She met her gaze. 

"Slayer hours." 

Will nodded and then went up the stairs and that felt.....strange. On the one hand she still felt that deep spike of anger, but on the other Will had almost died and she went out there fighting the monsters in the night on a nightly basis where she actually got to live that normal life she wanted. Clinging very hard to that thought Buffy too began to go upstairs and then paused by Willow and Tara's room. 

------

Willow had stepped in and had then gone to the shower when she'd paused, hearing Tara's voice. 

"Again?" 

She turned to look at her. 

"Tare, the magic I put on me means I'm stronger than a Slayer, and I'm invulnerable. I can do with a lot of punches and with a lot fewer clips what Buff does, nobody has to go out and follow me. Giles doesn't get more concussions, you don't have to run yourself ragged." 

"Buffy has fr-" 

"Buff," she said quietly, "is done Slaying." 

"You don't have to keep doing thi-" Willow just gritted her teeth and went into the shower and let herself strip off and sigh, relaxing under the hot water. 

------

Tara gritted her own teeth and made herself get up, going to the shower to follow her. 

------

Buffy, for her own part, decided discretion was the better part of valor and went to sleep, where she found herself locked in a strange dream that became a recurring one-out of the darkness, she was coming, a blazing figure of perfect power and perfect beauty. That, ultimately, was why they must kill her. That ultimately, was why they could not. 

A figure clad in red and gold stood in a bright day, power rippling around her and it was both fire and darkness and elemental destruction all in one. Her eyes were pools of darkness and fire by different angles and she was smiling a tiger-smile. 

You gave up the title and the role, and now you want it back? Now? Now that Tara's only alive because of the power she left me over? No. 

She met the eyes of the gleaming figure and she froze. This thing in red and gold, the color of blood and fire and doom all in one, it was Will and the power here curdled in her mouth. 

I'm done. 

And then a few words in Latin followed and light began to consume the world and the last thing she saw in the dream was a cheshire-like grin and two eyes gleaming- 

She ramrodded herself up, staring in the darkness. 

"That'll teach me to borrow Xander's comics," and then she let herself fall back asleep. 

-------

Giles was there, the next morning. He'd arrived while everyone else was eating breakfast and after Spike's warning Willow had a very good idea why he was actually here and what it meant that he was, but she was tired, it had been a long night. Invulnerability was a strange thing. She couldn't be hurt outwardly, and she wasn't. She very fortunately wasn't dealing with something invulnerable, like Glory, to find out what happened if two such things fought. Vampires were anything but that. They could take a punch but a splinter, or if you really got mad, just ripping their heads clean off, was all it took to bring them down. It still meant patrolling twelve cemeteries each night. 

She was also bemused that even with that invulnerability and strength that she was becoming considerably more toned, and whatever complaints Tara had about other things seeing her in the bedroom meant that this was not one of them. And......when everyone else had sidled out, Tare driving Dawnie to school (she only had class in the evening today, and then patrol again) that left her and Giles both. 

"Out of all of us, I believed you would handle power like this best." 

Willow scoffed, shaking her head. 

"No you don't. If you did you wouldn't have thrown sand in my face every time I tried to learn, except when I needed to do really dangerous things that had to be done." 

Her gaze met his and there was something of ice and steel in it. 

"I didn't see you casting those spells, Giles. You asked me to do it, you benefited from the results, and any prices paid were purely my fault while the good was for everyone." 

She shook her head, and Giles stared at her dumbfounded. 

"You're here to yell at me that I messed up with that resurrection spell. You don't think I know that?" 

Her voice cracked and Giles flinched slightly. 

"You've been reckless-" 

"Once, when I was heartbroken, and drunk, and otherwise no more and no less dangerous than everyone else." 

Her eyes briefly flashed with light for a moment and Giles paused. 

"Amy up there's a rat. She should be human again-" 

Willow and Tara's room 

-------

The rat cage exploded and Amy Madison found herself sitting buck-ass nude on a counter in a house she knew, from her time as a rat, as Buffy Summers'. This had happened, briefly, once before and she braced herself to be turned back. She kept waiting, and only when the first five minutes passed and she'd forced herself to stop cleaning whiskers she no longer had did she accept that she was finally, properly back to human again. 

------

"Willow-" 

"No." She glared at him. "I know I messed up. That's why I did a set of spells on myself so until, or if, Buff is ready to be the Slayer again I can keep doing what I was doing. It's clear I couldn't lead people, the moment a hard decision happened everyone yells at me and hates me. Fine. So be it. But...." 

Her gaze was cold. 

"I'm not getting yelled at for defending Sunnydale and cleaning up my own messes. There is nothing you can yell at me that my own mind doesn't tell me." 

Giles stared at her dumbfounded, and after a long awkwardness he first left and then went to his apartment, where he sat down and then words began to fully register to him. He took his first step when he went to the phone and picked it up. 

"Quentin." 

"Mr. Giles." 

"I shall have to postpone my trip to London until next year." 

"Something changed over there in the Colonies?" 

"You could say that, yes. I wish to be sure all is well with my....charges...before I head across the Pond." 

"Very well." 

Travers hung up, then. 

And with that Giles got into the car he'd heard Dawn refer to less than kindly as his midlife crisis car and drove to the Magic Box. 

-------

And it was then that the strangeness began to start. Sitting in her room as she was starting to doze off, Willow paused to look at the pictures in the room. Herself and Buffy, herself and Tara, even one of the only pictures out there of herself smiling around Anya. And all of them briefly marked with skulls and the impression of something dark and deadly. She slept until she was awakened by a spirit, in the image of Buffy, that looked at her. 

Filthy little bitch. Did you cut its throat? Did you pat its head? The blood dried on your hands, didn't it?

She shook her head and exhaustion took her. When she awoke she could see a swollen mass moving across the ceiling and the floor following her, and then she'd gone to the bathroom to wash her face. And she'd paused for a moment. The face looking at her in the mirror had hair much longer than hers that trailed off into fire, clad in red and gold, and eyes that were red streaked with darkness, a maniacal killer's smile on her face. 

Ben Azomer looked upon the waters and went mad. 

She closed her eyes and shook them fiercely and when she opened them the gleaming figure of darkness and fire was still there, grinning at her. 

There is a demon summoned by that spell, but I am not it. I am within you, Willow Rosenberg, and you know it. You are me, as I am you. Remember-and the strange fire-haired version of her had a pouting smile akin to the vampire version of her-that leather-clad monster with our face? A vampire is just a man or a woman stripped of all decency and with physical strength. What she is, I am and you are, for we are one and the same. 

She closed her eyes again and hit herself, and when she opened them the thing was gone. 

The lump was still moving through the floor and she decided, then, to end this here and now by speaking a spell into existence and then the Child of Words took shape and that was when Willow let herself feel her muscles slacken and took altogether too much relish after the sight of the monster wearing her own face beating it to death. There was blood all over her knuckles and flecks of bone, and she took the thing into the back yard, poured gasoline around it, made a circle to contain the effects, and burned the corpse so that nothing remained, and stood there for a long time. 

------

Tara found her girlfriend in the back yard, where the smell of burning and of demon-flesh followed, and Willow had flecks of demon-flesh and bone on her knuckles and for the first time since that argument with Glory Tara felt a sudden pall of fear. Not of Willow, it would never be that. For her. She had seen an alternation on her face between triumphalism and signs she enjoyed the fight, which never really did trouble her. Buffy was like that, the stories she'd heard (and the one indirect meeting) of Faith told her the other Slayer had been like that, too. The more infrequent stories gave her the hint that beneath all of what the Council had done with, and to, her Kendra might have been like that as well. 

But there was also a solemnity and her girl's babbles were infrequent, given she was withdrawing from her and from the others. Tara had known of the spell, but only up to a point as she didn't want to know, but she'd found the urn, and the traces of dried blood on it, and had done fuller reading. And so she went to her girlfriend, took her hand, the non-bloodstained one, in hers and helped her clean that hand as that same strange iron curtain had fallen around her. 

"Will-" 

"Yes?" 

She looked into those eyes. 

"What happened?" 

By then Buff was back and was looking at things, too, back from her shortest shift and the one where she'd begun to adjust to actually doing a job. 

"Thaumogensis." 

"Huh?" 

She turned and froze when she saw Buff. 

"Magic always has a price. It took a week for it to fully manifest, but it did. We brought Buff back, and the spell to do that required a sacrifice. The blood of an innocent, and then a gift of equal value to the person restored." 

Buffy frowned. 

"I didn't know that." 

Willow shrugged. 

"It happens. How was work?" 

"Not that bad, Anya's actually pretty nice to work with." 

Willow scoffed. "If you say so." 

She went out of the house and drove off to class. She hadn't eaten anything since breakfast and that was fine, she'd stop by the campus cafeteria and get a quick meal before patrol. 

-------

When Buffy went out that evening, it wasn't with ideals of patrolling. It was because she was used to Slayer hours, and as she'd paused in an alley and had seen, and frowned, at a 'beware of dog' sign she'd turned to see Spike. 

"Spike." 

The vampire nodded. 

"It really is good to have you back, Slayer." 

She'd given him a long, lingering look, her gaze dwelling upon his body and dry-swallowed before nodding. 

"How are you?" 

She'd paused, for a long moment. 

"Better than I expected." 

"Well you were in Hell, so that happ-" 

"I wasn't in Hell." Spike paused. "I was in Heaven." 

His eyes widened. 

"Do they-" 

"Will knows." Buffy winced. "It's why she's..." she paused. "Filling in for me. She knows." 

She shook her head. 

"I don't want anyone else to know, Spike. Besides, I at least think I was in Heaven but that's the thing. Where I was, there was light, and peace, and it told me not to worry, that the people I loved were fine, and doing well." 

She gave Spike a very long look. 

"Was that true?" 

The silence in the alley lingered for a very long time. 

"No." 

Buffy bit her lip. 

"Then who knows? I may have been in Hell after all and she did bring me out of it. What kind of a peaceful place tells me things are going well for my friends when that's a lie?" 

The silence lingered at a different level and then she was astonished when the vampire sprang at her and pulled her into a hug that she let herself return. 

"If that's the case then I'm glad she did bring you back." 

Buffy bit her lip, looking at the stars for a moment. 

"I am, too." 

She looked at him. 

"I have a job, and a normal life. And........I never thought I'd be able to have that." 

She followed the vampire to his crypt that evening, and it was, in the hindsight of all else that would follow from it, her who leaned forward and gave Spike the first kiss that turned into a sparring session, all that latent energy from not Slaying erupting into a straightforward brawl that ended with the two flush against each other. 

-------

Willow returned from patrol and was exhausted enough that she just sank on the couch face-first and couldn't even make it upstairs. The slices on the back of her shirt from the one demon she'd encountered were real. Tara, who'd heard those steps and the door opening and shutting, went downstairs and soon took a blanket and let herself sleep with them in each other's arms, contented. She would ask Willow who the stranger was that was borrowing Willow's own clothes and sleeping in their bed and who had stared at her as if she knew her well in the morning. 

-------

Mears Residence, Basement, the next morning 

-------

Warren drank in the sight of Willow changing her clothes. Tara, for whatever reason, was good at doing so outside the camera's eyes. Willow, equally for whatever reason, neither knew nor seemed to even entertain the possibility. Warren loved the American Pie films and even if he was much more interested in the brunette, a rewatch had reminded him that yes, there was an actress in those file had also seen elements of the kind of power she had, she could literally rewrite reality with the sorcery at her disposal and had physical power at least equal to, if not superior to, a Slayer's. ms who could be Willow Rosenberg's identical twin. And he had seen the demon that Willow had taken out of the house to burn in the backyard, if the column of fire and smoke had been any kind of a hint. 

And she was invulnerable, beyond all that. He'd seen that when their van had driven by one of the cemeteries she was patrolling and a huge demon with claws and antlers had ripped into her back and torn one of her shirts to shreds only to stare as dumbfounded as he did at an absence of blood. And had then seen how swiftly Willow had become about as violent as a vampire in tearing the demon down and ripping off one of the antlers, in the end, and stabbing it to death with it. 

He nodded. 

It would be time, and more than time, to start preparing the set of tests. First, they'd find and hire an M'Fashnik. It would cover for them with a bank robbery, first and foremost, and then he'd send it to that house to try to kill the witch. Brute force first, and then.....as he looked at the small set of devices by his table. All manner of things to gauge the dangerous person who was taking the place of the Slayers. Would it be the endearingly pathetic girl in the sweaters he vaguely remembered from high school? The woman who casually stripped off and he grimaced as his pants were suddenly tight at that thought? Or the vengeful....thing...wearing the same face as the other two who could and did switch to murderous violence on a dime? 

He suspected if they'd faced the brunette he vaguely remembered and what was her name again? Faye? Kate? Something like that, that this might be what they'd been in for. Instead he faced a challenge that made him smile, at one level. An invulnerable witch whose magic basically amounted to 'reality is what she says it is and for as long as she says it' when she cast a spell, who was invulnerable and as strong as a Slayer? 

He looked at Jonathan and Andrew. 

"You know, we did say we wanted to be supervillains." 

There were nods from the other two. 

"Well what sounds more like a superhero? The person who can say a couple of words in Latin and turn a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse and can shrug off bullets? Or a tiny blonde who thrusts wood really hard into the hearts of people who don't want it who'd bleed to death from a bullet like anyone else?" 

"Phrasing." 

He turned to look at Andrew and scoffed. 

"We need to figure out the limits of what she can do. We'll use the M'Fashnik for that robbery and then-" 

He went over the small object. 

"Say what you will about the ol' class protector but she's smart but it's person-smart. Willow's the smartest person I know, maybe one of the smartest people on the planet." 

He shook his head. 

"We'll need to change, and modify, plans. What the Slayers would be too dumb to think through if one or both of them were here, she'd outmaneuver in a hurry." 

And then he turned to them and smiled. 

"And that plan to make Buffy our love slave?" 

"Oh we'll get there, eventually. But consider, if we do this-" and he pointed back to the footage of Willow quite literally hitting the huge horned demon so hard it folded over wheezing and moving with a blazing fury in her eyes-"we know what she can do. We resolve all the issues of making her our slave and we get a harem and we get her to do it." 

"What, Willow do a spell on someone's mind?" 

"Yeah." 

"That doesn't sound like her-" 

Warren reached over and clouted Jonathan on the head. 

"Johnny, we all remember that day you made yourself the grand high pooh bah Captain Defender guy." 

Jonathan frowned. 

"If you could do that and get a pair of twins to sleep with you, then imagine what we could do if we get Rosenberg to be our weapon." 

Chapter Text

Spike's Crypt, morning

-------

Her second week of being alive and in this case each night, now, she fell asleep not in her own house but in the arms of a vampire. After they sparred. She had no regrets about trying a normal life and with sparring (and sleeping with) Spike she got the best of all worlds. The violent energy that would have otherwise built up without an outlet was fully charged. Willow and Spike knew she'd been in what she no longer thought of as Heaven, but perhaps a place like Valhalla. A field, maybe, a meadow. A shining place, a fitting realm for warriors. If she thought really hard there were glimpses of enormous cats able to pull a chariot and a shining being with a wondrous necklace around her, very lightly clad and wielding a spear fitting a deity. Or maybe that, like the glimpses in her dreams of a red-clad Willow whose hair trailed off into fire and before whom reality itself knelt and trembled was just reading more of Xander's comics collections. The Thor ones, in particular. 

Maybe. Either way, she really had been at peace, and now she was....living life. In all its complexities. Two days out of six she worked three hour shifts in the Magic Box, the others she worked six or eight, depending. Well-paid, in all of those cases. Giles and Anya were generous employers in that way. Between them and whatever Will's computer witchery did she and Dawnie were not broke, as they would have been without this. What she had with Spike....the vampire was pathetically eager for anything she could and did give him, and he could both take her pace and be an equal or in a few cases, a superior. And beyond all else, there was a man she could spar with. 

She knew, abstractly, that she could spar with Will. Spike went on patrol with her sometimes and it was the words he'd said about that last night, before they'd started what she was waking up from, that lingered in her thoughts. Buffy always went in groups, Will was doing this alone. Granted, unlike her, Will was bulletproof and had augmented her own strength enough that when she'd challenged her to an arm-wrestling contest she had won four out of five when Buffy had considerably underestimate just how far Will had augmented herself. She had only won the second, and when they'd both done trials of equal will and strength Will had won every time. She kept telling herself that in these earlier months until it sank in. 

Her Slayer was gratified by sparring with a vampire even if she wasn't actively killing them. She had much more time for her sister, too, though Will and Tara both continued to help out here. She had heard arguments between them and it was increasingly clear that all was not entirely well there, and she really hoped she'd be wrong, but.......but she shrugged and finally got up and yawned as she could feel Spike's admiration without needing to see it. His hands traced along her back. 

1630 Revello Drive, morning 

--------

Willow stared in dismay at both the busted pipe and and the bill. Her programs plus Buffy's salary would make for a lean month for the rest of them but they'd manage. She.....could keep eating at the uni cafeteria three times a day rather than add to the food part of the bill, at least. Xander and the plumber were talking and at least here, she'd be able to ensure this particular thing would be told to Buff when things were already managed. They'd gotten up out of the basement, after Willow had done the work to dry the place as much as she could, making a deliberate point not to use more magic than she already did. Existing in this world of super-strength and invulnerability was magic enough, and she'd noticed her desire to cast spells in general dwindled when that magic literally sank into her skin. 

And after they'd walked up out of the basement, there was Giles again, as he was staring at them. She bit her lip. 

"Hi, Giles." 

He'd taken one look at her clothes, gone down into the basement and seen for himself, and had just as quietly arranged for use of a Council fund to ensure the whole business was handled, after talking this over with her first. 

"Buffy," he said quietly, cleaning his glasses, "has enough to adjust to and the part-time work she makes here won't pay for it. The Magic Box makes plenty of money, and between that and the Council's resources, all is well." 

He cleared his throat. 

"Well enough, anyway." 

She'd just nodded at that. And then braced herself after he'd put his glasses on and looked straight at her. 

"Now," his tone was slightly deeper with a bit of a menacing rasp, much more the voice of Ripper than Rupert, "just what did you offer Osiris in that spell?" 

She'd frowned. 

"Giles, why does that matter?" 

He gave her that same stupefied look of disbelief and leaned forward. 

"The spell you did was dangerous. It called up forces that are not easily matched. You are, if the magic books are right, the only person in all of history to do this spell and resurrect someone with it. You found a priceless artifact that's been cleansed and used supremely dangerous dark magic, and you reawakened a Slayer. Need I remind you about dear Faith and what happens if someone with a Slayer's power slips a gear?" 

Willow's jaw was tight. 

"No, you don't need to remind me about Faith." Her words were toneless. 

The silence lingered. "What did you offer?" 

"My happiness." It was all that she said and Giles had frowned at that, at first, and the words had seemingly been trivial. It was only later, months later, that they came back in full and had him springing awake at night. And in the hindsight of where reality would go for all of them, he would like to think the importance had been heard, then, but at the time all he did was tilt his head and shrug lightly. It hadn't entirely resolved his issues, either. 

"I heard from..." he paused. "From Spike that you're the one doing patrols." 

She nodded. 

"Alone." 

"I am, yes." Willow saw the way a slight pall of fear crossed his face. "I understand that you've made this invulnerability spell and a strength augmentation spell part of...everything. I understand, after that encounter with that Hellion why you would." 

Willow crossed her arms in front of her chest as he continued. "We did vote to make you the leader-" 

"As long as Buff's dead. She's back, she's trying, as I said, to live that normal life. It's her choice, Giles. I did have some selfishness in wanting her back as much to not do this, and I should have wanted her back because she's my best friend, and I love her, and I had and have the power to change one person who died too young." A shadow crossed her face. "If I could do that for Jesse, or Jenny, I would." Giles went still for a long moment. 

"Jesse's dust and Miss Calendar...." she stared at her shoes and she missed the way Giles' expression changed as he went over to her and pulled her into a hug. 

"One person," he heard her saying, "in all the world brought back. One unjust death, undone. That can't be evil." 

The long silence that followed just saw him nodding. 

---------

Buffy wasn't entirely sure of what to expect when Giles was outside the Magic Box, waiting, after she was off of one of her short-shift days and patting the door. She let herself get into the car with him, and they drove at first in silence. 

"How are you adjusting to being back?" 

Buffy was silent for a moment. 

"Good." And she did mean it. "I get to go to work, go home, spend time with my sister, go to school. I really want to at least try an ordinary life, Giles. It's not like there's anything particularly bad on the Hellmouth right now, even. The worst people deal with is the ordinary vampire, and with all Will's changes, that's easy." She shook her head. "One year, a year in which I can try and see if I want to be Buffy Anne Summers, normal girl, or if destiny wins. And if destiny does win..." she looked at Giles directly, "then I can at least try it for a few months until it takes those choices away again." The silence lingered for a long moment, and then Giles nodded. 

"Next year," he said quietly, "I will be going to England for a few months. I will need to scratch some backs with the Council and touch base with a coven I have ties with in Devon." 

"Coven?" 

"Yes. I should have thought of them long before this and in truth I'm not sure why I didn't. I believe they'll be able to help both Willow and Tara to grow into everything they can be." 

Buffy nodded. 

"Not gonna tell me to be a Slayer?" 

Giles shook his head as they pulled by her house. 

"I don't see why I should. Just as when you told me about Angel, if you're looking for anger or judgment, I shan't provide it. Not only is it not my place, but you're a grown woman and you're doing very well indeed. Anya likes having you work with her." 

Buffy blinked. 

"From her that says a lot." 

"It does. She has high standards, and good ones." 

When they stopped in front of her house Giles paused again. 

"I do believe you'll do well in a normal life, Buffy. And as you say, it's a relaxed year on the Hellmouth. It appears after everything with the portal even the Hellmouth is stunned at how to follow up on that." 

Rack's Lair 

--------

As always, the place smelled disgusting and the human swine before the butcher were more disgusting. Little teenage Amy Madison had thought this when her mom had first brought her here, older adult Amy thought it moreso. But she was human now, Larry was dead and also gay, years had passed, and Willow was changing in ways that disturbed her enough that she couldn't help but wonder, at times, if someone or something had bodyjacked her the way it had happened with her. She remembered as a rat when Willow and Tara had discussed Faith doing that, it could happen. And as she'd stepped past the last set Rack turned to see her and smiled that oily grin. 

"Well, well." His tone of surprise and admiration sounded genuine, "you're alive." So did the surprise. 

"I was a rat for five years. The whole MOO thing." 

Rack clicked his teeth. "That was a fun day indeed." He gave her an appraising look and licked his lips. 

"You've grown up." 

Amy nodded. She'd hated the man when he'd taken her virginity and she hated him more, now, but the power......and so she leaned forward and told him about both Willow and Tara as he leaned forward. 

"My my," he murmured, "so that's where all this strong magic is coming from." 

Amy nodded. 

"Will's getting stressed, very stressed. Patrols plus school equals too much, I remember that from the Slayer and high school." 

Rack blinked, then nodded. 

"If I play my cards right, and she gets stressed enough, or isolated enough...." 

Rack grinned. 

"Excellent idea, Miss Madison. And I shall also help you delve more into the darkest of the dark arts. If we are to beard this particular dragon in her lair, we will need it." 

The feverish light of enthusiasm in her eyes was all too real. 

-------

Tara and Willow were driving home from one of their two joint classes together. Tara was the one driving as Willow sat in quiet contemplation. Tara didn't like that. Usually their drives were full of Willow-babble and the more her girl withdrew into herself the more she found her irritation rising and the bad thing about that as a driving force was that it made people quick to speak and quick to error. So it proved here when she finally cleared her throat and got her Willow-tree to turn her gaze to her. 

"What is it?" 

"You're quiet, lately." 

"Got a lot on my mind. I went to the bank, shortly before that robbery, today." 

"The bank?" 

Willow nodded. 

"Sold another couple of programs, put the money from what one of them earns in an account solely for you." Tara was glad it was a red light as she would have stopped the car regardless. 

"For me?" Her voice was almost a squeak. 

"You came down here, from a biological family that uh...." the silence trailed off and said all that needed to be said, as Tara winced. 

"Yes," her word was almost a whisper. 

"Well here, you'll have your own money and there's nothing I can do with, or for it." 

Tara gave her a long look until the cars behind her honked and got her back into driving, as she too was thoughtful. 

"Nobody's ever....." 

"Well now someone has." 

And with that that irritation also changed. It was.....hard, very hard, to be angry, or irritated, at someone who went out of her way to meet her needs, and those of everyone else. It was equally hard to be angry at someone who'd survived what Will had in that cemetery who refused to take the magic off and de-armor herself. Even around her. There were a few times when they'd tried to make love that she'd put her fingers right on that scar and that had made her stop (and many more times where they'd done things just fine with no problems but it was always the nature of the human psyche to dwell on problems more than successes and Tara was no different to most people in that). 

For someone who'd gotten her friend out of Hell, Willow seemed far, far sadder than she should be and that.....puzzled her. Will had been the one who'd worked so very hard to bring Buffy back in the first place. Her goal, her vision, her power. All of this had seen it through. It bothered her at a different level and she wasn't entirely sure how to mention it, or if she should. And when they'd gotten home Will had gone down to the basement. 

-------

And right as she'd stepped into it she had paused, finding a demon, green-skinned and with a reptilian look grinning at her with fangs. 

Finally. 

She'd paused. 

"Who are you and what do you want?" 

The three that hired me to rob that bank had one other task for me. Kill a witch, bring them her head. 

He took a step forward. 

Shame to mess up such a pretty bo-she moved then with a lightning speed and threw her fist into its face hard enough to shatter fangs. Once again her technique was sloppier and amateurish, windmilling and over-telegraphing things but with each hit bones broke and there was internal bleeding that she could not see, and the thing's anger grew. She finished the fight after several desperate minutes and by the time Buff had arrived back in her house and had seen the aftermath of the flooding and Willow standing over the brutalized body of the thing she killed she'd stared wide-eyed. 

"That thing got in my house." 

"Yes." Will's words were colder. 

"Yes it did. And it said that there were people, three people, who hired it." 

Will's tone was suspicious but she shook her head. 

"See, Buff?" Buffy winced slightly at the damage done to the demon. "I got this." 

Months later Buffy would look back on the damage left there and decide if she had immediately decided, then, to be the Slayer again rather than making a go of that normal life that things might have turned out better. Instead she'd just shrugged, had nodded, and as much as she would spend the rest of her life trying to convince herself that she'd always questioned wanting to just be the Slayer, it gave her that moment of relief. Her life was balanced. Her best friend was coming through for her, Sunnydale had responded to their tempting fate by what it was going to do. 

Mears Residence, basement

-------

A grisly corpse with a shattered face and bones poking from parts of it were all that Andrew needed to turn to Warren and gesture dramatically at the thing that the vampire dragged out of the basement by night. 

"And you want us to go up against someone who does that?" 

"Of course," he breathed with that same admiration. "Think about it. What do these brave superheroes do if all that power turns against them? It might be scary enough to them on their side, maybe, but if we can let the monster out to play...." 

Jonathan's nose wrinkled. 

"And let's not forget, she'd be our slave in every way imaginable, while doing it. Imagine a blend of Dr. Strange, Supergirl, and Princess Leia." 

Jonathan and Warren shared identical smirks while Andrew frowned. "Didn't Leia strangle Jabba?" 

Warren shrugged. "The Hutt left her with free will. And think about it another way, too. That girl's a lesbo now, or so she says. But remember we all went to high school with her. Everyone thought that she and Oz were the saccharinely sweet couple that made diabetes meds people very rich if you saw 'em." 

Andrew frowned and something curdled in him slightly. 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean she ain't that gay and there's nothing that hippie girl Maclay has that we don't." 

Andrew frowned.

"I've heard you say before you think the hippie girl's the more attractive of the two." 

Warren nodded. 

"She is. But I've come to understand something after looking into the magic books." He tapped one foul-smelling gland. 

"A lot of this is like hypnotism. You can strongarm someone utterly, against their will, but it's not recommended unless you have a lot more power than all the rest of u do. Now she herself? If she wanted to she could. It'll be one of the things I make her do. And I don't just want a glorified lovedoll here or I could just make another April with Willow's face on it and that'd be enough for that. I want someone who's basically the Cesare to my Dr. Caligari." 

The other two nodded at that. 

"Oh." Andrew blinked. 

"Uh huh. Maclay's a lesbian's lesbian. Not a single hint of attraction to a man. Yes, I could make her, but I'd rather have her girlfriend do it because she can do that with full power enough to leave her useful and not a corpse on legs." 

"Oh." Andrew squeaked. "That'd do it." 

Warren smiled coldly as he went back to a set of beakers and held up one that glimmered with an eerie hue in the light. 

"So here we are," as he held it up. "The time stuff works on someone who thinks more with her fists than her head, if we try mind games with her we'll poke her where she's strongest and she'll go straight for us and end our fun way too early. But this? Girl's a sweetheart, she really is." 

He turned to Jonathan. 

"And that's where you come in. They know you better, you go up to her in the Bronze while she's drinking and slip this in and bring her here, and we can really get started." 

Andrew blinked. 

"A roofie?" 

"Oh yeah," Warren smirked. 

"Very much so. And then, once we have stage zero done, we move to stage one. We need three more beakers and then we're going to mix this and let it chill." 

"OK, so I get the roofie part, but what does it do after the fact?" 

"Well, Johnny," Warren grinned, "no spoilers. You'll find out as events work." 

Chapter Text

The Bronze, evening 

--------

After this Willow Rosenberg would never leave her drink unwatched and unaccompanied again. The irony was that until that point the day itself had gone extremely well. She'd done well in her classes, whatever tension there was between her and Tara both had unraveled. Buff was out at night doing something (or someone) a part of Willow's mind thought to itself. She just shook her head to ignore it. Buff was a grown woman, whatever she did with that was her business. Xander didn't quite see it that way and that was a Xander issue until he started making it everyone else's issue. She had aced two tests even by her own exacting standards and Buff had scored equal to her in another class, which was its own relief. She suspected, very strongly, that without having to Slay all the time Buff's academic skills would finally give her a genuine challenge. 

And she wanted that. She was also human and she was prepared for another exhausting night patrolling when someone she remembered mostly for the failed gun and clock tower type incident had shown up by her. She neither really listened to Jonathan nor took him seriously, and she would not make that mistake again either and was kicking herself afterward when she remembered that brief day Jonathan had made himself the greatest of all time and the very public Sunnydale Superhero. Overconfidence could and did endanger and trip up everyone and the reminder, harsh as it was, was also a necessity in her own sight. 

Because as her gaze was flickering around the Bronze and she'd seen and waved at Xander and Anya she'd misread Anya's look of brief consternation that turned into genuine anger and had flinched. She had missed that Jonathan had poured something into her drink that gave it a strange gleaming greenish tinge. 

------

Anya gave Xander a kiss as he'd stared at her. 

"Ahn, sweetie, what-" 

"I need to get over there. Now." 

"Why-" 

But he understood immediately when Willow had drained her shotglass and then pitched over into the table hard enough to crater it. That was when he too accelerated and Jonathan Levinson looked up at him like a deer in headlights and decided to abruptly skeedaddle. And it was Ahn, out of everyone, who picked up Willow and helped her out of the Bronze, Xander with her, and then into their car. 

"Buffster's place or ours?" 

"Ours." Anya's response was one word and with the kind of steel within it that reminded Xander abruptly that at one time his girlfriend hadn't been Anya Jenkins, very sexy badass who had given him one of the world's most amazing sex lives. At one time she'd been a demon, and an immensely powerful one whose very specialist was.....exactly what had just happened to his best friend. She even sat in the back with her and kept an eye on her, relieved that she was still breathing, that look of rage all too visible on her face. And when they'd gotten there Anya had gone to the phone. 

------

"Hello?" Tara had hoped that Will would have a good time at the Bronze, particularly since the tension lurking with them had just neatly started to fall apart. Then Anya's words made her almost sit down hard. 

"I'll be right there." 

"She's just sleeping right now," she did hear Anya said "so I think, and hope, it really was just what it seemed to be." 

------

Not long after she'd hung up Willow woke up, briefly, and Anya went very pale. Her skin became a marble white in pallor and her eyes became pools of darkness along with her hair, and she'd dry-swallowed because every single one of her hairs was standing on end. She springboarded up and Xander was as pale as she was for a moment. 

"Will?" 

Her gaze went to Anya and then her eyes widened. 

"Are you real?" 

Anya made what, in retrospect, could have been one of the most dangerous and moronic decisions of her life but since it worked she ignored all of this in going over to her and tweaking her nose, hoping the absurdity would distract her. Willow had stared at her hand and then as she removed it exhaustion seemed to take her again and Anya prevented her from leaving another head-crater on the floor. 

Mears Residence 

-------

"You know, with the benefit of hindsight trying that in the Bronze was inextricably stupid and now they'll be looking for you." Warren exhaled. "And they know me." 

He turned to Andrew. 

"Guess what, Andy? You just volunteered for the next try." 

Andrew blinked.

"I did?" 

---------

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

------

The dark magic had faded when she was asleep but the sign of her awakening again was that same hair-prickling sensation returning, about the time that Tara walked into the door. Willow rose again with that almost zombie-like fashion, her eyes swirling pools of night that matched her hair. That zombie-like element with latent rage stuttered when Tara walked into the apartment. 

"Tara?" 

Her hands went to her mouth and Willow lurched to the bathroom and locked the door that Tara followed her to and used a spell to unlock before resetting the lock when she went in. She winced at the green stuff that Willow was.....and looked away for a moment. The pallor vanished and with it her hair slowly turned back to red, first as a single red lock, then tiger stripes in an inverse pattern, then fully red. Willow's voice was hoarse. 

"What happened?" 

"I think Anya can tell you." 

Willow frowned. 

"This..." she looked around. "Huh." 

"What?" 

"I don't think I've actually been in Xan's apartment since he brought it. No wonder I think I was freaking out-" and then she did a double take. 

"Anya?" 

Tara nodded. 

"She called me." 

Willow clicked her teeth, wincing. "I hope they won't mind-" when she got up and looked in the cabinet and nodded, "if I borrow a bit of mouthwash." Tara went to the toilet and held her hand to her nose and flushed it. 

"No, sweetie, I don't think they will." 

-------

When Willow and Tara walked out of the bathroom she made a beeline directly for Anya, as Xander took a step back and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and figuring out how he was going to weasel his way out of trying to decide between them this time. 

"You stopped it." 

He'd opened his eyes to see Willow giving Anya a look with her brow furrowed. 

"Of course I would. You think I'd let you get hurt, especially like that?" 

Willow grimaced. "We didn't exactly get started on the best foot, Anya." 

She'd opened her mouth at that and then paused, blinking. 

"Oh." She exhaled. "The vampire thing." 

"Yes," Willow's tone was level. "The vampire thing." 

"A lot's changed since we were seniors in high school." 

Willow kept giving her that long look, then took a deep breath. 

"I believe that." 

"And honestly," Anya put her hands on her hips, "you guys keep forgetting. Patron Saint of Scorned Women."

Willow blinked. 

"You have no idea, over a thousand years, how many times I had to clean up what happened when a man did that to another person. How many bloody parts of history happened as a result of it. I actually kind of regret I don't have my powers, because this is exactly the sort of situation I'd use them in." 

Willow blinked at that, and exhaled slowly. 

"Ahn, please don't do that-" 

He was startled when Willow turned and told him "Xander, don't." 

He'd blinked, as did Anya. 

"Someone-" and then there were tears in her eyes and both Anya and Tara held her and let her cry. It was a surreal thing to hold an invulnerable being whose face had fallen into a table and left a face-sized crater in it, but it was still there. Xander just stared in silence and the words she'd spoken and that Anya had belatedly registered. 

"That bastard," he hissed. 

Anya, Tara, and Willow didn't say anything. 

-------

For her own part Buffy Summers had tripped over a lawn gnome when she'd gone to visit Spike that same evening, not a thought in ehr head besides the kind of fun that Spike and she would have, and after getting a face full of dirt had turned and paused as she stared at the thing, and then at Spike's crypt, and her eyes narrowed. She marched up to it and hammered on the door and then on Spike's head which got a loud "What the Hell, Slayer?" 

She'd stepped back then and pointed to the camera in his yard as Spike suddenly stared wide-eyed. 

"What the sodding Hell?" 

Their initial plans were forgotten as they'd explored his crypt and that initial surprise in turn became a steadly growing and dangerous anger as they found a set of cameras and Buffy had frozen then and briefly went green. 

"Oh God." 

Spike turned to look at her. 

"What?" 

"There was a lawn gnome like that at my house. And the Magic Box." 

The greenness intensified. 

"Spike, they were spying on my house. On Dawn!" 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

------

"I admit I-whoa." 

Dawn Summers paused when she'd arrived at Xander's apartment. She'd expected another cringy moment with the Game of Life. What she saw was some surreal Hellmouthy strangeness. A shaken Willow sitting and talking actually peaceably, like a normal person, with Anya. No insults, no thunderheads on the edge of collision. Just...them. 

"What happened?" 

Tara took her aside and gave her a somewhat sanitized version of it and Dawn exhaled slowly. 

"Yikes." 

"Yeah." Tara's words were clipped. 

"First the demon, now this. And the 'best' case scenario is that it was a prank and the worst case? That was Jonathan." 

"Who?" 

"You remember him." Tara turned to look at her. 

"The guy from that one day-" 

"Oh." Dawn went pale. 

"Oh wow." 

"Yeah." 

"Well I'm never leaving my drink unacompanied around him even if it's just a coke or tea or whatever." 

"Sounds like a plan." 

-------

Willow would find it deeply ironic and painful that her entire reconciliation with Anya, a thing that would change both of their lives in a way neither anticipated, began where the bad beginning of everything between them had. She would never particularly warm up to those stories, but.....it was infinitely harder to feel that deep visceral dislike bordering on hatred for someone who her mind demanded she think had spared her from a kidnapping because she absolutely refused to accept that an old high school friend had sunk that far. When the phone rang it was Xander who went to get it, as they were still talking. 

"Dead Boy Jr?" She dismissed his words, then. "And...Buffy?" Xander did a double take. 

"What's she doing with-" his words went silent and he went pale, squeaking. "Oh. Ew, that's nasty. Even Spike doesn't deserve that." 

Even a "Yeah I admit I deserve that Spike, sorry." 

And then "Yeah, I brought Dawn to my apartment." 

A pause. "Well something weird and bad happened with the Willster in the Bronze and we almost had a witch on the rampage but it's good, we're fine here. How are you?" 

Silence, then something much louder and more panicked and eyes turned back. 

"Well," he cleared his throat after he hung up. 

"Good thing," as he looked outside, "that it's a cloudy evening." 

"Why?" 

"Because Buffy and Spike are on their way over here." 

Silence for a moment. 

"Buffy and Spike?" 

Xander shrugged. "Maybe she felt sorry for Dead Boy Jr. and wanted to keep him company or something. He did take her loss kind of hard." 

Silence, for a long moment, and then after a while and Willow and Anya cautiously talking their way at least to understanding, there was a knock at the door and it was Buffy, Spike, and....two cameras. 

"What are those?" 

It was Tara who asked. Buffy and Spike were grim. 

"Exactly what they look like." 

"Ok." 

And then the next words kicked the hornet's nest. 

"The first was in front of Spike's crypt. The second was in our house." 

She turned to look at Willow and Tara. "They had cameras in my room, in Dawnie's room. The basement, the living room, the kitchen..." her gaze lingered on Willow and Tara "and your room." 

Willow immediately ran to the bathroom but there were no retching sounds this time and Anya sighed in some relief. 

It was her turn to kick the hornet's nest when it had registered on Buffy that "Wait, were you and Will sitting at a table together?" 

"Uh huh." 

"And you weren't about halfway to murdering each other?" 

"Yes." 

Anya's response was somewhat colder. Buffy clicked her teeth. 

She'd blinked. 

"This isn't some weird Hellmouth thing is it?" 

Anya gritted her teeth. "Is it really that unthinkable that Willow and I could have a normal talk?" 

"Yes." Everyone else said and Willow looked as offended by that as Anya did. 

"I'm not that bad! I think." 

Silence lapsed. 

"So what happened?" 

"Jonathan tried to roofie Willow and I saved her." 

Anya was serious with the first part but couldn't stop a proud smile at that second part. 

"Wait, Jonathan?" 

There were nods. Buffy looked down at the cameras in her hand. 

"Wait a minute," 

She paced. 

"Cameras in the yards, Jonathan roofies Willow at the Bronze..." 

She frowned. 

"Am I leaping at shadows?" 

Spike shook his head. 

"I don't think so." His tone was harsher. "Someone ought to ask Mr. Roofie what he thought he was doing." 

Buffy nodded. 

"You getting back into Slaying, Buffster?" 

Eyes turned to her and she shook her head. 

"No. Roofies and spy cams? I think this is a police thing." Everyone but Tara missed the way Willow's shoulders slumped slightly before she made herself perk them, and herself, up. 

"I'll talk to Giles about it, too. Wrong and creepy as Hell, absolutely. The kind of stuff that gets the pepper spray people to make the big bucks? Hell yes. Stuff that involves a Slayer? No." 

Mears Residence 

--------

"Wow, what a cold bitch." 

Warren shook his head. 

"You sure they didn't see you?" 

Jonathan nodded, a miserable look on his face. 

"You know, I may not even need the serum after that. Someone roofies your friend, someone who knows you're a Slayer, and you look for excuses not to get involved? I think it was General Patton who said never to interrupt your enemy when she's making a mistake." 

The other two nodded. He turned back to look at them. 

"So anyway," as he leaned forward, "I'm telling you that Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah isn't actually that confusing. It wasn't time travel, it was a time loop." 

"No way man, you're full of shit, and here's why-" 

Chapter Text

Wilkins Cemetery, October 30th 2001 

------

Things were always simpler, Willow mused, when dying had been a thing that had stuck more neatly. But Angel had come back (and Jenny Calendar hadn't and as tempted as she was when she still had that urn she had screwed up enough lives with this once and that was once too many). Buff had come back and her punishment for her hubris in bringing her best friend back because she was worn down by five months of doing this with a group was doing this on her own....mostly. Xander went with her some nights, and it was Xander, Spike, and her on some nights, too. Out of all of them Xander did this because h was most convinced of it and that same wariness and what wasn't quite a truce with Xander and Spike was....shifting. 

She had the most direct doubts for very good reasons that just because she'd accepted whatever Buffy and Spike were doing and that they were doing it that this thing that happened at night would work. But in the end Xander wasn't here tonight, it was both her and Spike and Spike had seen her fighting the Suvolte demon led by the huge hulking vampire with the goatee who reminded her of a more human-like Kakistos, almost, from what Buff and Faith had said, and while Spike had helped to take down the minions Willow had growled when yet another slice of those weapons tore her shirt further.

"I really liked this shirt" and then she'd decided to try something on a smaller scale and indeed it turned out you could, actually, do something like the Hulk in the movies with super-strength, enough to go high up in the air and swoop downward on a stunned-looking Suvolte, her right arm going around its neck and clenching it. 

And that was when she'd turned to the huge hulking vampire as she'd seen a car passing by the cemetery and stopping a bit out of her peripheral vision.  The vampire swung at it, trying to monologue but a hard strike to the jaw was followed by a floating stake that slammed into his heart and dusted him. 

And that was when she'd turned around to find Buffy all but sauntering into the cemetery and her suspicions were fully confirmed when Buffy almost molded herself into Spike to a point she feared she'd see not just far more of the vampire than she'd ever really wanted to see, and had just shaken her head, picking up the stake that had fallen from off the ground and walking back to the house. 

-------

Ira and Sheila Rosenberg had paused at first that sight, and then Sheila's eyes had gone very, very wide. A blonde girl had jogged up out of the darkness, as did a blond man. The sight of a blond man in a long leather coat walking toward a Jewish woman left her wanting to roll down the window and shout but instead the man and the woman had first kissed passionately and then her daughter had whirled around to see that. And that strangeness that she'd seen, that floating stake that had levitated by a means nothing of mere physics could explain, became much stranger as the stake had fallen. Years ago Dr. Sheila Rosenberg had tried to burn her daughter at the stake, before that family dinner first with the musician (her lip curled) and then with her girlfriend Sarah. 

She remembered that and yet she didn't, but looking at this had not only brought all that back but it had shaken her understanding of the universe. They continued their drive to their own house, arriving and pausing at the doorstep. 

"Sheila-" 

"Ira, we need to talk. But....tomorrow." 

He'd nodded at that and when they'd opened the place it hardly looked lived in, these days, and its clinical perfection was likewise gone. She took a moment to go to Willow's bedroom and other than the indication she'd slept there once there was.....nothing, except, strangely enough, old posters of her boyfriend the musician. 

------

Spike's Crypt

------

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

Tara always stayed up to wait for her girlfriend, now. Not just because it was the right thing to do. She still had her own nightmares of Glory, of that bug room, of everything that had happened there. Of her hand slapping her girlfriend, hard, and realizing what was going to happen and being incapable of stopping it. Willow had plentiful nightmares of her own, if that Veruca bitch (in the most literal sense) hadn't been killed by Oz......but she had been. That, being held hostage by the Mayor and things with Faith, the other side of the brainsucking.....and now that incident in the cemetery. It didn't matter if Will did show up late, as she would tonight. Trying to sleep without her even with a sleeping pill or two (and she had tried that) just didn't work. Supernatural nightmares breezed through medicine like nobody's business. 

That and her girlfriend fought to keep Sunnydale safe, alone. She'd accepted that in the short term with the idea that Buffy would decide to go back to being the Slayer. This was proving considerably more than the short term and she would also have to have a very specific talk about her own risk. A week ago Spike had made his own decision to visit Jonathan Levinson at night to interrogate him. Even with the chip he was perfectly capable of playing people like a fine violin and he had done so, and it had confirmed to all of them that that footage had been everything Buffy feared and more. And....it was the bit he'd taken her aside to warn her that had led her to the belly of the beast itself.

This morning she'd met Warren Mears in where else, his mother's basement. And she had seen red when she'd seen on those cameras not just an image of the two of them in the bedroom but of Willow standing there in blissful innocence, or at least the seeming of it. The incident in the cemetery, that bloodless way of referring to what had almost happened, and that lasting scar on her hip that was visible had damaged their sex life. This would damage it further, and most importantly of all it was that goatish laughter, what he was doing, and the sheer sickening realization of what had happened and her telekinesis had smashed him hard against the wall as he'd stared in shock, vision blurred and doubled as her hand tapped the screens and a spell that Willow would later proudly call her 'EMP hex' essentially fried everything in the machines. 

"Bitch!" 

She'd heard that word and had walked straight over to Warren and kicked him right where it'd hurt most as he made a single high-pitched pained wheeze and fell forward, clutching himself. 

She had destroyed evidence that could have seen these people locked away in jail. She hoped the experience of being grabbed and thrown against the wall by telekinesis would humble Warren but she had a very bad feeling that it wouldn't. And when Willow had walked in with her clothes torn she couldn't help but wince even as she got up and hugged her invulnerable girlfriend. That magic around her was strange, because to everyone else Willow felt like her skin was iron, perhaps. To her Willowskin still had its softness and the magic that she had worked on herself just......wasn't there. 

And as they'd gone to the bedroom she'd told Willow of the camera, of what she'd seen, and then as she had bowed her head and told her that she'd destroyed the footage there was a silence that started off awkward and began to become ominous. And what startled her most when she looked up was that for a moment Willow's hair had not gone dark but it almost seemed to be literal, not just poetic, fire at the edge as her eyes were red streaked with black like tiger stripes. 

"Will?" 

"They..." and then Willow had turned away from the bedroom and had gone back outside and knelt. Not for the first time Tara had kicked herself that it had taken absorbing all that knowledge and power from grimoires to bring Willow here, but that frightening element of hair trailing into fire and those eerie nightmarish red eyes did ultimately vanish, after a point. Willow was still kneeling, breathing with not a heavy breathing of the good kind but that menacing prelude to a terrifyingly powerful thunderstorm. 

"They...." 

"I'm sorry-" 

"You have nothing to be sorry about." 

Willow stood up, staring at that room. 

"I'm sorry, baby. I know I haven't been the best girlfriend in that way and I'm going to have to ask either that we skip another few days or just sleep in the basement for a bit. I...." 

Tara nodded at that and she took her to the old cot in the basement and felt......relief, to put it one way, and made a specific point to remind herself and Willow as she marked her girl that whatever things she'd seen with Mears aside, her Willow-tree was hers. 

Rosenberg Residence

-------

"Ira, I know what I saw." Sheila was pacing, her hands behind her back. "Our daughter! In a cemetery! Fighting a man twice her height and triple her weight and that man just...disappeared!" 

Ira cleared his throat. 

"If this is about the stake thing-" 

"Oh it's about a lot more than that." 

Sheila frowned. 

"A great, great deal more." 

Ira raised an eyebrow. 

"Just because our daughter had a rebellious phase and nailed a couple of Christian artifacts to her wall...." 

"Ira, we both know there was more to this than that." 

"What are you trying to say, Sheila?" Ira had groaned. 

"Ira," Sheila's voice was cautious, "didn't Willow's little friend Bunny die?" 

Ira had frozen then. 

"Well.....yes. I remember that. Small funeral and we went there to talk to our daughter before one of our conferences." 

"Right, well...." 

Sheila's nose twitched. 

"Bunny was there and met a blonde man in a leather coat." 

Ira blinked. 

"The dead don't walk out of the grave, Sheila." 

"I think they do, sometimes. You know everyone in this town doesn't allow someone in a house unless they can walk over a threshold without an invitation. More attentive parents like us, or the McNallys, demanded our kids be in at nightfall and not out there and having those strangely high number of barbecue fork incidents." 

Ira brushed his mustache. 

"Ira, I think those monster stories are real." She dry-swallowed. 

"If they are real, that whole stake incident was about that Buffy girl being the Slayer. Whatever else she is, our daughter isn't that." 

"And yesterday we thought death was final and it clearly isn't." 

"So..." 

"So," Sheila held up a flyer. 

"There's a big Halloween party here and I think we should pay our daughter a visit." 

Ira sighed. 

"All right." 

"Good." Sheila nodded. "Even have costume ideas." 

Magic Box 

------

Willow's squeeing over the cute little kid in the witch costume had begun to turn into whispering sweet nothings into Tara's ears when her words guttered and died on her mouth. The two least likely people outside Xander's parents had walked into this Halloween party, and Tara had done a double-take seeing them too. 

"That's-" 

"I know." Her words were wary. "What do they want?" 

To her own further bemusement her parents made a direct beeline to Buffy. 

------

"Bunny." 

The woman turned and had frowned at them. 

"It's Buffy." 

Ira hissed in her ear "I keep trying to tell you that" and Sheila had just waved him off. 

"You're alive." 

"Y-yes, yes I am." 

She'd frowned. 

"We went to your funeral and saw that rather ungrammatical headstone." 

Bunny frowned at her. 

"Well I'm here." 

Sheila had cleared her throat only to see the old Sunnydale High librarian, a man she vaguely remembered as Gills or something like that take her and Ira both to the side. 

"Why are you here?" 

They told him and he'd frowned. 

"Willow went patrolling on her own?" 

"If that's what you call it," Ira's voice was low, almost menacing. 

"My daughter fought this huge hulking man about twice her size and three times her weight and then he just seems to disintegrate into thin air." 

He folded his arms in front of his chest. 

"Were all the rumors about this place true?" 

Giles' silence was real for a long moment, as he put his pointy wizard had in his arm with the pointy edge away. 

"Yes, I'm rather afraid they are." 

That silence lingered. 

-------

The next hour and a half of Sheila's presence and visible detachment from literally anything to do with her life was excruciating for Willow but finally, whatever strange element had made her parents pretend they cared seemed to pass as they stepped out....right in time for an exhausted kid to literally run in not long after they'd left. He was panting, wiping his brow. 

"What's eating you?" 

He turned to look at Spike and his next words kicked  a hornet's nest. 

"Dawn and Janice are being chased by some guy with golden eyes and a really bumpy face." 

Sunnydale Streets 

------

"Ok, OK, I admit it!" 

Janice was panting in her own brand of exhaustion, leaning against a car. 

"You were right. Those bumpy face guys are vampires. I should have trusted you and I didn't and that's my mistake. Happy now?" 

"No." Dawn looked around, wary. 

"Buffy's gonna kill me if that vampire doesn't," her voice was a whine but they kept running. 

Magic Box 

------

Tara's other worry, that Will was becoming too lost in this growing violent, sadistic element had disappeared immediately when instead of offering some grander solution she'd shown that she did listen to Anya in a way others didn't by finding one of Dawn's things in the Lost and Found and having the two of them do a locator spell. By then it was dark and it was the vampire who'd busted out of the shop first, Willow and Tara close behind him. It was moments like that, the pacing and borderline snarling fading into the determined fighter that was Spike at his best, that gave Willow a bit of an inkling of what Dawnie saw in Spike. Did she agree with her? 

Not entirely, it was harder to forgive a vampire who'd almost raped her to death and who had only been stopped from doing that by the chip. But Dawnie didn't know that and Spike had never been anything but his best there. And as they had followed....

Sunnydale Streets 

-------

In the event it wasn't Buffy herself who saved her, it was the combination of Spike and Willow, Justin's gang holding the vampire's attention where the witch's floating stake didn't prove an unerring force of destruction, who'd gotten there first. Buffy arrived just in time to see Willow quite literally pull Justin off of her sister in a headlock and her Slayer vision showed her Dawn's neck unharmed, as she'd sagged to her knees in relief and then Dawn had shouted in anger "FUCK YOU" at the vampire and had smashed a crossbow bolt into his chest and he had crumbled into dust. 

"Good aim, Dawnie." 

Willow's words were quiet, yet approving. The second time in a night that Buffy had seen Will fight and while she was crude and slow next to a Slayer her methods were both brutal and effective. She'd all but braced herself to get looks and concern for her own role but all she did was get them from and about Dawn and while on the one hand she'd had everything she'd wanted with that normal life....but it still stung. Will didn't even look at her, going over to Tara and Buffy had blinked. 

"I need to see what my parents want and why they're here." 

Tara had frowned. 

"I'll wait up for you." 

"In the basement." 

Tara had nodded at that and Buffy had frowned, before turning to Dawn and giving her a glare that only proved she was no Gorgon as Dawnie remained stubbornly flesh and bone. 

"You and I are going to have a talk." 

Dawn's own glare was stony in that moment. 

Rosenberg Residence 

------

Sheila and Ira had had much to ponder, given what they'd seen, the crucifixes, and those books that Sheila had read at times when the stake memories returned in full and she'd tried to make sense not just of what she'd done, but that set of episodic murders that matched those methods a little too well. She had almost murdered her own child, you could not forget this, nor truly forgive it. And then that door had opened and Willow had walked in. 

"Why are you here?" 

"Would it really be that shocking if we said we cared?" 

"Yes." 

Silence, for a long moment. 

"You'll speak respectfully to me and to your father-" 

"Why?" 

Sheila blinked. 

"I was just a glorified lab rat to you anyway. All the theories but you never had time for me, you never cared, and you never wanted to. I am an adult, now. I make my own money with my own programs." 

Her eyes narrowed. 

"Whatever you came here to do, it's not a thing that involves me anymore, unless some damn fool around here decides to mess with the two of you and then it will be my problem." 

"Willow-" 

"No." She looked at the both of them. 

"Are you one of those Slayers those books I read talk about?" 

Willow's lip curled. 

"I'm a witch. I did a really powerful spell and I messed it up badly and I'm fixing it. So get whatever you need, go on one of your conferences, and stop trying to act like the parents you're not!" 

The last words were shouted and Willow closed the door gently and then stalked off into the night. 

1630 Revello Drive, Dawn Summers' Room 

-------

Dawn sat with her arms folded in front of her chest, jaw taut. It would have been one thing if Buffy had been here but she wasn't. Spike was. Willow and Tara were. Willow in particular made a deliberate time for her each day even if she would find her passed out sometimes, almost always in Tara's arms, afterward. Tara did as often as she could, which was very frequently and very often. Her sister standing and yelling at her for the things she'd done to get herself and her friends facing a vampire? She just sat and listened with that same silence and didn't have anything to say, and didn't want to say it. 

"Where do you even go on nights? I know you're not here." 

That had silenced her and she didn't get an answer, then, as her brows furrowed further. 

1630 Revello Drive, Basement

------

Once again Tara was content to mark her, to feel the exhilaration of knowing that flesh that was magicked to withstand blows from super-strong forces could and did have her markings. That Willow trusted her enough to let her in. Willow let her. All that strength, all that burden, let go in their union of flesh and lips and tongue and spells and magic, a release that she could see in her girl's eyes and relaxation was precisely what she needed. And in these moments the entire world faded away, and it was just them. Cameras and demons literal and metaphorical and creepy boys who'd spied on them and tried to roofie them and who had seen who knew what with Dawnie and even Buffy, maybe, the worlds of the machine and supernatural? All one and all nothing in the pursuit of the two of them. And when they were done, and Willow was sprawled with that boneless spread and that goofy grin on her face and she felt her own contentment at that and the gifts that Willow had given her in return, it was easy to believe that the dangers could be gone even here, on the Hellmouth. 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

-------

It had been quite the chaotic few days and Hurricane Sheila showing up to depart again and rubbing his best friend raw with all those wounds exposed in front of her entire family, the one that actually counted....he'd winced at that. That, Buffy's strange detachment, his jitters now that he'd openly told everyone what had happened with both of them when he'd promised his hand in marriage......that had all driven him to a very Sunnydale solution. The demonology book was opened to the image of a demon in what looked like a very modern suit complete with fedora, the demon in a dancing posture. The entire thing sounded harmless, really. It really, really did. 

"I mean really," he mused. "It's obvious in hindsight that the love spell on Cordy was stupid, but this is a demon that'd turn reality into a musical. Give me a week to plan it and how bad can that be?" 

His eyes went to the demon shown dancing in that bright blue suit and he noticed that the entity resembled the Devil more than any other demon they'd faced, or were likely to face, but he'd shrugged.

Chapter Text

Wilkins Cemetery, Sunnydale

------

"Did that just happen?" 

Spike turned to look at her and shrugged elaborately. 

"Well you got me, Red. By all accounts it doesn't make sense." 

"Yeah." Willow bit her lip. "I mean I know what both the books say, and you say. There's no way vampire turning would focus on a literal barbershop quartet. Who even has those anymore?" 

Spike spread his arms wider. "As I already said." 

Willow clicked her teeth. 

"I hope this both isn't contagious and it doesn't make me sing. I sound like someone having a cat version of a rat king when I try." 

Spike tilted his head. 

"You have your own way with words." 

Willow gave him a gentle smile and squeezed his shoulder. 

"Give Buff my love." 

Spike paused for a moment. 

"You know about us?" 

She nodded, shrugging. "She's happy, or happy enough, with you. That's all that matters." 

And it was the vampire who stayed in the cemetery long enough for Buffy to find him, staring where Red had walked off to. 

"C'mon..." and then he'd followed her. 

Willow and Tara's bedroom, 1630 Revello Drive 

--------

The moon to the tide
I can feel you inside
I'm under your spell
Surging like the sea
Pulled to you so helplessly
I break with every swell
Lost in ecstasy
Spread beneath my willow tree
You make me complete
You make me complete
You make me complete 

And there it was again, as Willow wiped her mouth, blinking. 

"You've never done that before." Tara looked at her, eyes more than a bit clouded by lust and then lunged at her, and it was Willow's turn to be pinned down. 

"Maybe it should be my turn to let me see how I can make you sing." Willow's own eyes were clouded with lust no less and all she could do was a little squeak as Tara leaned down and started t kiss her voraciously. 

Magic Box 

------

It was the next morning when Willow and Tara had been woken up late and Willow had stared at the phone. 

"What is it sweetie?" 

"Giles." 

"And?" She stared at Tara with a slightly shaken voice. 

"Singing." 

Tara frowned. 

"Wait, vampires last night, and me last night, and....Giles? What the Hell's going on?" 

I don't know why everyone's  bursting into song, but I hate it and it feels wrong. 

Willow's hands went to her mouth in horror. 

"I feel like the Jim Carrey Grinch right now. Tare, if I break down about singing in rhyme, feel free to slap me." 

Sunnydale Street 

-------

As they walked hand in hand to the Magic Box they paused and stared dumbfounded at a group of people near a food truck moving in perfectly choreographed harmony, singing likewise in perfect unity. 

They got the mustard out! 

Willow and Tara looked at each other and began to move much faster as the crowd behind him sang 

He got the mustard out! 

Magic Box 

-------

And that was where they found everyone else. And to their own genuine surprise, this time, 'everyone else' included Buffy. They'd walked right in as Giles was singing and his own expression showed that wariness of his song and that was a relief to Willow in a way that someone who really could sing felt as bad about his singing in this case as she did about her caterwauling. 

I've got a theory, eyes turned to him, that it's a demon, a dancing demon, nyeh something isn't right there. 

Willow's eyes were full of horror as her own voice echoed in response I've got a theory, some kid is dreamin' and we're all in his Broadway nightmare. 

Xander seemed like he was having fun and in hindsight they would all rue that they didn't pick up on this and on his lack of concern for the origins of this day then but they didn't. 

I've got a theory we should work this out.

Willow's eyes were horrified as she moved in unity with Tara and Anya, Anya no less terrified and Tara just staring into space for her own reasons. 

It's getting eerie
What's this cheery singing all about? 

Hindsight would mean that in twenty-four hours for one of the only times in her life, and even then for the most obvious reasons distinctly pulled Willow would slap Xander when he'd looked at herself and Tara and had sung unironically even as he registered the way both Willow and Tara were glaring at him as if he were rat poison. 

It could be witches
Some evil witches
Which is ridiculous 'cause witches they were persecuted Wicca good and love the Earth and woman power
And I'll be over here. 

I've got a theory
It could be bunnies, and everyone, even Tara, rolled their eyes at Anya and then Willow had stared in mute incomprehension as not only was there audible music but a real for true lightshow far more dramatic than what Anya had asked of her at Halloween. 

Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses
And what's with all the carrots
What do they need such good eyesight for anyway
Bunnies, bunnies
It must be bunnies
Or maybe midgets

Tara's own voice echoed 

I've got a theory, don't mad here, I think it's some Hellmouth insanity making us all poor men's balladeers. 

Willow's eyes were horrified as her voice echoed and merged with Giles as they were moving in their own unity 

I've got a theory we should work this fast Because it clearly could get serious before it's passed.

And for her own part Buffy took center stage as she sang 

I've got a theory
It doesn't matter
What can't we face if we're together
What's in this place that we can't weather
Apocalypse
We've all been there
The same old trips
Why should we care

And once again their joint performance ended in that same lightshow as Anya stood up and pumped her fist saying-singing in a heavy metal voice 

Except for bunnies... 

Mears Basement 

-------

No one will laugh anymore, yes that's true. 

Andrew and Jonathan harmonized behind him. 

I get no kick from champagne....

They harmonized behind him. 

Mere alcohol, doesn't thrill me at all. So tell me, his voice lingered on his half-finished robot, why I get a belt....outa you? 

Some get a kick from cocaine......

Rack's Lair 

-------

Dead by dawn, dead by dawn, dead by dawn. 

Rack was having quite a whimsical look on his face as Amy found herself singing with a voice much nicer than her usual singing voice 

Book of the dead, pages bound in human flesh
Feasting the beast, from the blood the words were said
I am unseen, dreamt the sacred passage aloud
Trapped in a dream of the Necronomicon
Seven lords of an evil and fatal force
Levitate through the secret and ancient doors
Unbegun, premenating bizarre
Swept away to the castle of Cantar

Dead by Dawn, Dead by Dawn, Dead by Dawn! 

Magic Box 

-------

These songs are not mere songs.

Willow stared at herself in the mirror, haunted. 

I think they speak secrets true, and there are things I don't want others to know and I never did, ooh....

She walked out, smacking herself in the face to get herself to stop until Tara had taken her wrist and had shaken her head, as they would walk together on a lovely day. Tara wore a dress typical of a medieval princess, Willow wore jeans and a diaphanous top that Tara could never quite take her eyes off of. 

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

Dawn Summers let herself smile, the next morning, as she admired the talisman she'd nicked from the Magic Box. It was beautiful, hauntingly so, and she let herself begin to sing 

Does anybody even notice
Does anybody even care— 

That was when a hand reached out and put itself over her mouth as she turned to scream only to find a being behind her in a bright red suit. 

Well well well, a voice rang with near Giles-like harmonies, what have we here? A maiden so nubile, and so dear-

And then a flash of light both Dawn and the demon were gone.

Wilkins Park, near bridge 

------

They were dressed this time with Tara wearing the same dress from yesterday and Willow a shorter skirt and showing a bit of her midriff, staring at her adoringly as Tara had turned to her and then that lovely voice broke out into song. 

I lived my life in shadow
Never the sun on my face
It didn't seem so sad, though
I figured that was my place
Now I'm bathed in light
Something just isn't right

For the only time in those two days Willow's face was something other than simple horror when her own lips parted to sing 

I'm under your spell
How else could it be
Anyone would notice me
It's magic I can tell
How you set me free
Brought me out so easily

By then Tara had taken her hands and they were starting to twirl together and dance. 

I saw a world enchanted
Spirits and charms in the air
I always took for granted
I was the only one there
But your power's shone
Brighter than any I've known

And their voices sang the last stanza in harmony, their bodies moving likewise. 

I'm under your spell
Nothing I can do
You just took my soul with you
You worked your charm so well
Finally I knew
Everything I dreamed was true
You made me believe

That part had been lovely. Seeing the first of the six people who died as a result of the spell run out of things to say and then start dancing convulsively until she'd exploded into fire and ash was not. 

"Magic Box?" 

"Uh-huh." 

Hand in hand they ran. 

Magic Box 

------

Giles, Giles, we have news. 

"Oh dear lord," Giles cleared his glasses. 

When you run out of things to sing about you burn to ashes. 

He did a triple take. 

Oh bloody Hell. 

True, true, very not-swell! 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

------

Anya Jenkins was alone in her bed as she looked up at the ceiling and a voice began to sing. 

This is the man that I plan to entangle
Isn't he fine
My claim to fame was to maim and to mangle
Vengeance was mine

But I'm out of the biz
The name I made I'll trade for his
The only trouble is...
I'll never tell.

Xander found his own voice singing and he understood then why Willow seemed so afraid of this.

She is the one, she's such wonderful fun
Such passion and grace
Warm in the night when I'm right in her tight
—Embrace, tight embrace

I'll never let her go
The love we've known can only grow
There's just one thing that— No
I'll never tell.

The Bronze 

------

Dawn Summers had almost made it out the door when the atmosphere changed and she saw a being stepping in in a bright red suit. He looked like the Devil and he grinned like what such a being as the Devil might grin like.

I went down to Georgia. I was lookin' for a soul to steal.
I was in a bind 'cause I was way behind and he was willing to make a deal
When I came across this young man sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot.
And well I  jumped upon a hickory stump and said, "Boy, let me tell you what."

"I guess you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle player, too.
And if you'd care to take a dare I'll make a bet with you.
Now you play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the Devil his due.
I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul 'cause I think I'm better than you."

The boy said, "My name's Johnny, and it might be a sin,
But I'll take your bet; you're gonna regret 'cause I'm the best there's ever been."

Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard.
'Cause Hell's broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards.
And if you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold,
But if you lose the Devil gets your soul.

He'd danced his way over to her, and he'd leered at her. 

Now Johnny he boasted he was best that ever been

but you-

Why'd you run away
Don't you like my style?
Why don't you come and play
I guarantee a great big smile

I come from the imagination
And I'm here strictly by your invocation
So what do you say
Why don't we dance a while

I'm the heart of swing
I'm the twist and shout
When you gotta sing
When you gotta let it out
You call me and I come a-runnin'
I turn the music on — I bring the fun in
Now we're partying — that's what it's all about

'Cause I know what you feel, girl
I know just what you feel, girl

All these melodies
They go on too long
Then that energy
Starts to come on way too strong
All those hearts lay open — that must sting
Plus some customers just start combusting
That's the penalty
When life is but a song

You brought me down and doomed this town
So when we blow this scene
Back we will go to my kingdom below
And you will be my queen
'Couse I know what you feel, girl

Dawn shook her head. 

No you see
You and me
Wouldn't be very regal. 

The demon rolled his hips, grinning. 

I'll make it real, girl

Dawn held up her hands, waving frantically. 

What I mean is I'm fifteen, this would be quite illegal! 

I can bring whole cities to ruin
And still have time to get a soft-shoe in

Dawn waved her hands even more frantically. 

No that's great
But I'm late
And I'd hate to delay her

Something's cooking — I'm at the griddle
I bought Nero his very first fiddle

She'll get pissed
If I'm missed
See, my sister's the Slayer

Now we're partying
That's what it's all about 

The Magic Box

------

Dawn's in trouble? Must be a Tuesday. 

Buffy's lip curled as she looked at the demonic henchman and her voice began to belt out a song that would continue to echo until its last lines found them in the Bronze, with Dawn in a beautiful, almost regal dress and a demon sitting where the singers were when they performed at the Bronze, the seat remade into a gaudy throne. 

I touch the fire and it freezes me
I look into it and it's black
Why can't I feel
My skin should crack and peel
I want the fire back

Now through the smoke she calls to me
To make my way across the flame
To save the day
Or maybe melt away
I guess it's all the same

So I will walk through the fire
'Cause where else can I turn
I will walk through the fire
And let it—

The Bronze 

--------

Buffy walked boldly to face the demon, finding herself moving in that animated fashion as she would both have Tara and Anya for company 

Life's a show and we all play our parts
And when the music starts
We open up our hearts

It's all right if something's come out wrong
We'll sing a happy song
And you can sing along

Where's there's life there's hope
Every day's a gift
Wishes can come true
Whistle while you work
So hard
All day
To be like other girls
To fit into this glittering world

She turned to look at the rest of her friends, only Willow and Spike starting to tense as eyes turned to them. 

Don't give me songs
Don't give me songs
Give me something to sing about
I need something to sing about

Life's a song you don't get to rehearse
And every single verse
Can make it that much worse

Still my friends don't know why I ignore
The million things or more
I should be dancing for

All the joy, life sends
Family and friends
All the twists and bends
Knowing that it ends
Well that
Depends
On if they let you go
On if they know enough to know
That when you've bowed
You leave the crowd

And she did not look at Willow, or Spike, who already knew, but at the rest of them. 

There was no pain
No fear, no doubt
'Til they pulled me out of Heav-out of where I was 
So that's my refrain
I live in this world and it's its own Hell
'Cause I've been expelled where I was 

and I can't tell if it was Heaven or Hell, 

but you are not the only one who'd want to rest in peace,

So give me something to sing about
Please give me something...

And Spike had joined her as everyone else but Willow was rocked by this. Tara walked over to her. 

"This is why you've been sad all this time." 

Willow was staring with open-mouthed shock. 

No no, you see that's not quite true. 

I thought I'd done something unholy, you see I thought I pulled her out of heaven. 

Instead I see that I stole her peace. It wasn't victory, no, it was grief.

She bowed her head and stared at her shoes. 

And when that power began to swarm at her she raised her head and for the second time Tara saw her eyes turning not black, as they'd done before, but that eerie and unholy-looking red streaked with black. Her hair was an even brighter red than usual and all of them, even Sweet, could have sworn that her hair was trailing off into fire. 

You demand we sing and tell our secrets true? 

Well I'll tell you this. I got no strings to hold me down, there are no strings on me-

And by then she'd risen with that aura of power blazing around her like a terrible eldritch flame, the demon slowly realizing just how dangerous the situation was. 

Set me free O demon swell, 

Or I'll show you that Hell is but a word, and the torments visited across ten thousand realms shall be heard. 

The eeriest single thing to everyone, Tara staring no less in horror, was that the green and gold had become red and gold, the power rippling around her as Sweet himself tipped his fedora and vanished in light as the last lines echoed long after he'd vanished, again. 

What a lot of fun
You guys have been real swell
And there's not a one
Who can say this ended well

All those secrets you've been concealing
Say you're happy now — once more with feeling
Now I gotta run
See you all in hell

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

-------

For all that she complained about others taking her things from the store without asking, Anya hadn't begrudged him this magic flower or the book, and Xander had for his own part realized that in the midst of all this that he'd killed six people.And he had a very bad feeling that where his mind-whammying the entire female population of Sunnydale at the time (he thought, if he'd done that to Tara on that day she fortunately didn't seem to remember it) was laughed off as a joke actual deaths wouldn't be. The strangest thing was that so dangerous a substance looked just like any other flower, and it made him look like he was holding a bouquet. 

And in a way he was. Xander also felt confident enough in his mastery of this power that he could and would be able to handle it, and marveled at one of those smaller levels of Hellmouthy power that left an apartment like this with a fireplace. It worked out, though. He'd spoken the spell, had made his words clearly enunciated. He didn't particularly enjoy Latin but this was easily enough pronounced and then he left the flowers by the fireplace. The demon had run from literal fire-haired Will, and in the midst of that grenade going off nobody had yet asked how all of this happened. He would just cover up his tracks and in particular he thought he'd do something nice for the Willster and the Buffster, too. 

Willow and Tara's bedroom, 1630 Revello Drive 

--------

"Why did you keep knowing where Buffy was a secret from the rest of us?" 

Willow frowned. 

"Because I thought I'd pulled her out of Heaven. But.....now she's not sure and since I have no idea if I did the right thing, or the wrong thing, I don't know what to think." 

Tara glared at her. 

"God, what is wrong with you?" 

Willow flinched. 

"Is this why you're out at night trying to be a poor woman's Slayer?" 

Willow's jaw went tight and Tara flinched. "Sweetie, I didn't mean that-" 

"Yes you did," Willow's words were flat. 

"I'm doing this because I hurt my friend and this is the least I can do to make it up with her. She's my best friend, Tare. Doing this is one of the only ways she would forgive me." 

Tara walked up to her and their eyes met, one apologetic and afraid, one Tara's surprisingly harsh glare. 

"She's not your girlfriend." 

Willow took a deep breath. 

"Is that what this is about? Tara, I do not have feelings for Buffy. I never have, I never will. Any glimmering possibility of that died when I had to repair and restore the bot, and frankly I don't know what I have to do to prove to you that I love you. I don't have the lesbian street cred, we already established that. I give you everything I have to give, I seek to move heaven and earth for it and it's no hardship because I love you more than I ever imagined that I could. None of it is enough, and for a daughter of psychiatrists it took me far too long to understand that there is nothing I can, or should, do to fix that. I'm sorry you have insecurity problems over how much I love you, Tara, but they are your problems." 

She shook her head. "I'm going to the basement-" and then Tara's hands closed around her arm. 

"Will, don't." She flinched again. "I'm sorry, sweetie, we're terrible at fighting." 

Willow's jaw was tight. "I don't want to be good at fighting you, but I'm also not going to deal with your feeling insecure over the idea that I might possibly love you. There's nothing I can do to prove that. There never was. If this is how things are going to be, if that's the kind of fight you pick...." 

Willow gritted her teeth. "I think a night away will do us less harm right now than a night together." And with that she gently removed her arm and walked down the stairs. It was as she'd taken one step that a very strange sensation rushed upon her and with a startled yelp she fell straight down the stairs and cratered more wood, finding herself in an extremely awkward position. Tara had followed her, picked her up, and had made her step back in the bed with zero allowance for any demurring. With a grimace Willow nodded. 

Chapter Text

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

-------

If Xander had been more willing to study the text he'd skimmed in depth he might have been more willing to object to.....everything....but he had woken up in a state of confusion matching that of the beautiful blonde with him. Neither quite noticed the huge mass of plants in a fireplace that was still going in its own ways, because both of them were staring at each other and at the room and eventually found both pictures of each other, drivers' licenses, and to their own curiosity Xander and Anya both were able to get dressed, head out the door, and start making their way to the Magic Box. 

1630 Revello Drive

-------

"What happened last night?" 

Willow bit her lip, looking at Tara. 

"Exhaustion, I think." 

Tara raised an eyebrow. 

"I mean that." Willow leaned forward. 

"It's not that surprising that Buff does a lot less with Slaying these days, if she does anything." 

"She doesn't, I think." Tara's words were warier, harsher. 

"It takes a lot out of you." 

Silence lingered for a moment and Tara took a deep breath. 

"Yes, it does. And that, Will...." her girl met her gaze. 

"That's why you need to stop." 

Willow gritted her teeth. 

"I'm not going to leave Sunnydale unprotected. I can't." 

"Well...." 

Willow shook her head. 

"It's funny, you know." Her words were bitter. "That May, everyone was so angry with me when I said we could bring in Faith. I wonder how things would have worked if I had." 

Tara's nose twitched. "I only met Faith that one time, indirectly, but if what I was told was true...." 

"And it is. But so what, Tare?" 

Tara had blinked at that. 

"I had a lot of time to think about what happened with, and to, Faith before the whole body-swap thing. We could have done so many things differently, and we didn't." 

"That body swap thing was extremely bad, Will." 

"I know it was." Willow winced. "And that's why everyone shouted it down. They felt it'd be this great insult to Buff's memory." 

Her gaze went over to the few surviving pieces of the robot torn to pieces by those biker demons and Tara's gaze followed her and she briefly flushed. 

"Will-" 

Willow bit her lip. 

"I know it scared you. It scared me, too." She exhaled slowly. 

"It could also have been whatever happened with the whole literal firey hair thing and the singing demon. Big magic still takes a toll and even if I'm invulnerable now that doesn't change the limits that  much and I really don't want it to." 

Tara had blinked at that and nodded. They would finish eating breakfast and Dawn would accompany them to the Magic Box, her school out for the day from a usual Sunnydale 'incident'. 

Spike's Crypt 

------

Once again Buffy Summers woke up in bed with Spike and it was that morning, as he admired her and brushed his hand down her side that he'd elected to drop a grenade in her lap. 

"Red knows." 

Buffy froze, eyes going very wide. 

"Wait what?" 

"You heard me." 

He blinked, looking at her. 

"Red knows. About us." 

Her face went pale for a moment. 

"Sh-" Spike put his finger on her lips. 

"Kitten, she's known about us for weeks. She's kept it quiet all this time. You didn't know, after all." 

She blinked again and that sensation of sudden fear shifted and her eyes narrowed, at first, before a dozen different emotions swarmed through her at once and that eerie sensation itself reminded her of one of the biggest reasons she did all this. To truly feel and hoo boy did she. They'd contributed to Sunnydale's urban renewal with a couple more buildings and being able to cut loose with sparring and with.....with all of this...meant that the Slaying part of her had something. And yet it wasn't the first time that she'd let herself think that she was feeling....not discontent, maybe, but something missing and that couldn't be right. Ever since Merrick had crashed into her life a normal life, as normal as it gets, was what she'd wanted.

And now she had it, and....it felt strange. So did the strange kind of acidic burn in the back of her throat when it came to the idea that one of her friends had selflessly not only taken up her job but was doing as well with it as she had. If she wasn't the Slayer, what was she? She moved one of the curtains well away from Spike on one of the windows. 

"Huh." 

"What?" 

"Very cloudy day." 

She looked at him. 

"Come on." 

He'd paused. 

"I don't want-" 

Buffy shook her head. "You fought with them when I was......out?" 

He nodded. 

"And you and Will-" 

"And the whelp, sometimes." 

Buffy paused for a moment. 

"You and Xander...." 

"We even get along, so long's it's killin' demons." 

His gaze met hers. 

"Then that shouldn't be a problem." 

He'd frowned. 

"You don't-" 

"That's right, I'm not. But.....I'm still the Slayer, and I should know what's going on." 

And thus they too left his crypt and walked out of the cemetery into the day with its more ominous mass of cloud cover, walking together as if there was no care in the world and nothing else between them. If she didn't think too hard Buffy could even let herself believe it. 

Magic Box

------

And that had brought them all here, with Dawn sitting at one side by Willow and Tara, Xander and Anya, bemused and hiding something even if they were otherwise calm about it, and both Buffy and Tara realized this and cared, while at the time Spike had seen it and hadn't. To here, and to that discussion with Dawn sitting with her arms folded in front of her chest and a stony glare. 

"I didn't summon Sweet," she hissed. "I took the amulet thing because it looked pretty, but I didn't bring it into being. So stop yelling at me as if I did." 

The silence that stretched was there, and it was real, but it was Buffy who cleared her throat and Dawn turned to look at her. 

"You haven't been stealing anything else?" 

For just a moment a brief flurry of panic entered her gaze but only a moment and Dawn had shaken her head. 

"No. Not at all." 

And eyes turned then to Willow, who went ramrod still. 

"What?" 

"Well, it was weird magic." Xander's words were spoken with a calmness that would seem almost a dream itself a few hours later. 

"That's usually something you do." 

Willow's jaw was stony. 

"You all saw how much I hate singing," her words were hissed with the leaden tone of a funeral bell, "why would I summon a demon like that?" 

The silence that lingered at that became distinctly vicious and uncomfortable. 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

-------

The embers of the guttering fire suddenly and briefly fluttered into an overpowering roar that consumed the entire mass of Bramble of Lethe and the necklace Alexander Harris wore suddenly flashed with light and while he and Anya remained awake they watched with sudden awed confusion as literally everyone else pitched forward and winced when Willow's face left another crater in the table. 

Willy's Bar 

-------

"So let me get this straight," Willy leaned forward. 

"You're here for William the Bloody." 

The demon-lord with the shark's face nodded.  Willy made a single low whistle. 

"You know he's taken up with the Slayer, right?" 

Bro'os shrugged. 

So? 

"And it's not just her you gotta worry about. That friend of hers? The ginger? Slayer's either not feeling well or taking a vacation since the business with that Glory bitch." 

Bro'os stiffened for a moment as his eyes widened. 

"Yeah. The friend's about as vicious as that dark Slayer was." 

The demon shook his head. 

That fucking guy owes me my money and I'm going to collect. 

"Don't say I didn't warn you. 

Magic Box 

-------

And when they all woke back up Dawn, her blonde hair shining enough that it was clear why she'd gotten the name had scowled at her little sister Buffy, the two of them fairly sure they'd put together their own identities. The blond British guy and the brunette likewise. One was Rupert Giles, one was Randy Giles, and Xander heard the blond making comments about "Might as well have named me horny for a shag Giles" in the background. The redhead and the other brunette, whose hair was in a set of very specific curls and who had reverted to being timid were cautiously exploring her own super-strength as she had marveled at the crater her face made and she was spinning around the heavy oaken table on her hand with an almost childish joy. 

That initial reawakening had been chaotic, Willow had been....discontent....with her name in the same way that Anya was with hers, but it was still better than realizing that two women were named 'Dawn' and 'Buffy'. For her own part Tara was standing by Willow, just outside the range of the table as it was spun around, staring at her and at the movements of her body in the same kind of admiration that others showed Dawn when she'd realized that she had her own strength, marveling at picking up something immensely heavy when Willow had been distracted and neither Rupert nor Anya could move it. 

"I guess we're superheroes."

She'd smiled saying the word and that meant things made....sense enough, they supposed. They'd woken up without memories of some things but knew what clothes were, how other things worked, and had enough memories of other things that it was clear something strange and supernatural had happened. And that was when there'd been sudden ramming on the door and that led others to go there and while Buffy knew she was a superhero she still screamed where Willow had just tilted her head, the kind of confidence she'd felt that filled her leaving her to raise an eyebrow.  Or she had, at least, until the thuggish-looking men had had their faces swell and their eyes turned gold and she'd seen the shark-faced demon that looked at all of them. 

Sunnydale Streets 

-------

It was the superheroes, Willow and Dawn, who were on the streets fighting the vampires. Of the two Willow hit harder and it was her who discovered by sheer dumb accident when she overswung at one point and literally decapitated one and it fell down as a fall of dust and ash and she'd just blinked, and then Dawn had taken a sharp branch from a tree and had discovered the other weakness and that left the two of them busy. Dawn's initial fears had turned into an almost visceral relish and the two of them fought back to back with a kind of rhythm all the more ironic to both of them for not having actually foguht by each other's sides even if they'd assumed they had. Dispersing the vampire crowd had been enough to make Teeth disappear for a time as he'd growled. 

Sewers 

-------

It was by sheer dumb accident that Tara realized what the strange lights she saw around others were, why the necklace around Xander's neck glimmered with that strange light. She'd thought it might have been from the Magic Box and a way to truly see in the dark, down here, but something else led her to go to it, and she'd looked at him for a long time. 

"What?" 

She looked at him. 

"Where'd you get that?" 

They dismissed that behind them Randy was climbing up, after discovering he too was a vampire and deciding that he wasn't going to leave it to Dawn and Willow to fight on their own, no matter how capable they were, in practice. 

"Grandma gave it to me." 

"Can I see it?" 

With a slight bit of reluctance that faded a bit when he'd almost violently shaken his head Xander handed her the necklace and she kept staring at it. 

"Ok, I'm a witch," she'd muttered to herself and with that power rippling around everything she'd stared for such a long period of time and had then taken two quick actions that unknown to literally everyone would redefine the entire year. First she put the crystal down and then she'd raised her foot and with an instinct that told her everything in this was right, as Anya, Xander, and Rupert all turned to her her foot slammed down on it and there was a sudden roiling flash of light....

Magic Box 

-------

If the sight of Willow turning and then unleashing a sudden explosive sphere of telekinesis that had very narrowly avoided taking Spike with it to dust all of his remaining minions in one move with her eyes briefly two pools of midnight hadn't scared him off, the sight of a restored and willfully violent-looking William the Bloody would have. And that left literally everyone's head swiveling in the same direction at Xander, but the one he registered with the most vivid aspect was not Anya, quite, the bewildered hurt all too real in that moment, but that immensely dangerous crackling anger from Willow that gave the air a strong smell of ozone and he could see darkness swimming in her eyes. 

"It was me, huh?" 

"W-Will, I-" 

And then as that moment of tension rose Willow just snarled and stormed out. All eyes turned back to Buffy. 

"So does this mean you're back to Slaying again?" 

She gave it a long thought and shook her head. Tara's jaw became tight for a moment and her right hand clenched into a fist and then unclenched. 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment 

-------

"Are you mad?" 

He rubbed the back of his neck, as Anya shook her head. 

"No, surprisingly." 

He'd blinked at that as her gaze met his and there was a steel in it that left him just slightly nervous. 

"I'm not, and I mean that. Fully." 

She paced. 

"Remember I was a vengeance demon for 1,000 years. Making people forget something to cover up some things is the kind of vengeance I've done myself more than a few times."

It was the first time Xander's shoes had ever looked as interesting to them as he did and he felt a strange sense of shame. All those years of chiding Anya for her demonic aspects and he owed them that they still had a 'them' to speak of. 

Sunnydale Cemeteries 

--------

Tara could have told Will not to patrol, but this time, for one of the few times in their life before everything would abruptly crash, in what would in hindsight feel like a swansong even though it wasn't, entirely, she opted to go with her. And this time, too, unknown to Buff but very known to Dawn, it was the first time that Will would bring Dawn with her and encouraged her to start learning how to fight. The memory of that incident with the vampire lingered and this way Will could find a way to include Dawnie and quietly begin to work solve issues rather than having them hamster wheel. Tara kept thinking that as they would patrol cemeteries and she saw the ways in which Will used not the fancier magics she could but the humble pencil-floating adapted to stakes. 

And as they walked together she couldn't but admire Will's body in motion, the ways in which months of this had not only clearly explained some of her more toned feature but also the somewhat colder, more callous aspects. And not for the first time that deeper core of anger and resentment at Buffy took a bit further hold. She was the Slayer, it was supposedly destiny, and she seemed to deal with it pretty well....but she wasn't even in the house caring about her sister and leaving her best friend to deal with all of this, and Tara could feel a great tension growing between them with each argument. Xander's little memory-twisting spell, at least, had made Willow viscerally angry with him and that hurt, too. 

And so too the kind of things lurking with and between them. This was dangerous. Will might keep that invulnerability but she'd had it because she'd almost died and bled to death in a cemetery and that would have cost them both of them. Now.....now she had to watch all of this and to figure out how to have a talk that she really didn't want, knowing all too well what the likely results of it would be. 

Spike's Crypt 

--------

"I think Tara's mad at me." 

Spike turned to look at her. 

"What makes you say that, kitten?" 

"When I said I didn't want to go back to Slaying." 

Spike, she was pretty sure, saw a look on her face that must have given away more of her thoughts. 

"You know I have no problem with you picking that stake back up and fightin' demons." 

"I know." 

Her fingers drummed on the bed. 

"And yet for all that this is what I really did want, and wanted, that entire time." 

She bit her lip. 

"So I count as normal to you, now?" 

There was something strangely vulnerable in the vampire's voice and Buffy just bit her lip, unwilling to say it, and nodded. The smile on his face left her feeling strangely better about herself, and about everything else. And, she mused to herself, she could count on the vampire to keep an eye on Will and if things were getting bad to tell her. He did like Willow, and her best friend doing this for her was something she'd....

Rack's Lair 

------

"Now that...." she saw the more than slight blend of fear and awe on Rack's face with a predatory relish she locked up firmly behind a neutral expression. The huge towering goblin-demon that had walked in boldly had managed to scare a few of his more indolent customers out of torpor, one particularly unlucky person slung over its shoulder. 

"You told me you had a plan for this, but this is magnificent." 

Amy just nodded. 

None so fresh and none so fair as bone of bone, flesh of flesh and witch's hair. 

The leathery hand whose fingers ended in sharp claws tapped the back of the unlucky bastard the thing had scooped up. 

Time and cunning shall it take, but in your power or in my gullet so shall the iron-skin witch break. 

And with that the huge demon loped out in a simian set of motions as the two sorcerers stared in that blend of carnivorous relish and awed and for the first time more than vaguely frightened shock. 

Initiative Facility, Las Vegas, NV 

-------

"Huh." 

Sam Finn looked up, frowning. 

"What is it, honey?" 

"That HST we were tracking? We know where it went, now." 

She went up and over to the point he was tapping on a map and inhaled, sharply. 

"Oh." 

"Yeah." Riley shook his head. 

"Sorry about your ex." 

He just bit his lip. 

"I'll go say to her grave. Or maybe to her." 

Sam gave him a sharp look and a double take as he raised an eyebrow. 

"Sweetie, it's that town. Death is a bit different in a vampire town." 

Sam blinked. 

"Actually that's fair." 

Chapter Text

Cave, Sunnydale 

-------

The prelude to the entire trainwreck began with its own grim irony, with the very cave in which the horrors would begin remaining solidly present where before it had been a meadow and after it a meadow would again be, until the waters of the Pacific swallowed the Hellmouth's old domain entirely. The Gnarl sat on its haunches, eating the last strips of flesh from the dessicated flayed corpse beneath it, the last of its victims before it would go out and hunt the witch. It had had a week to observe things, to see the nature of the witch. It had watched her take down vampires, had seen a few of the more clever attempted creatures bring metal against her only to see the metal break, or even shatter. Magic, powerful magic. For Gnarl that would be much less of a problem. It had also deterred the effort, still more surprisingly, of the man who called himself Rack to drive it away, gaining cold feet at the last moment for its presence by briefly paralyzing him and taking a single strip of his flesh. 

And so it waited, watching the course of the Sun's rays shrinking. This would be a gamble and a test, but it was tired of hunting the lesser sorcerers of the Hellmouth. The apex predator, now.......

------

1630 Revello Drive 

------

Riley and Sam Finn had taken a week to drive from Las Vegas to Sunnydale, which was on the one hand seemingly rather too long, but on the other they'd come very well-armed and very well-prepared. There was, after all, the flaying demon that they were hunting. If they were lucky the Scoobies would have found the thing's cave and the flayed horrors it left of its flayed and blood-drained dessicated victims. If they were not......and that meant that they'd gotten out when the darkness had already set. Riley had walked up there, Sam just a bit nervous, and then the doorbell had rung. 

------

For a rare change Spike was out of town with Clem on what he called 'Demon pal' business and he had privately told her that Clem had had a bit of heartbreak and they were going out to cure it. Something about one of Clem's friends having a very rough encounter with one of the real horrors of the demon world. And that meant that Buffy was actually in her own house while Will had gone out on patrol and had given Tara a kiss, as Tara sat waiting and giving her that judgmental look that laid between them with a tension she wasn't entirely sure what had caused it, nor how to fix it. The doorbell breaking the long and increasingly awkward silence was welcome. Opening to see....

"Riley?" 

And then she would meet his wife, who did a triple take and first casually held up a cross before Buffy had given her a very strained smile and tapped the one Angel had given her all those years ago. 

"Told you." 

As they would walk in she found herself following them awkwardly to her couch. 

"What, uh, what brings you here?" 

"Hunting an HST." 

His gaze met hers. 

"We almost caught it near our Vegas facility but it escaped. Very strange escape, too. Big sphere of light around it and then it was gone." 

"What kind of demon is it?" 

"HST-" Riley held up his hand and shook his head, and leaned forward. 

"The older sources call it a Gnarl." 

Tara suddenly bolted up. 

"Oh Goddess." 

"What?" 

"Those demons can cancel magic." 

Buffy had blinked at that and then had whirled around to get a stake, a crossbow, and Olaf's hammer, just in case. Sam and Riley were talking to Tara, staring in mute shock at whatever Tara had told them as his gaze turned back to her and Tara had stared in surprise. 

"What?" 

"Thought you'd given that up." 

"My best friend's life is in danger. I'm not just gonna sit here and do nothing." 

Tara was silent and nodded, as they would step out. 

Gnarl's Cave 

--------

Willow Rosenberg was paralyzed and on her back. And.....she'd turned to stare in simple horrified fright at a set of putrefying skinless corpses, and at the sensation of a sharp pain in her head. This was exactly what she'd done her magic not to do, and here she was again. There was an eerie lighting in the cave and then there was the thing itself, the demon that had ambushed her after she'd taken down her first group of vampires. 

Hello there oh witch so fine, for me a great and wondrous meal upon which to dine. 

She tried to cast a spell only to see the magic gutter where the thing had put its hand around hers and had shaken its head, and the most eerie thing was realizing she felt human contact like she hadn't since that day with the Hellion in the cemetery. And she'd opened her mouth for a horrified scream when it had reached down and peeled away its first strip of her flesh, and had then eaten it slowly, its eyes never leaving hers. 

From above you I devour. 

She would be here for a span of three hours, watching her body slowly peeled apart, feeling the agony, her jaw shut. She could breathe, but after that first scream whatever power the demon had had silenced the others, as she listened to the rhyming ramble of the horror in the cave, the thing.....and the strangest part for her was that at times she saw people who couldn't have possibly been there. The smiling face of Veruca, and even the giggling form of Harmony Kendall.....and then there was Buff herself, pacing around her.

Should have left me in that grave, Will. What did that spell cost you again? Oh yes, a life for a life, the blood of an innocent and all that. Well here we are, then, aren't we? You interfered in my life and didn't let me live. You didn't let me die. This is what you deserve, this and nothing more. Feeling life leave you by inches. 

Gnarl itself, as the thing called itself, was silent whenever it spoke, its eyes narrow and its manner wary.

-------

And it had taken them a couple of hours to scout out places in Sunnydale, as Buffy wanted to hope against hope that Will was patrolling and the thing hadn't gotten her yet. Other than a few bits of dust in various cemeteries and one shattered tombstone as a mute testament to one fight there was nothing at all. And that in the end meant that they deferred, with due hesitance, to Riley and Sam. In the passage of time since the clash with the Initiative Buffy Summers had taken to the belief that everything they'd done was wrong in a great many ways, but here she was stuck with a great deal of frustration without any ability to rely on Giles, because they'd all rushed here, and dealing with the obnoxious bimbo that Riley had taken up with. 

The woman's condescension was real, and the way she just was pre-emptively giving Willow up for dead had earned her a spot on Tara's hate list, as Buffy (and Sam herself) would learn when they came back later in the year in pursuit of a second quarry. And in the end they had sought out one of the meadows in between the parks and had stopped at the sight of the massive cave. 

"OK." Buffy blinked. 

"Now I believe you." 

She looked at Tara, who just nodded with her arms folded across her chest. 

"Geography here's flexible. You never know where things are going to be from week to week." 

And with that they would step into the cave, staring with horrified disgust at not one but a few dessicated bloodless corpses, looking for all the world like an anatomical diagram and suspended upside down. The sickly-sweet odor of decay lingered, and they could hear a high-pitched voice of giggles and rhyming echoing and with that the change in Samantha was vivid and it was like old times. Buffy and Riley, two very different iterations of the chosen monster-fighters that hunted the hunters, stepping into a cave and taking the leap into....not the dark, but a strangely lit-and that smell of blood in her nostrils had intensified enough she ran into it and found herself staring in mute horror. 

Will, paralyzed on her back. Her lower stomach to horrifyingly low places torn of flesh, this Gnarl thing eating one of the strips of flesh and pausing, as it stared in simple shock and anger. 

This is awkward. 

And then the thing had lunged straight not for them but for Tara with that high pitched bellowing shriek right as Riley and Sam brought out their rifles and opened fire. Buffy gritted her teeth, hating guns but in this kind of close-order space and lacking a convenient summoning spell by one Amy Madison the creature that called itself Gnarl wavered and would then fall forward on its side, tongue lolling out, and riddled with bullets and rivers of blood seeping into the soil and rock of the cave, which began to dissolve. In that time it had fallen to Tara to overcome that initial shock, pick up her girlfriend and take her in her arms out of it and into the car, where she focused on her healing and on her girl's semi-conscious self. And had noticed as they left the cave that not only the invulnerability restored itself, but she would watch in a kind of fascinated and worried awe as her skin healed. 

Riley and Sam would take the corpse of the HST, as they called it, with them to study, the cave gone, they buried the two corpses in it in anonymous graves in the same meadow, and their departure felt like a bad dream. 

-------

For Tara it was the night she'd dreaded in so many ways. Months of caged up magic and anxiety gave her a much greater than usual power and reservoir of it, and within a night the damage done to her girl's beautiful body would heal. Will's own healing factor contributed and yet the blood loss couldn't be that readily made up, meaning for another night, like that one that had started all this, Willow looked like her vampire self and Tara couldn't bring herself to sleep for a fear that her girl would somehow not be there, that this would be a desperate fantasy of denial. And it was as she'd stared that she'd taken deep breaths and braced herself for that painful, yet necessary, talk they would absolutely have to have. 

This was too much. The Hellion thing had been one thing, but she had almost died again and she just couldn't let her keep doing it. And beyond all that, that shadow of magic around her that had transformed from darkness into the kind of fire that reduced a lovely forest to blackened carbonized skeleton-trees clawing at the sky was there. It had been frightening last year with Glory, even when necessary. It was infinitely moreso now. But first was not just healing her, which her Willow-tree very much did need. First was making sure things would be there and figuring out how to have this conversation, because the last time they'd tried it had been the time that had seen her drawn to Glory. 

-------

And in the morning, it was a case where Tara had skipped class after taking Dawnie to school, while Willow, in a sign of something that had actually bothered all of them was still too pale and too out of it to remember she did have an early morning class and when Tara had come back that aura of magic lingered and she had stared at the way it had sunken much more deeply into Willow, the pallor changing for something much more like her normal complexion. 

"What did you do?" 

"Gave myself a healing factor. Should have thought of that much earlier but it took this to shake me out of it." 

Tara's eyes narrowed. 

"Will, you need to stop." 

"Stop what?" 

"This poor man's Slayer thing." 

She crossed her arms in front of her chest. 

"It's been hurting you. You come home exhausted, your grades are slipping, and I understand it. I get it. We all messed up with Buffy and bringing her back but punishing yourself like this isn't going to work. You hurt yourself, and what does it do? Does it undo the resurrection? Does it change that she was any less dead?" 

Willow frowned. 

"Baby-" 

"Don't baby me." Tara's voice became much harder and she'd seen the way Willow was starting to brace herself as if for a blow. 

"It's a wonderful thing you're trying to do, but you need to stop, Will. It's hurting you and I refuse to let it." 

"So I should let people in Sunnydale die?" 

Tara bit her lip. 

"How did you guys manage without Buff-" 

And then she'd paused, as Willow's shoulders slumped further, and as she took a deep breath. 

"I'm tired of fighting, baby." 

"So am I." 

"And I'm tired of having to justify...." she'd spread her arms. 

"I don't do all of this because I want to, because I have some sort of power complex or something I can't stoke in any other way. You told me I was too reckless, that my magic frightened you." 

Tara blinked. 

"You were right." The bitterness in her girl's voice jolted her. "You've always been right, but when you're staring a tiger in the face is not the easiest time to let go of it. A big part of all this was the one time inmy life I really let myself be selfish. I tried to be Buffy for five months. I couldn't take it. I bring her back, I have to keep doing it." 

She stared at her. 

"Buff taking up the Slayer after all this?" 

Tara had shaken her head, and Will had laughed, bitterly. 

"Of course not. And if I can give her a normal life, or what passes for one here, it's the least I can do. Wherever she was, she was at peace. And I took that from her." 

Tara leaned toward her. 

"It's killing you. And the magic...." 

Willow's jaw was tight. 

"You're still scared of me." 

There was a strange fragility in the words. 

"Yes." 

Willow's jaw was tighter. 

"I promised you after everything when your father and brother came to town that I wouldn't treat you like them." 

Tara had blinked at that. 

"And I never even really thought about it. You live with someone with all this..." she tapped her invulnerable skin, "who uses this to hunt and kill things that can kill humans with a punch. I won't make you live with anyone like me, Tare." 

Tara stared at her as if she'd grown another head. 

"Will, what are you saying?" 

"Exactly what I said. You feel safe here, you don't with me. I'm not going to ask you to leave a space where you feel safe." 

"You don't get to make decisions about our relationship by yourself!" 

Willow's jaw was tighter at that and she visibly restrained herself from saying anything. 

"I think we need to take a break." 

"Will-" 

She held up her hand. 

"I'll get my stuff tomorrow, and make sure Dawnie has a spare key." 

She bit her lip. 

"I'm sorry." 

And with that she would head down to sleep on the couch as Tara just sat on the bed, staring with an incomprehensible expression of shock, mouth gaping open. The tears didn't come until Will had casually gathered her things and taken them with her, after taking Dawnie out with her for a talk that had Dawn staring about the same way she felt, if staring in turn at the key that Tara couldn't disguise a spike of envy with. They had been a family once, forged and fire and steel. Giles was heading to England for his stay to sweet-talk the Council. It had been Buffy and Willow together who'd seen him off and hugged him in their own ways, with their own views. 

Xander and Anya were spiraling in the Xander and Anya-ness of it all. Buffy was who knows where doing who knows what, very like what they'd said Faith had been (and a slight pall of fear gathered on her at what that might have meant) and Spike was, at least, patrolling with Will but then he would. Spike craved a good fight and where Will was was where the action was. That family, the one that had chosen her these months ago, had fallen apart just as the Willow and Tara of it all had. And sitting in light and crying as she'd sat with a blank face in darkness, Tara found herself closing her eyes for a long moment. Things had fallen apart like this two years ago with Spike's mind games. 

And as the night trailed on it was then that an idea had struck her, simple and yet profound. The family had fallen apart and it had brought itself back together, once. Then she'd been an outsider, on the periphery. Now......now it would fall to her to start finding out how to piece all of it together again, ending with the Willow and Tara of it all. 

Rack's Lair 

-------

"Good theory," he'd looked at Amy. 

"Very dangerous choice of everything, but a good theory-" and then his eyes had gone wide when he'd realized just which book she was looking at. 

"You think something from another dimension would help?" 

Amy nodded. 

"We're facing a superhero who's invulnerable and where simply doing anti-magic doesn't work." 

Her nose twitched. 

"We need her vulnerable, and..." 

She met his gaze. 

"She doesn't need to cast a spell to strangle us to death and if someone pushes her far enough she could do that and that wouldn't really be what we want, would it?" 

Rack nodded, blinking. 

Amy nodded, smiling with a satisfied grin at the grimoire. 

"We'll need time, space, and a spell, and then in a week or so we should be able to summon a supervillain to face the superhero." 

Rack nodded. 

"Better theory." 

Mears Residence 

-------

"So uh..." 

Warren turned to look at Andrew and the others. 

"She's isolated, now." 

Warren nodded. 

"Yes." His eye twitched slightly. 

"We did our first tests and that worked out well enough, but you can shoot a Slayer and kill one, if it comes to that. I'm pretty sure you can, there's plenty of evidence they're not bulletproof." 

He looked at Willow, sitting forlornly on her couch and staring into space with a thousand yard stare. 

"That one is. A lot of the things that would work with a Slayer won't work here." 

Andrew held up a blueprint. 

"Why not this?" 

"Huh?" 

"Our invisibility gun. We're what, like 95% done with that one? If we're facing a superhero, face the person who makes horror and sci-fi into a documentary with sci-fi weaponry." 

Warren blinked, grinning. 

"Knew there was a reason we kept ya around, Andy." 

Chapter Text

Rack's Lair

-------

"There." 

It was done, as Amy Madison had smiled at it. Rack smiled in his own way. The resources really were here, and this was the kind of power he'd never dreamed of conjuring and in fact he wasn't going to be the one gullible enough to try it. It was quite wondrous, really, what a desperate girl with daddy issues could do in all kinds of ways. The circle, all the candles, and then the incantation began, dark and brooding and ominous, a set of un-words that were spoken and where the air rasped to hear them. The very sensations of reality became plastic for a moment as something ancient and hateful seemed to briefly stir and to rejoice at that casting.

Power rippled out and then to their visible surprise it seemed to dissipate only for Amy to suddenly start and turn her head in the vague direction of where Willow was living now. She'd frowned, at first, and then there was a primordial rippling power that made Rack himself start. 

"Huh. Wasn't entirely what I expected." 

Alternate Earth, Empowerment Center, San Francisco, 2021 

--------

Willow Rosenberg yawned and stretched, more than a little amused at the reactions this got from Faith and Tara both. It amused her, at times, to remember that she'd once been that shy nerd who'd been pushed around a lot and who'd thought the height of socialization was doing the homework of an ungrateful bastard who took you for granted and never even admitted how much work it took even when you liked doing it.Now she was a veteran of multidimensional travel, invulnerable, super-strong, able to fly, and had even mastered actual eye beams as a spell. She guessed after enough Supergirl jokes it got real easy to figure out how to make yourself that. 

And it was as if she'd jinxed herself the moment those two words ran through her thoughts when Tara had jolted and then Faith had, as she stared at a sudden circular mass of light beneath her. 

"Oh no, not again." 

Her words were flat, resigned. Her wife and her partner were startled and then the mother of two yelped as she was pulled between dimensions again- 

Mears Basement 

--------

The portal itself did not, in fact, look like a Stargate. it was  more like water skipped across like a stone, or a mirage. A place where the lines between the worlds thinned and then from the portal manifested a woman standing in a maxiskirt and a sleeveless top that showed a small bit of midriff, staring in simple confusion that transformed first into a very real and vivid fright and then into an anger as terrifying as the mystic aura that froze Andrew and Jonathan flat against the wall, birds before the serpent. 

Warren himself had stood confident at first and then he'd scratched his head. 

"I thought you said this spell reached into another dimen-" 

"You." 

A single word, a slow hiss, and Warren Mears was suddenly entirely aware of why Jonathan and Andrew were frightened, seeing the way the woman's gaze had become especially murderous in his direction, and Jonathan's. He gave a slow single awkward laugh. 

"Oh come on, Willow. I know Jonathan went a little far with the roofie-" 

"Fuck you!" 

She'd blinked in incomprehension then and had then spoken a single word and then when nothing happened had thumped her forehead, said something about "In a Sunnydale so no shit it's the old magic" and then repeated the phrase in Latin. From the maxiskirt and top she adapted into what seemed to be helmetless Iron Man-like armor, leaving them gaping with confusion. 

"You roofied your world's Willow?" 

She'd turned to stare at Jonathan with something that left him hating Warren more than anyone or anything else in the world right at that moment. 

And then she'd paused and had done the same reaction that Amy Madison had as she'd sighed. 

"Take this as your first, last and only-" Warren had begun to reach for something that looked like a sphere and in a moment that was caught on their own cameras, one that also lingered in his imagination and which deepened his animosity toward his own Willow for fear it might be her there was a blur that lasted an eyeblink, a grip around his wrist, the crunching of broken bone, an agonized scream, another blur, then an explosion of shrapnel and demon parts that left shards of metal embedded in the basement wall, before the armored Willow had placed a single finger on Warren's chest and he felt an utter spike of fear at realizing that a micro-motion of that finger meant it could kill him. 

"You're probably not going to listen here, which would be really bad for you, but if I just killed you for something you might not even do, I'm no better than the monsters I fight. Quit while you're behind. Your pet wizards, who abandoned you with two separate puddles of pee, were rather lucky to summon me from my world." 

Her grin was feral. 

"If you'd summoned my evil twin Pandora, you'd find out the hard way what it's like to call a demon that you can call up but not put down." 

He was staring at her with that same fear and then she levitated into the sky, that power rippling around her as she reached for his basement window and then hurled herself through it like a gunshot.

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment, Prime-Earth 

-------

The power that Amy and Rack had summoned reached out and struck the target they'd called it into, who had stood still for a long moment and had then started at the sight of darkness reaching for her. A swift shield spell was summoned but the power slipped underneath it and lanced into her as she arched her back and screamed silently. Pale skin became marble hue, black spider-veins danced along her skin and her clothes shifted color to match the darkness of her eyes and hair as she fell forward and clawed deep grooves into the countertop when she'd fallen, gasping. A few minutes later she rose and in a cloud streaked with lightning she'd vanished. 

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

"Oh come on Tara!" 

Dawn rolled her eyes, breathing heavily. 

"I know you and Will aren't in a good place right now but don't take that out on me!" She'd wagged her finger at her, the witch staring and then shaking her head, 

"You're not hearing me, Dawnie." 

"There's-" she'd paused, and had stared into space for a long moment, awakened when Dawn snapped fingers in front of her, anger shading briefly into worry and then back to anger. 

"Dawnie, it's really not a good idea for you to be around Willow right now. At all." 

"What happened?" The anger had changed to a mixture of confusion and fear as Tara looked straight at Dawn. 

"Something bad. Someone did a really big dark magic attack and it hit Willow and I can feel her." 

"Not the good kind of feeling?" 

"N-no, the 'falling asleep on Elm Street' kind." 

Dawn had blinked at that and then as Tara had gotten some magic supplies and rushed out, using a locator spell she'd paused for a moment, and had then let herself get out and walk behind a distracted Tara. 

Rack's Lair 

--------

The lights that flickered around the street were the first clue, the bow-shock of what followed. The second was when walls crashed in, given a light shove by that deceptively powerful strength, the indolent crowds roused and running. The third was the dark-clad dark-haired monster with bone-pale skin that glowered at both of them. 

You two. 

The words were Arctic, not at all Willow's usual tone. 

"Now before, I would have said strawberry," as Rack mused, "but this...." 

He'd walked toward Willow and had then formed a mass of red electric-style light around his right hand, before hurling it as a bolt toward her. Her hand stretched out toward it and it looped around her fingers like it was an animate thing as she'd stared at it, curious and detached, and had spoken a simple counterspell that left it to blow away as red dust. 

What was that supposed to do? 

The question was deceptively innocent and around her there was a hint of darkness leavened by flame and the hair that was dark trailed off into a long column of smoke. 

Really? You do this to me and you summon me here, and what precisely did you expect to happen? 

"Now Strawberry," by then Rack was right next to her and he'd pressed himself to her as she'd stiffened for a moment, noticing that his hand was sliding along her waist. 

"I have such sights to show you." 

I don't care. 

And then her right hand closed around his throat and Amy saw one of the most terrifying sights in her life. Rack, the man who her mother had taken her to see, who'd scourged her and....hurt her...for the sake of learning the darkest of the dark arts, held by the throat and utterly afraid of the kind of woman he might have otherwise victimized. 

So much power in you, all stolen. The people it was stolen from are mostly dead but not all of them. 

Amy frowned and then stared when Willow had dragged Rack along by the neck and then held him up in one hand while placing the other on her head. 

Might sting a bit.

And then light coursed through all of them and Amy's own back arched and her own eyes briefly went black to match Willow's before she'd fallen to her knees, coughing. And then that power, the rest of it, as Rack made a terrified scream, surged into Willow who exhaled with a sybarite's delight and grin and then that power within her erupted very differently, darkness shifting to that distinct kind of red, her smoke-like trailing becoming that of fire instead, and a savage grin marked her face. 

He was left to float in that eerie Evil Dead fashion as if he hadn't paid the gravity bill when that monster wearing Willow's face, the one she'd been so desperate to summon, had stared at her with eyes that were black and then streaked with red in a swirling fashion. 

Now you, Amy, what am I do to you? 

Mears Basement 

-------

"I should be really angry." 

Warren was slumped against his wall as he wheezed, feeling that fear that hadn't vanished. 

"You wanted me to face whatever did that-" and Jonathan pointed at the window. 

"You know, Warren..." he tapped his chin. 

"Andrew and I got to talking. The crazy Iron Man Willow was right, we have the brawn, and you may have the brains, but...." 

He looked at him. 

"We're gonna make this a lot more of an equal partnership here. We're not your minions. We're your friends." 

All Warren could do was nod. 

Magic Box 

------

As events had turned out Dawn made a detour from following Tara when she'd seen the Magic Box was open and had hastily run to it. Anya and Giles had looked up. 

"Dawn, what is it?" 

"I think Willow's in trouble. Tara's going after her." 

That was all that needed to be said before Anya and Giles had done triple takes, had a brief startled, guilty look cross their faces and then they too had gotten their own supplies, Giles doing his own locator spell, or at least starting one before they'd both paused. A human-like streak moving over Sunnydale, a blur that was horrifyingly Glory-like save that Glory had done all she'd done on the ground and this was in the air, and then Anya had stiffened. 

"So it wasn't our Willow." 

"Huh?" And then the human-like streak had descended downward- 

Rack's Lair

--------

The second most surreal sight in Amy Madison's life was when she was preparing to try to run from the monster she'd summoned right up until something had crashed through Rack's roof. She'd coughed a bit in the shower of dust and wood splinters (but that light was way too bright for any vampires to add extra complications) only to find herself bemused. A second Willow, wearing bright silver armor of an inhumanly perfect aspect, the luster subtly wrong. At that she'd frowned and re-consulted her spell. 

"I didn't use a Toth-" 

"Amy." 

The silver-armored Willow turned to her with a kind of empathy her own didn't have and wasn't likely to have again. 

"Be a smart girl and run like Hell." 

She'd nodded at that and had. 

------

Willow had done this kind of thing, oh.....less than some of her duplicates in other realities from what she'd learned, but this was also not her first rodeo. Admittedly the fire elements were new enough she was impressed. 

"Ok, Goth queen, settle down." 

So you're not some phantom Rack conjured up when he died?

"Uh....technically he's not dead." 

Then I'll- and she'd stopped when she'd felt the gauntlet around her wrist and had then done a double-take at feeling it. 

How are you doing this? 

"Invulnerability charm, huh?" 

Yes. I have my reasons. Now let me go so I can finish the job. 

"You won't forgive yourself if I do." 

And then with that there was a deceptively light shove and an explosion of magic that scattered the rest of Rack's shop, leaving his corpse continuing to dangle in the air. 

Sunnydale Street 

--------

Amy had not run entirely out of eyesight when she'd paused, same as the rest of them did, to witness the strange sight. Their own Willow, levitating slightly and with fire trailing from her, and another version of her clad in bright silver armor, her own eyes starting to gleam with magical power. They all took a moment to realize that yes, it was sunlight, no, there was no Ring of Amara, and that meant that the silver-armored version wasn't a vampire, and that was when their own Willow had raised her right hand and from it emerged not one strand of lightning but five, only to see them easily dispelled by the other one. 

"Darth Rosenberg, really? How cliche." 

I have a bone to pick with Amy. 

"You don't see me telling you not to go after her, do you?" 

The silver-armored her held up her hands. 

"There's a difference between making someone stop dealing with dark magic when they were at least partially manipulated into them and cold-blooded murder. You tried that with one man, and even when you're not right in the head that's not how to deal with real life." 

Their Willow scowled. 

Why are you here? 

"The loser Trio." 

And then with that the silver-armored one had floated over to theirs and then vanished with her in a sudden shimmering like water skipped across like a stone. 

Alternate Earth, Rosenberg-Maclay-Lehane House, Scotland 

--------

"You sure about this, T?" 

"Very." Tara's voice wasn't the least bit hesitant. 

"It could be a completely innocent magic misfire by one of the witches of a universes's coven overreaching itself. But...." 

"Yeah." Faith nodded and then she'd taken the hammer and strapped it to her back as Tara had strapped her sword to her side. 

"Ok." 

She turned to Dawn. 

"You have something from all of us. When the time's right, they're enchanted so you can reach out and bring us all back." 

Dawn nodded. 

"Will do. What do I tell the kids?" 

"Nothing, right now. If we're gone in 24 hours tell them their moms got caught up in another portal thing and we'll give them a lot of hugs and kisses and let them watch a marathon of their favorite show." 

Dawn gave them an ironic salute and then a bright green sphere formed around them- 

Derelict Church 

-------

And they arrived at the same place this world's Scoobies had followed her, leaving her near an unconscious Willow clad in very form-fitting red leather. Faith and Tara were gazing at her for a moment with an undisguised shock and checking her out that drew an initial startled reaction from this world's Scoobies and then one of the most predictable things in the history of predictable things followed when Buffy launched herself at a version of Faith, even an older mature woman version, even with Olaf's hammer, instinctively on seeing her. It was Tara who spoke the single word Thicken! and this world's Buffy stared at her with a kind of betrayed look easily ignored on the face of a much younger version who wasn't even theirs. 

"How could you?" 

"She's not the Faith you know." That answer drew eyes from everyone but their own Tara, who was staring at her Willow and the way the silver-armored version incanted and then called out both red magic in the one hand and something dark and vile and like a mixture of smoke and a snake in the other. With another word and her eyes shining white as white light flooded through her and then the magic was gone. She looked at all of them. 

"Stay away from my girlfriend." 

That brought the younger Tara to stare at her in shock. 

"Your g-girlfriend?" 

Willow sighed. 

"I'm not your Willow, things are a little bit different here. Woman you see is the woman your Faith can be, if she makes the right choices." 

"Yeah, right." Buffy and Xander both scoffed that as Giles kept staring at them with genuine bemusement. 

"Could have been a lot worse." 

And then light swirled around them and they were gone. 

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

"This is really getting to be a thing, isn't it?" 

Dawn's tone belied the way her eyes never did leave the unconscious Willow. 

"In a way,  yeah." Tara rubbed the back of her neck. "But that weird...whatever that was...was right about one thing. It could have been a lot worse. That set of spells they did had Willow capable of burning the world to a cinder and lacking enough control of her magic to where she might actually try it." 

Her nose wrinkled. 

"I know you're not back together'". 

Tara took a deep breath. 

"That's really not my priority right now, Dawnie." 

She met her gaze with her usual empathy and a bit of the steel in her voice she'd heard in the voice of that older her. 

"Willow's always had that power, in the raw power sense. It's what drew me to her." 

She bit her lip. 

"Whatever the silver armored....person...did? It was lucky she was here. If she wasn't we'd have to face an invulnerable super-strong witch in a murderous fit of temper and I don't think any of us would be cut out for fighting a Glory-like..." 

Dawn frowned. 

"How can you say that?" 

Neither of them had noticed Willow's eyes briefly opening and then shutting as those words registered. 

"She's not Glory, morally. But she's got that invulnerability and super-strength and that's the only person I kn-know of that had both." 

"There was the Judge." 

Tara turned to see Buffy, who was biting her lip. 

"Not gonna ask me-" 

"Why would I bother?" Tara's words were flat. "You got what you wanted, Buff. You have your normal life." 

"Yes, I do." There was a determination in her words. "I get to go to school, go to work, take care of my sister-" She missed the look between Dawn and Tara at that, "and.....have late evenings and be a normal college student. It's everything I wanted since Merrick crashed into my life." 

Her lips were thin. 

"And from what I understand you were the only person who knew about heavenly dimensions going in, so the only person who could have bothered to get people to see where I was.....didn't." 

Tara flinched slightly. 

"So....yeah." 

Buffy shook her head. 

She still made a point of sitting by her best friend that afternoon. 

Spike's Crypt 

--------

"I'll be damned." 

When he wasn't having to run from an instant staking he'd taken a second look at a shaken Xander and Giles. 

"So what brings you chaps by?" 

"Unpleasant things," Giles cleared his throat. 

"Ah." Spike tilted his head. 

"That magic shenanigans in the town this morning and early afternoon?" 

"Yes." Giles cleared his throat. 

"Xander tells me that you and he have been on patrol." 

"We have." Spike had a prideful tone in his voice and even nodded to the whelp who to his own brief visible surprise only just nodded respectfully back. 

"And it's near December, Watcher. Thanksgiving passed, no Indians." 

"And no syphilis." There was a pause. 

"Quite." 

Giles cleared his glasses. 

"After all that Willow's....incapacitated, for this night, in any event. I was hoping that Xander and I could accompany you." 

Spike was thoughtful. 

"Very well." 

And that night's patrol was.....fascinating. Only a few vampires and one demon that had taken one very startled look at Spike and had tried to run only to get the shit beaten out of him and then sent packing, and then Clem. Xander, by this point, liked Clem as much as Spike did, and so did Willow, and Buffy. Giles.....was initially intrigued and was to find himself puzzled to meet a demon who was visibly demon and yet by far one of the most pleasant people he'd met in Sunnydale and more pleasant than a great many of the humans. 

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment 

-------

It was the first time she'd invited Tara here, but the truth was.....as she felt her nose twitching and looked around, sighing a bit. 

"I'm still not quitting." 

"I know." Tara's words were......warier. "I get that." 

She looked thoughtful. "I've been angry at Buffy since she didn't and then we....talked....yesterday and I finally get it." 

She'd blinked, looking at her. 

"I still can't watch what this is doing to you." 

Willow was very still for a moment. 

"I killed a man-" 

"Spike said something when he found Rack and took down that....body." 

She'd bitten her lip. "Rack has a horrible reputation, he's not quite a crack dealer because magic's not a drug but he's the kind of evil wizard, to quote Spike, that you'd expect to see Arnold drive a sword into." 

Willow snorted for a moment. 

"Buffy saw it too, yesterday. Her Slayer-sense didn't register anything bad about it." 

Willow frowned. "I literally killed someone." 

Tara shrugged. 

"So?" 

Willow frowned. 

"You dust vampires every night. Putting people in their final grave is still a death, a real death." 

Willow bit her lip. 

"You were under some pretty powerful dark magic. The worst you did was attack the people who hurt you." 

Tara looked at her. 

"I was scared of your magic, and what it could do." 

Willow gave her a long look. 

"That showed me I was wrong. You go fully dark and you don't go on an indiscriminate rampage." 

"I..." 

Willow paused. 

"I had the power to do it, for a moment. I felt something, deep within the Hellmouth." 

She kept staring with a haunted look. 

"I did. I felt it. Like a heartbeat, or a seed." 

"Infinite power." she continued, as she held up her hand, "in the palm of my hand." 

"I had it. I really did have it." 

"But you didn't use it." 

Willow bit her lip and for a moment Tara felt like there'd been a test and one of them had failed. 

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

For a change Buffy Summers was in her house, sitting on her couch. The TV was on but she wasn't really watching the show, she was....sitting. Spike was out patrolling with Willow and there was something in that which almost bugged her to a point until her eyes had widened. On the TV itself the werewolf was staring at and confronting another one but she'd sat up, and let herself stand up. There was a really, really easy way to start smoothing things together, even. Spike said Willow knew about them even if she hadn't pressed it. Maybe, just maybe, if she could get her best friend to see things with them and to give her endorsement of it she could start introducing Spike to, and with, everyone else. 

She nodded. And then changed the channel. 

Alternate Earth, Rosenberg-Maclay-Lehane residence 

---------

"You're thinking of going back there, aren't you?" 

Willow nodded emphatically. 

"A version of me that looks like she stepped out of one of Xander's comics in a rage? The kind of magic I felt? She's literally tapping into the Seed of Wonder without knowing it or understanding what this is going to do to her." 

She winced. 

"Something bad always happens in May 2002. What do you think happens when that does when she's already at that state in 2001?" 

Faith and Tara shared a look. 

"Well you talked us into it." 

Chapter Text

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment, January 2002 

------

Something had changed since the incident with that mirror version of herself in the strange simultaneously medieval and futuristic armor had shown up. She wasn't entirely sure of it, or its nature, but she felt the most terrifying reality of them all. The feeling of infinite power, an inexhaustible reserve of magic. It was not her, she couldn't even dream of this and its presence lurked in her like a tiger with eyes shining around a guttering fire and a maw stained with blood and flashing that fatal grin that was so often the very last sight that people would see. It was there, beneath, and yet outwardly.........outwardly she was here, sitting at a table and listening to Dawn talking excitedly about things with Janice, and Kit, and Carlos. She was happy for her that Dawn was starting to really and truly make friends of her own, that this thing that meant so much to her was real. And that power she wielded, the vast and remote  force that was now brooding over Sunnydale in a way that had begun to sow the first seeds of a harvest of ill-ease and discontent, it was always as nothing around Dawnie. 

Around Tara, too. Even when their break intruded, at times. With them it was the easiest, most wonderful thing in the world and it helped that with Dawnie all she had to do was listen and nod and make supportive banalities that meant everything to her. And with Tara, to talk and to give her.....her Tara, for she could never quite say the word in her own mind, the reassurance and love that her Tara needed. And then drove her to school. And as she did she could feel that power in each and every moment, a magic to lay low colossal armies that would make those of the Second World War seem drops in the bucket. With a thought she could rearrange the entire geography of Sunnydale and remake the world. And that was precisely why she clung so hard to the idea of still being Willow of the geek-infested roots, because even now she could see how much danger that path sowed, and what it meant that it did sow this. 

And it was after she'd dropped off Dawnie at her house, it being the Christmas holidays for the local school district and all, and was going on a walk in the business district that she'd heard voices in an alley, and had turned to raise an eyebrow. The loser three. And she had turned to walk toward them and they hadn't even noticed her until their ray gun had gone off and then for a moment they had and as it flashed she'd arched her back and screamed until she'd realized she was....

"Invisible." 

She blinked, with eyes that still saw even though invisibility should on paper have made you blind, and had looked, though they couldn't see her, at the three who were staring and then whooping for a moment that their device worked. And it was here, too, that the change would first take hold as the power that had let her speak into the minds of others had grown with the rest. And for a moment she let herself brush the mind of Warren Mears-glimpses of bitter-angry-hateful lust toward not just Katrina or his old robo-girlfriend but to her Tara and even to her at this point and she could feel the dense singularity of his hatred and saw a vision of what he'd wanted to do to her with that....that....

Fingers crunched into brick and she'd lost the breakfast she'd eaten. Warren and his two little helpers were gone but she could still track that mind and its monomania. And.....she was invisible. And with that thought she let herself walk through Sunnydale, after wiping off her mouth and then smearing the rest on the brick, and at first simply marveled at the elements of both how normal the town seemed, and how this immense power lurking within her like a great leviathan of the depths casting its shadow at the water's edge beneath a rowboat showed her elements in which it wasn't. She could see that people who otherwise looked about as normal as anything did in a town where the dead rose at night with a hunger for violence, and lust, and destruction, had elements that weren't....and that was neither her circus nor her monkeys, and she wasn't the least bit inclined to harass them for existence when prior to this she would have just taken them as ordinary humans, not part-demons. 

And it was this that had led her to the Summers house, where she was surprised to discover Sunnydale really did have social workers. 

"Where were they with Tony Harris?" 

The woman had paused, for a moment, at the threshold of the house. 

"Hmm." 

And Willow had let herself follow her. Spike was over, for a change, and that wasn't surprising at all. For a week Buff had been bugging her about wanting some kind of a thing with her and Spike and with all the elements of the two of them dating. And.....Spike hadn't noticed her but Tara, who was in the middle of washing dishes from breakfast, had paused and had then done a triple-take for a moment as this woman, a Ms. Kroeger, began to take her look around. It was the first time in months that Willow had noticed the house that she'd once taken for granted living in and she'd seen various changes in the decoration. Among them multiple pictures of Willow-and-Tara, but on the whole, while frazzled and clearly out of her depth in some ways, she thought Buff did a pretty fair job. 

For all that Ms. Kroeger's lip had curled at the sight of Willow-and-Tara, which irritated her enough that there was a sudden moment where her magic left an almost tangible impression that did rouse Spike as he'd blinked and had looked around and then he had that artificially calm Scooby face on him that the rest of them had done something with, she seemed to think so, too. 

"House is in very decent order, your funds are in order." 

She'd paused. 

"Is the redhead in those pictures by any chance an er......financial benefactor with certain expectations?" 

"Huh?" 

"A sugar mama, I believe, is the vernacular." 

Buffy and Tara both had blinked and then scowled. 

"No. Mom died of cancer and Will's able to help me out with computer programs that help me meet the bills." 

Ms. Kroeger had paused at that and given Buff a very long look. 

"You have very good friends. Shame about the boyfriend." 

Spike gave her an angry look and when her back turned went full game-face even when Buff had given her a long look. Tara, meanwhile, had gone straight over to her and her hand had clasped her arm. 

"What the Hell?" 

Her words were a mixture of anger and wariness. 

"Warren and his loser gang shot me with an invisibility ray. So I get to be the invisible woman." 

Spike turned and looked at her. 

"You should put on a pair of pants and go around singing "We're going to be gathering up nuts in May." 

Willow had blinked at that and shrugged and would later tell Spike quietly that after leaving she'd done just that and had genuinely startled people. On the whole it had been a nice quiet morning with her invisible and taking just a moment to go up to the room Tara still lived in, with Tara following her. 

"This is so weird," Tara had spoken, and then her hand had caressed Willow's face. Whether she was floating pencils strong, college strong, or invincible uber-witch strong, no matter how invulnerable her flesh got it always felt like it was just ordinary when Tara touched it. Not to anyone else, not even Dawnie. Only to Tara. 

"I can see your aura. I can see you." There was wonder there and a sense of fear. 

"Will, what did you do to yourself?" 

She'd blinked at that, even if Tara could only partially see it. 

"Nothing." 

Tara raised an eyebrow. "Honestly, I didn't. After the..." she'd waved her hand, "Darth Rosenberg incident I've felt magic uh....different. Jedi me might have taken out the bad magic but it's like something else filled it. Something warm. Like a heart, or a seed." 

Tara had blinked at that and had taken a deep breath. 

"It's.....s-something." 

Willow had winced at the stutter and had bowed her head. She was also to be astonished when she'd paused and had found so many of her own clothes still here, including some of the ones she'd realized were missing in her apartment, and had shut the door, as Tara met her gaze fairly. 

"You said it's a break, not a breakup." 

Willow nodded, and Tara could track that, evidently, as that relief in her eyes was tangible. 

"Then you don't mind my keeping some of your things here." 

She'd shaken her head, then. 

---------

And from there it hadn't taken her much to start at least playing a few pranks. The 'nuts in May' one had been amusing. She'd done a few other fairly harmless things and had then taken a moment to neatly swoop into Warren's basement when the slight brushing of that fanatically focused mind had shown her he was out, and that was when she'd paused at staring at the schematics and the information. And from there the pranks would abruptly change. 

------

All in all, for Warren Mears, what might have been a truly satisfactory way to try to kill someone in disguise might in retrospect have always been likely to backfire. He really should have remembered that not only was this a witch, but that she'd made herself invulnerable and super-strong. And that she was easily intelligent enough to become the Griffin of that damn novel given sufficient provocation. When things began to move in a way where he hadn't moved them that was the first stage of concern. When he began to hear voices and to realize that things were maneuvering in the corners of his vision but never when he looked at them directly, other things began to clear up and it had taken him an embarrassingly afraid two hours before he'd finally whirled in anger. 

"You fucking bitch!" 

"Turn me back, Warren." 

There was a flatness to her voice. 

"Why should I?" 

"If you don't, I die." 

"I missed the part where that's my problem." 

He'd smiled at himself at literally pulling off that line from that movie like Spider-Man but then he was reminded how that went for him when an immense power suddenly smashed him against the wall. 

+There will be nowhere you can hide from me, Warren.+ 

And then he realized it wasn't just a force, that there was a hand around his throat and that with trivial difficulty that hand could flex and that would be that for the life and times of Warren Mears, who had so much more to do , so much more to live for. 

+I can read minds. I can track you, your robots don't work for that. There's no mind to detect, just algorithms and programs. But you cannot hide from me.+ 

"OK if you can read my mind and what I'm think about-" and then the blood drained from his face. 

"OK look, Willow, I'm a fan of American Pie, OK? If I conflate you a little with that European chick and your identical twin with the band camp comment, that's just a movie, all right? I wouldn't actually do that to you." 

"Your little crony tried to roofie me." 

He could feel a tangible ozone-like odor in the air and a tension along his skin like electricity or numbness. 

"That's on him, not me-" he'd squeaked and then he realized that with but the tiniest fleck of pressure the thing holding him could quite literally yank his head off and would take great pleasure-that squeeze began. 

+Thing?+ 

"Youtalkedmeintoit" he wheezed and when she dropped him he crawled over to the machine. Blind fear of what he'd done animated him and when he'd turned that device toward her and it struck her she was standing there visible again. And as he looked at her he felt a strange kind of fear crawling in him, that same aura that had been hidden with the rest of her was there for a moment and it was as if she were illuminated by a brilliant and terrifying bright red flame that moved in tune with a heart beating, and flashing him a tiger-smile of feral wrath on her face. 

"Ok I admit it," he was still wheezing. 

"I did think those things. Thinking it doesn't mean I'm gonna do it, Willow. Jesus Christ." 

She took a step forward. 

"Stick to that." 

That was all she'd said and she'd disappeared and Warren flashed a look of vengeful rage that made his pupils dilate for a moment before he'd closed his eyes and shaken his head. But then he'd snapped his fingers. 

"As much as Jonathan was an idiot there that roofie did work." 

He mused. 

"I refuse to be afraid of someone who looks that much like Michelle Flaherty." 

He went and looked at the elements of that roofie and had then grinned. 

"And now I know just how to cure that fear, too." 

It would take a week, maybe, but he'd be able to manage this. 

-------

For her own part Amy Madison glimpsed Willow all of once in the aftermath of that, seeing her walking out of the Mears residence with that strangely detached face. She kept herself in the shadows as much as a vampire trying to stay out of the Sun and it narrowly worked and the sensation of that power left her deciding that Cleveland, lesser Hellmouth as it might be, sounded like a great place to take a short term vacation until whatever this was passed or the pucker factor, at least, passed with it. 

--------

And that was how, after her patrol with Spike, she'd found herself roped into something she neither quite understood, nor quite wanted to understand. Buff had essentially cornered her after the invisible day and the stress of having prepared everything for that social worker and the relief it had all gone well. Spike was, interestingly enough, far more nervous than Buffy was and that had puzzled her. It would only be after she'd told him about the pants thing that he'd paused and had then told her that he could sense how much her magic changed. That element of fear was real, and she'd stopped for a long moment. 

"You're afraid of me?" 

He'd paused for a moment. 

"Not of you, exactly, Red. What you're capable of right now, though? Yes." 

He'd looked at her squarely in the eyes. 

"Whatever you're doing, you need to stop." 

"I don't know what changed, or how I'm doing it, or what I'd even need to do to stop, Spike." 

The vampire had fallen silent, a bit, at that. 

"I'm scared of me, too." 

That statement startled him. 

"I'm trying to be careful." 

She met his gaze, looking at him directly. 

"I believe you." His gaze was a steady one, the fear changing a bit, then. 

"This isn't just about that cemetery anymore, is it?" 

She'd almost fallen out of her chair at that and not for the first time felt that painful bemusement that Spike could read her motivations more clearly than anyone she knew.

"No." However reluctant the answer the respect in his gaze made her feel strangely better in certain very real ways. 

She'd braced herself for judgment but he was giving her a strange look of many facets. 

"It wasn't evil." 

"What wasn't?" 

"Bringin' her back. She's....making her way with it." 

Willow blinked at that. 

"Spike, I want her to have this chance." 

"I know. She's..." he paused. "She enjoys it. Sparring with me means her Slayer never really goes dull." 

He shook his head. 

"You're a vampire and you know what evil is. Better than....than my friends do." 

Spike had tilted his head and then nodded. 

"Yes." 

"That thing Amy and Rack called out, the monster wearing my face...." 

She blinked. 

"That's what Buff and Tara want to think happened. It wasn't, was it?" 

For a moment Spike flashed his game face. 

"No." 

Willow exhaled slowly. 

"When all of that....changed....I felt something. Like a spark, or a seed, or a heartbeat." 

For a moment Spike stiffened. 

"A seed?" 

"Yeah. In the heart of the Hellmouth." 

Spike looked in the direction of the high school and then back at her. 

"The Master...." 

Willow blinked at that. 

"His deepest obsession was always here. It's why he was trapped in that church all those years." 

Willow started. 

"He spoke of something ancient and what he considered a divine manifestation." 

Spike scoffed, shaking his head. 

"If he thought it was wonderful it was a nightmare, you can be well assured of that." 

Willow blinked. 

"So..." 

"I'm not saying you found it, but the symbolism..." 

Spike paused. 

"If the Master was right in that obsession...." his fingers drummed. 

"Peaches' old mansion had a lot of Aurelius Order specific books and he never took them to Los Angeles with him. Think the git didn't want to remember for himself what was going on with all that." 

He looked at her. 

"I'll go see. If he was right, this is going to be a big problem. And I don't think you'd do this deliberately, Red." 

"I don't want this power, Spike." 

"I can't see why anyone would." 

By then Buffy had gotten back and had tilted her head. 

"Master obsession and power what?" 

Spike looked at her and shook his head. 

"Just talkin' old times." 

"Ok." 

She'd shrugged and dismissed it. Months later she would think if she'd actually paid closer attention to the way Spike talked and what he was saying that even then history's courses might have changed. At the time it was a relief and to her, at least, it mattered only that her best friend, who was keeping Sunnydale safe at night and patrolling and becoming this amazingly powerful big gun and giving her the normal life she'd wanted and gotten used to, gave her approval to what she was doing with her......lover. That in reality Spike's nervousness and distraction and Willow's dead-eyed apathy that was....odd, in its own ways, and at times more of a serene element of a being so infinitely beyond anything that could threaten her that life was losing certain aspects of meaning and permanence shaped things was of no consequence either. 

It meant she did a lot of talking, got responses that were about equally mono-syllabic, and all went well. 

Devon Coven 

--------

"Repeat that." 

"Well..." Agatha Harkness cleared her throat. 

"There's only been one other entity in my life I've had the ill fortune to encounter who reminded me of what your dear friend in Sunnydale is, right now. Witches and wizards worldwide can sense this across the globe. Anything with enough magical power in its own right can. A Slayer on a Hellmouth draws deadly forces wishing to play King of the Mountain. This?" 

"And who precisely was this person?"

Agatha's nose twitched. "A grieving mother named Wanda." 

"How did that go?" 

"For me? Very poorly. Got me stuck in thinking I was a fifties sitcom character because I picked a fight with her and bit off more than I can chew. For her ultimately far more poorly. And that world, the world I came from?" 

Harkness looked at him straight on in the eyes and he began to feel certain bits of...strangeness....about her magic. 

"It had far more powerful beings on the side of good with far fewer limits than yours. Angel and Spike and your Slayers? They count. Even if you had Doctor Banner, or someone like Strange...." 

"Doctor Banner?" 

Giles frowned. "As in the television show?" 

Agatha Harkness sighed and then purple light began to gleam from her hands and the nature of it was so unlike everything else Rupert Giles had seen in a lifetime of dangers and wonders that he'd stared with a wide-eyed look of horror. 

"No. As in the actual entities. What to you are beings from comic books, or a television show, were to me beings of great power and wonder and equally great danger. The Hulk, Doctor Strange, and in the case of Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch. Your Miss Rosenberg, right now, is what Wanda was at the end, when she was powerful enough to reach across worlds and to project herself and be only very marginally less dangerous than if she were there directly. She is still afraid to wield that power directly. So long as that lasts, she will still be herself. But power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Reality, on that Hellmouth, is now what she says it is, for as long as she says it. No-one, not even beings innately born to that power, can wield it without it forever changing them." 

Her gaze bored into his. 

"We'll help you, Mr. Giles. A three-part plan. One part might be to bring her here, to drink in her power. I've done that sort of thing before." A brief haunted look passed her face. "I'd rather not. Way too much danger in that, but if we must we must. A second is for you to go there, bind her, use a small bit of very powerful hex magic I've taken from my old friend Wanda and copied as she did it, and use that to dissociate the rest." 

"And the third?" 

"All hail the Mistress of Mankind Willow Rosenberg, mistress by the will of the Gods." 

Rupert Giles cleaned his glasses. 

"You must be joking there, Miss Harkness." 

"Not at all. If this power can't be outmaneuvered, there is nothing supernatural that can stop her. She is powerful enough now that nothing natural could, either. If the governments of the world got scared enough to try to drop an atom bomb on the Hellmouth she could take a direct blast from it and survive out of simple ignorance of what she is, and the town would survive, too. They do not know that. Be glad that they do not." 

She frowned. "I did encounter one other being like this, though, in one universe. It wasn't magic, there, it was psychic power. A poor woman named Grey." 

Giles shook his head. 

"Miss Harkness, this seems a bit extreme." 

"You feel it too, don't you?" 

"Power, yes. But I think Willow can be trusted to wield it." 

Agatha shook her head. 

Rome, base of the Immortal 

-------

"You tell me this...." he waved his hands, "is not a return of Glorificus or Illyria in power unbound?" 

"No, my lord." One of his minions bowed. 

"As far as we can tell, this is a witch." 

The Immortal leaned forward, a roguish smile on his face. 

"My lord, the witch also prefers women." 

The Immortal shook his head. 

"I find that tends to matter less. If that Slayer in that Hellmouth were there, I would have pursued her for a challenge but this is something worthy of me. Glorificus is fallen and that Hellmouth has been quiet since. I think it's time to give it a proper welcome." 

He smiled and looked at them. 

"My boys, in a week's time they shall speak of a new chapter in the legend of the Immortal, when he went to face the dark witch of the western lands and added her to his conquests!" 

He looked at them. 

"Really it is a shame that Illyria hasn't awoken yet, if she was, then I'd be able to bed a capital G Goddess, not a small g one, but reality is what it is." 

Chapter Text

The Bronze 

-------

To say that Spike was.....annoyed, if not deeply alarmed, that the Immortal had come to Sunnydale was a significant understatement. At first like a good vampire he'd feared a being that had casually tortured him and Angelus both for the fun of it had come here for him. But he hadn't. And then he'd done something both very brave and very foolish and had taken Red by the arm and had them sit on the same couch, several tables in front of it removed, where she and the cheerleader had once sat when Dog Boy had first gone American Werewolf in Sunnydale. For a demon the feats described were catnip to a cat, unless you were Spike or Angelus. He had never known the Immortal to fail with a woman, before. 

He had also never gone after a lesbian and if he did somehow affect Red he was going to intervene. Not least because the prospect of all that immense power Red had was....frightening-but-comforting as long as it was on their side. The second that changed.....

"So what do you say, milady? I have made a conquest of many and many a vampire, more than one Slayer, and now...."

He blinked when the witch yawned.

"Is that it?"

The Immortal blinked

"I....this has never happened to me before."

"Yeah, well, I've had a lot of everything you're trying to do here happen to me this year and I'm sick of it."

He found himself blinking when power began to surge out around the witch, something vast and remote and he realized that he'd considerably underestimated his challenge. And beyond that, her hair was trailing off into long streams of fire that seemed to roll down her back, her eyes swirling masses of black and red.

I'm not Buff, you know. Trying to seduce me with the vampire charms? Wrong equipment for that, buddy. And even if you had the right equipment-

He was suddenly pulled to eye level with her and he realized the stake that was levitating was quite literally blazing with fire and he stared at it and at the witch in horror.

You're not Tara.

The stake slammed into him and he was nothing but dust and then Spike had stepped out of the shadows, staring at the power uncaged for a moment. Red knelt by the aspiring Big Bad that had haunted Sunnydale's streets for a week and then turned to look at him. It was surreal, like it was with his Slayer. The monster that the monsters were afraid of was a slender redheaded woman, staring at her hands and at the ashes that had been the stake with visible surprise and wariness, almost.

Sunnydale Street 

-------

Willow waited until Spike stepped out. 

"Why were you watching?" 

She listened as he gave her a barebones version of the things the Immortal had done and then she'd looked back at the Bronze and then him. 

"So he really had a threesome with Darla and Drusilla?" 

Spike grunted, scuffing the ground. Willow clicked her teeth. 

She stared back at the Bronze for a moment and then at him. 

"I don't think the world lost much from staking him, then." 

"No." 

And they shared a brief grin as Spike walked off. 

Doublemeat Palace 

------

Slayer physiology was capable of many wonders. Buffy put away massive meals and to save on money, even with Will's programs, she'd taken to that California tradition of fast food places. It was cheaper, and she could put away those enormous quantities of food and work it off with both sparring with Spike and the other thing involving long things that thrust deep, penetrated, and produced explosions. At least she'd thought that until after getting tired for a bit of McDonald's and Burger King she'd stopped by Sunnydale's own unique franchise, the Doublemeat Palace. Xander, of course, swore by it. What Xander Harris swore by in dietary things wasn't to Buffy's choice as a general rule. Any more than it was with Will. She loved the woman, she really did, they were about as much sisters as she was with Dawn, but for all the other power she had, for all that her Slayer senses were starting to warble around Will when she was literally doing no more than walking around smiling with her adorable little Willow-grin, for all that her own stomach was an iron thing and that she couldn't cook either....

She was eating when she'd paused. Her Slayer senses were screaming and they were screaming at.....a little old lady who smelled like grease and was about as adorable as a little old lady got, and had a taste for pie. She could have dismissed it as a false positive as she did with Will when that woman had passed by her and then the warbling became a howling five alarm thing and the woman had ever so briefly stopped and turned to look at her and she'd just calmly packed away her third Doublemeat Medley and pretended that this, a big danger sign if there was one, hadn't just happened. 

1630 Revello Drive 

--------

"Why are you calling Will?" 

Buffy turned to look at Tara. 

"I told you. Fast food place. Demon. People-eating demon." 

Tara's jaw was tight and her smile was thin. 

"You are literally a Slayer. You are not a helpless little girl, you could and you should be able to solve this on your own." 

Buffy paused. 

"Tara, I'm living a normal life now. I'm fine with that." 

Tara's smile slipped and her tone was cold. 

"Whatever." 

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment 

--------

"Buff," she said patiently, "slow down. What's going on?" 

"Will, I think I found a big demon nest." 

She was silent for a long time. 

"Really?" 

"Uh huh." 

"Where?" 

"I think it's best that you come to the Magic Box and let me explain it because it'd sound like a joke if I didn't but I know what my Slayer senses are telling me." 

Buffy took a deep breath, preparing to defend her sticking to normal life and acting like the civilian even if she wasn't. When it didn't happen she was.....discontent, in a way that didn't quite make sense to her and which she wasn't willing to truly try to parse, then. 

The Magic Box 

--------

Tara had expected things from Spike's statements that were very specific and Anya's that were rather vaguer, but none of that prepared her to see Will walk into the Magic Shop at the same time she did. Still less that she didn't even bother looking at the artifacts, that the lights literally flickered around her like it was a horror film.

"Let me see if I understand this right."

Buffy's gaze met hers.

"You think the people working in the fast food restaurant are evil?"

"Something bad's going on there."

"It's fast food, Buff. Everything about it's evil. Delicious evil, depending on the brands, but evil. It's like the good tobacco company boss or the good booze company boss, no such thing."

"Oh." Buffy blinked.

"That's..." she stared as the lights flickering followed Willow and her right hand automatically charted that.

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment 

-------

After all of that Willow wasn't the least bit broken-hearted that it was her and Buff working on this. The normal Buffy that walked in was just as much a fashionista as she ever was, and there was a lightness in her shoulders and in her gaze that made all of this worth it. The danger, the forces she had called up and called into herself. To see this meant she'd also atoned for the great wrong in bringing her back and she saw that happiness, and contentment, and Spike at least was able to scratch itches Buff needed scratched even if at times she almost felt more like it was Buff using the vampire in that exact opposite way to what Angelus had done to her back in the day. That felt wrong and she didn't like thinking that way, so she just helped Buff in with the bag of food and had ultimately listened to the story, and when she'd mentioned her Slayer senses screaming that was proof enough they'd need to face the grease lady. As for the food.....

Willow Rosenberg's Computer/Science room 

-------

"You have a chemistry set?" 

"Kinda-sorta. It doubles as a potion-making set because a lot of the things that can be done with one can work for the other." 

As she took the meat and had done her own examination it didn't take that long before her nose twitched. 

"No Soylent Green here." 

"Huh?" 

"It's cardboard, semi-vegetarian, but it's not people." 

"Oh. No wonder it tastes terrible." 

Willow shrugged. 

"As I said, fast food places are evil." 

Doublemeat Palace 

-------

The actual confrontation with the Grease Lady and the penis demon would be one of the only times where Willow had let the full weight of her power show up as she did elsewhere, and Buffy had realized with that sinking growing horror that her Slayer senses were in fact screaming there but refused to accept that there might be reasons they were. At least a part of it was that she suspected her Slayer aws growing angry with being limited to sparring with a vampire she was boning while she was simultaneously focusing on the normal life and Magic Box job routine. In this she would understand later she was entirely correct, and that was enough reason to refuse to let it pick a fight with what her friend was slowly sliding into. 

The grease lady, too, had this thing that looked like the alien from those movies extending from her head, which had gotten an 'ew, what the Hell' reaction from Willow and then Will had managed to first smack down the Grease Lady and then cut off the demon, before levitating it into the meat grinder and groaning and holding her nose as the thing was destroyed. And for Buffy there was something strange about that. The part of her that had grown up as Buffy Anne Summers, elder sister of two and product of one of America's many broken families was happy to see another monster destroyed. The Slayer was bitter and vengeful and angry about fighting and was aching for her to do something, to go as far as to try to go after her best friend in the world because she'd spent months living a normal life. 

And the part that had worried her most was that she had actually taken up a dislodged frying pan and had prepared to slam it at her before staring at her hand and making herself put it down....and yet those Slayer senses had screamed differently when Will had turned to look at her and smiled and said "That was fun!" There was something in that power, a thing she could sense but not quite grasp. 

Spike's Crypt 

--------

Willow had stopped by the crypt with Buffy before deciding to head off to the Bronze. She was pretty sure this time, at least, the booze wouldn't up and bite her, but....

"Let's just say," as she looked at Spike, "after facing that thing? If I wasn't already gay, whoo." 

She'd huffed and had then given them a more than semi-derisory salute and ambled off. 

------

Spike had turned to Buffy.

"And you, Slayer?" 

"Well..." she'd purred, as her hand traced down his chest, "why don't we find out?" 

The Bronze 

------

The truly fascinating thing to Warren was that in the end it had proven paradoxically easy. The usual suspects were very consciously avoiding the immensely powerful witch. He could feel that kind of gravitational effect she was starting to have, that her sense of power was so much of a thing that people in general were....warier...without fully admitting to themselves why. It meant when she'd shuffled off to the little witch's room that he had seen her drink completely unguarded and with no-one else as a part of it, and her table equally more reinforced and heavier now, he was able to stand in the crowd and wait for her to come back. And she had, and she had sat down, drunk the entire drink in her shotglass and had pitched forward. 

That was his chance, as others were distracted and he helped her up and hobbled out of it more slowly through the back door into the alley. 

Sunnydale Street 

-------

From there, with Andrew and Jonathan's help, into the van. And what he had realized was that as a small testament to that magic that not only was she invulnerable, giving her skin a strangely metallic like feel to the touch, but oddly heavy as if the gravitational metaphor in his thoughts was literal. And then, in a signal taste of their cowardice and lack of imagination when they'd pulled into his house's driveway Andrew and Jonathan had made all manner of excuses and left him to lug her in alone. Well, when he was done, they'd have no more fear of her and they'd all be able to get on with the program of aspiring supervillainy. And yet for all of that he had felt that power and he knew that he absolutely had to rely on this Red King drug to keep her asleep while he did what he was going to do. If that gravitational force awoke and had time to focus, a part of him told him that there wouldn't be enough of him to bury and maybe not the part of Sunnydale where he was, either. 

Mears Residence, Warren Mears' Bedroom 

-------

It had worked, and in the end, Warren Mears faced this for the first of two times in his life. This time, facing the all powerful entity that he'd heard some of the demons speak of in fear unconscious from that roofie and lying in his bed he realized that on the one hand, he absolutely could do things and he decided that if nothing else it was going to be both nice to lie about things and to mess with Willow in that way. He didn't quite have it occur to him that there were potentially extremely deadly risks in pursuing this kind of path, that in bearding a dragon in the dragon's lair he was likely to meet the fate of all too many aspiring dragon slayers and introducing new marvels in studies of fire damage to metal. 

All he saw was an end to the fear he felt of her. The one thing that he did do in a rather childish impulse was unzip and literally rub himself on Willow's face just to say that he'd done something even if he knew that being passed out and woken up, as he intended it done, with her pants unzipped and her belt undone, her shirt raised up and one of her breasts exposed would let him lay the groundwork for a great deal of chaos. For all that he wanted an end to the fear some instinct in him led him to believe if he'd gone too far there might not be enough of him to bury and he was, he realized, not wrong about that at all. And thus he sat back and waited and was not disappointed when Willow had woken up, fuzzy, and her vision had cohered at the sight of him and then the blood drained from her face. 

"Shouldn't go drinking, Willow." 

His tone had that malevolent irony to it. 

"All kind of bad people might take advantage of you if you do." 

"Whadyadotome?" 

"Nothing you didn't want me to do." 

Willow hastily got dressed, not entirely well, and staggered out of the room, at least initially, and he'd smirked at the cameras there and what they would let him do.

Sunnydale Street 

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment 

-------

She had noticed it in the abstract but now it was actually a damned inconvenience and a challenge. She was......she was......she was showering. A lot. She needed it. What had happened here, how it had happened, what it meant.....she didn't know for sure that Warren was telling the truth. He might have lied. He was the kind of person who would, he had a grudge on her, but her pants were unzipped and she'd had parts of her body exposed and that didn't mean that nothing else had. And....the hot shower that could have cleansed this was just water against her skin and she couldn't feel it and that was the first moment in her entire....set of experiments...with this magically altered body that something had struck a deeper blow in and within her sense of self like this. 

So she kept scrubbing herself and broke down for entirely different reasons, and she failed to notice the way the water around her surged with electric sparks of her magic that scythed out of her.

1630 Revello Drive 

-------

When the phone rang Tara picked it up, as had become her routine when they were all at home. 

"Hello?" 

"Hey there, Tara." 

She'd frowned. 

"Warren?" 

That drew the attention of her friend and her surrogate daughter, both of them swiveling. 

"Thought you'd want to know your girlfriend went drinking and then she had a good time with me." 

For a tiny fraction of a moment all of the insecurities that had been there, that had led her straight to Glory and to her worst nightmare made real roared in but then she'd paused. 

"After what Jonathan did? No way in Hell." 

Warren laughed, coldly. 

"Oh but she did. You know, she did have a boyfriend back in high school. I reminded her of just what she really wants." 

"The Hell you did." 

That anger had Buffy and Dawn getting up and she'd just raised her hand as Warren gave her an unpleasantly graphic set of descriptions of parts of Willow but all that did was make the rage get still more unpleasant until her own eyes had darkness starting to swirl around the edges. With that she'd stalked out of the house after leaving Warren to continue to ramble and then hanging up on him, getting into the car and driving over. 

Mears Residence, Basement 

--------

It had seemed a simple enough idea at the time. Sow some chaos, disrupt some relationships. Instead the witch, the really hot witch, had shown up at his door and the look on her face made him start running to the basement only to be first frozen and then floated there, feeling that fear. And it was in the wake of it, as she'd followed him there, that he'd decided to smile and clicked a button to show his magnum opus, the unconscious Willow and some of the things he'd done and he felt that brief electric charge in the air and had whirled only to get smashed into a wall, again, by Tara, who stalked toward him with an eerie outward calm on her face and placed an open palm on his chest. 

"Go near any of us again, Warren, and I kill you." 

He'd scoffed at that only to drop the scoffing when a sharp knife was poised right beneath his jaw as Tara smiled. 

"I grew up on a farm. I'm not sentimental about killing if I have to. Did enough of it with livestock. And you so much as look at Willow wrong, I kill you. She would never cheat on me. Never. And even if some ill starred circumstance did that, it would be with a woman, not a man." 

As she let the knife float down away from his reach she at first paused and then whirled around to punch him very hard between the legs and stalked off in a rage. 

Willow Rosenberg's Apartment 

--------

She had gotten out of her eighth shower and was sitting on her couch in a bathrobe, skin still numb and realizing then the kind of ironic trap she was in for when a shower that left the room outwardly steamy just....hadn't worked, when her doorbell had rung. She'd padded over and had frozen, seeing Tara, and letting her in automatically. 

"I know what Warren did-" 

Willow was prepared to...she wasn't even sure but all Tara did was put her hand on her cheek. 

"He roofied you and he moved your clothes to scare you." 

"He didn't do anything else?" 

------

Tara's face was stone and her voice was level. 

"No." 

The trembles were there, and Tara was able to hold her and to her relief Willow still felt soft, like Willow, but that moment and that instance of defiance of Warren and everything he'd tried was everything for and with the both of them. They might have had their troubles, and their difficulties, that argument might have burned parts of the bridges, but not everything was lost. And that plan to fix her family was still something she was figuring out, with some various levels of difficulties in particular at their greatest with Giles, who wasn't even in his apartment but was over at some place in Devon, wherever that was. She could figure it out. She would. She hadn't found a family here that was about to fall apart like the one she was born into did. She would never, ever let that happen. 

Chapter Text

Wilkins Cemetery, Sunnydale 

--------

"I hear you." The other master vampire circled with the leader, a blonde woman with close-cropped hair and a leather jacket. "But really? Thirty of us, all master vampires. It would be glorious overkill if we were facing a Slayer, let alone the one that brought down something like Glory." They kept circling each other. "But a witch?" 

"You don't feel that power?" The leading vampire spread her hands and there were nods. 

"Yes, I...." and then they turned, seeing someone leaning against a tree and smiling a tiger smile. 

Oh don't stop on my account, please. It was just getting interesting. When are ya gonna pull out the knives? 

As one the master vampires swirled and they turned to face her. Thirty beings, each of them on their own at least an individual night's, if not a week's work for a Slayer of Buffy's skills and the last thing less skilled Slayers who lasted shorter spans would have faced. In the vanguard the woman, her hands starting to crackle with magic. 

We will end you, abomination-Richter scales across California recorded a small anomaly that left a person-sized crater in the ground and thirty separate dust clouds, which received a small investigation that morning. After the eruption of power a figure stood there in the cemetery, clothes shifted from green to red, fire trailing down her back with hair as long as the kind she'd had when Buffy Summers had first entered her life. Her eyes shone in the darkness and around her lights flickered and then guttered and died, leaving only trails of red and two shining pools of fire streaked with darkness, magma-eyes in a human face, spider-veins of molten red crawling where once had been black. 

Willow Rosenberg looked around her and inhaled slowly and her head bowed and then raised up with a tiger smile as she exhaled with a breath that briefly became a roaring gale as her right hand moved and where Tara's had raised gentle sparks she could feel potential. 

Let me out, purred a monster within, the idea that with that power of the Hellmouth hers to command that Sunnydale, and eventually the world could be her playground. Let me out. Let the world know that there is but one being to fear here, and it was always and then she fell to her knees, clasping her hands to her head and an agonized scream ripped out into the darkness, followed by her curling up and holding herself, and forcing herself to walk to her house. A few opportunistic vampires saw the staggering almost drunk-seeming woman in green and gold and went for her. Fire consumed them where telekinesis did not sever their heads or hurl a sharp stick into their heart. The rest fled, fearing what staggered into an apartment and with another agonized scream fell into a kind of slumber. 

Glory's Tower, top 

--------

The hateful hellish light was there and her sister's words trailed off, as they both saw Glory snarling and turning toward what was Willow and it wasn't. Her clothes were an eerie red, her hair trailed into fire and her bleeding wound was sealed, and with it Glory's howl of rage was all the more sincere. She ran for Willow only to see the witch pressing a hand to her head and then it was Ben. 

Burn. 

Shrieking like the damned soul that he was a blazing torch of a man hurled himself into the light that took him, and then it was her, and the dream-sister, mercifully alive (and she had smiled in her sleep) and the version of Willow that stood there (and the smile had vanished) and then she awoke, realizing that 

Dawn Summer's bedroom, 1630 Revello Drive 

-------

Realizing that she was not on that tower. She was in her bedroom, and there was a corner of her bedroom that was dark, where skin marked with magma-trails gleamed, where eyes shone like stars streaked with carbon and where a cheshire-grin was there. And it all was "Will?" 

Hi, Dawnie. 

"Am I dreaming?" 

A little. Yes and no. You were dreaming of the tower, and now you dream of here, but it is still a dream even if you feel awake. 

"How, h-h-h-how are you doing this?" 

Infinity touched me Danwnie. It touched me, it remade me. You know the most dangerous thing about placing the power of a Goddess in the hands of a person? Well, you would. 

There was wariness and awe in her gaze. 

I really feel like that rank, arrogant amateur Giles called me to tell you this given what I can see with these hellfire eyes but I do see it. That's the point. I see you. I can see every mind in Sunnydale and there are some people who I can't bring myself to kill.....right now. And I want to, the idea of doing it gives me this rush of power and that's why I know I have to stop. But I see you, a tiny fraction of what you are and that is more than enough. The monks that incarnated you were very brave, very powerful men. That feat is still beyond me, right now. Not because of a lack of power, but because I cannot bring myself to rip open the line between things like this yet. If I keep going down this path, that will change. 

Dawn frowned. 

I know you're angry I went to my apartment even with the key, even when you are as likely to sleep in my guest room as you are in your house, I know you're angry that people keep leaving you. Your dad, your mom. Buff. Me. If I keep going this way, Dawnie, there may come a time when I stand in front of all of you, briefly human again. Lucid. Not a walking corpse puppeted by power that drove the human me into extinction. If I do, if I beg to die, kill me. Do it then. Don't hesitate. It will be that, or it will be a power that cannot be contained in the worst of all things to contain it. You do, because you willfully blinded yourself and only a being more arrogant than even what guides me would be would dare to speak that true name. 

You can. Magma-tears dripped down Willow's face. I can't. If this wins, Dawnie, forgive me for whatever I do, if I no longer remember you. 

Harris-Jenkins Apartment

--------

Chapter Text

1630 Revello Drive 

------

She had been back at this house for a week, and had spent a lot of that time in the room she and Tara shared, when she wasn't coding and making sure to use her programs to check on financing. It wasn't going cold turkey.....exactly....but it was a struggle. The leviathan was there beneath the waters, its shadow vast and terrifying and she could see it, could feel it. She could feel minds, could name people she'd never even met and knew them as if they were lifelong friends and that horrified her. In a case of the turn tabling it was her parents who'd left plenty of messages on her phone and it was her who was ignoring them. Life had moved on for most other people, and for her, there were also nightly patrols, the few cases she made herself get up and leave the house. She couldn't leave things to where they were, and that power that made her stronger than Buffy easily and much stronger than vampires endured, as did her invulnerability. 

She didn't like that, but it was a Catch-22 she had yet to resolve. It also made it easier to mediate, to focus and kneel and try to siphon off the magic that coursed through her, because an invulnerable body could and did take more magic but it could also try to give it away and yet it was like trying to drain the ocean with a sieve. All of this swirled through her head while living with Dawnie again made her almost joined with her at the hip, all the moreso since aside from patrols and family meals where her once-complete inability to cook had become a master of microwaved meals was....there. She had also received an evasive call from Giles noting that he'd made a few important decisions and that he would be home soon enough. 

If she hadn't been so consistently focused on not becoming the monster she was slipping into the nature of those evasions would have been there. Dawnie's own secretiveness and the growing clutter of her room would have occurred to her. Xander and Anya's not entirely subtle anxiety would. In all fairness to herself, she'd reason later, trying not to blow up the world when you realized that it was only your neuroses not going out of control that stopped it took up a lot of time and focus. Killing vampires let out a surprising bit of it and of her frustration and that helped. She didn't even resent Buff's normal life anymore, it was just background noise. She was trying to save the world and it had taken her far too long to realize that neither Warren, nor Amy and Rack, for their best efforts were the real danger to the world. She was. And that meant a struggle she had no choice but to spend every day fighting. 

-------

Buffy Summers had the inkling that would be confirmed by Tara that her friends were preparing an elaborate birthday party for her....again. She was pretty sure she wouldn't be drugged into powerlessness and left to face a monster again or fuck a vampire and let loose a monster, but.....there were other issues. For all that she had all of these parts of her life, the normal life, the hot boyfriend, and all the rest, that mundanity was chafing at her and the frustration was she knew how easy it would be to let it go, to let herself accept what she was slowly seeing she wanted to do and was fighting out of her own stubbornness. She did not have the hindsight to see she was on day twenty-two of a dwindling count of days to when she'd retake her position as the Slayer, or that she was starting to talk herself into it. What she did see were the bags under Will's eye, the hollow bleakness in her stare. 

The inconsistencies, that at times her Slayer-senses were screaming five alarms at deafening volumes and at times Willow felt like Willow. She was praying at times, to what she didn't know but still trying it because it at least gave her the feeling she was doing something, that the Slayer dreams were lying. That she wouldn't have to see Faith back in their lives at all, let alone sticking some monstrous axe into Willow's back and seeing her best friend die and bringing them in a way back where this had all started. Willow had brought her back. If they had, they would absolutely bring her back because she couldn't condemn her best friend to die because she'd tasted that normal life and had found in the end that the part of her that was a Slayer was clawing at the room and leaving her at the edge of violence and with a much sharper temper than anticipated. 

Spike, the same Spike who relished a fight so much he protracted demon slaying for the enjoyment and kept his caustic wit and temper, was more reasonable than she was, these days. It didn't help that Tara was angry at her and Dawnie resented her spending so much time away and would have resented it much more if she knew that Buffy was spending time with Spike, of all vampires. Her life was bills and all the mundane factors of keeping a house, and her best friend, whenever she wasn't coding or sitting on her bed wrapped in blankets in a room that felt like it was soaked in gasoline waiting for a psycho to light a match, was showing her things her mom never had (and if she quietly resented in hindsight that her mom hadn't, that was between her and her own thoughts). 

And if she was honest with herself, it did feel good to meet these payments, to see that here, as in school, she was much smarter than she'd ever given herself credit for. To have grades that were the equal of Willow's and perfect attendance without Slayer status. Will, as she had been at the start of college was very happy for her and her strongest cheerleader, as she always was. It was satisfying. She had proven to herself beyond all doubt that she wasn't some stupid oaf who relied on fists as a substitute for other things. She knew that......and it still felt strange to realize that even on a quiet Hellmouth day that her Slayer was worn out by fucking Spike with ever more brutal intensity between them of the kind that left mutual bruises. 

Willow made her potions with a strangely sour look for a witch and put bandages on her and said nothing, but......it did mean that she was both nervous and wondering just how and what her birthday would mean. Something always went wrong. Always. What would it be this time? 

-------

Will had just quietly said that she'd fought some kind of annoyingly persistent demon with a sword on patrol that night and had ruined another shirt dealing with the sword, and if that was all Buffy could continue to rest easy that her normal life wasn't threatening people that much  So it wasn't the earlier part of the day.

It wasn't her shift at work, either. Tara and Anya were both there and the strange frightful thing that Dream-Willow of the magma veins and fire-eyes had done weren't there. Willow had evidently saved a woman's life, and no less a woman at that than Warren's ex girlfriend. The same man who'd been behind so much else of what was happening with and to them. Giles was back, he'd astonished them all by meeting them at the Magic Box and it would be that this happened when she was there for her morning shift. He was back, he was evasive and nervous and that was a bad sign but she could and did attribute it to the idea that if they'd all had magma-veined Willow begging them to kill her she had done that with him too and if anything gave you a wiggins that was it. It was what she clung to, what she was desperate to cling to, because the alternative was that one of her best friends was the kind of thing she was Called to fight and that was in its own way worse than Angel. 

Angelus, by the time they'd really and truly fought, had made it easy to separate things. The monster that wore her friend's face, this....Red Willow, was not something she could so neatly do that with. So it added its extra element to clinging to normality, because the alternative was that the monster hiding in plain sight.......and yet Giles hadn't said anything about it. It would seem really, really obvious in hindsight what would happen two weeks later when shades of Thanksgiving had deepened. Whatever it was, this time, Will was as ignorant as she was and they, Anya, Xander, and Giles, and even Tara (and this would become a huge problem waiting to happen) had agreed to work together with it. Tara had been taken aside by Giles and had then bowed out early and she'd assumed it was for her birthday. 

--------

Faith was shorter than Tara remembered her to be from the vague encounter with everything with the Katra, and very wary. 

"Hey, T." There was a complete nervousness on her face. The nervousness was matched with bruises, healing cuts......and her face went corpse grey at the sight of something red and gold and leaning against a wall. 

"Why do you have that?" Her voice was a cold whisper of danger enough that even Faith's bravado took it seriously. 

"It's a Slayer thing." 

"That's not what I asked." 

"Is there an answer that won't see me turned into a toad?" 

Tara's rage was there and she'd started to raise her and her own look of shock and horror and guilt and the way Faith's expressions cycled meant they talked, for an hour, in circumlocutions that left her understanding Faith in certain ways as much as Faith understood her. But that Slayer dream was not given any direct relevance and it was the topic neither could admit was there, face to face. 

-------

Buffy Summers, thus, left her shift and went to the coffee shop, where Will, for a change, was there waiting and letting herself sip intermittently from a mocha that had grown cold. She looked bleak and hollow-eyed, like Buffy herself had been in the first couple of months after her rising from the dead and looking into a mirror Buffy hated it. Willow's verbosity faded into monosyllabics and there was something off in that, too. But there were no Slayer-screamings around her, anymore, and that was something Buffy clung to as well. 

"At least the birthday's going great." 

Willow nodded, then raised an eyebrow and finally seemed to have more to say than "Yeah". 

"You invited Katrina?" 

Buffy nodded. 

"She's as safe there as anywhere." 

Willow nodded at that. 

The silence lingered between them for a long moment. 

"You OK?" 

Will gave her a long look, bit her lip, and seemed poised to say something but just nodded and smiled and briefly there was the happy perky cheerful best friend she had. 

-------

And it was that party, in the end, that she'd invited both Spike and Clem to, and had decided to make this the grand debut of noting Spike was now her boyfriend. She had braced herself for a big reaction from everyone but Willow and that part, at least, was correct. The bleakness faded and the smile was there and she felt like Willow again with her excitement for them and hugs that felt like the usual Willow-hug, much moreso than when she was stuck as a third wheel with them and their couple-y-ness. Tara had stared at her in shock. 

"Are you nuts?" 

She'd blinked at that. 

"No." 

"Sweetie, you and a vampire? That vampire?" 

She'd frowned. 

"I didn't think you'd judge me." 

"If you came to me asking me to forgive you for this I wouldn't, because there'd be nothing to forgive. We all have our occasional moments of bad taste in people. Doesn't mean I've changed my mind that much." 

Buffy's nose had twitched. Dawn had taken it second-best but there was still a deep sudden rage on her face. 

"So this is where you were so many nights?" 

Buffy had clicked her teeth but it was Spike who'd frowned at that and said "Where were you, Bit?" 

"Willow's." The brief cycle of fear-relief was there and she'd sighed, content at that. 

Xander had taken it third-best and had simply shrugged and said "As long as we can still patrol together and he keeps hating Angel. That changes I'm gonna stake you." 

Spike snorted. 

"That'll be the day." 

Anya.....was in an almost-trance and visibly nervous and reacting as if there was something odd about the place and that reaction would make all too much sense in a short span of time. It was Katrina who'd sought to leave first and it was her who discovered the sudden element of unpleasant surprise, the truth that they really were all locked into this place. 

--------

Less than five minutes later Anya and Xander had tried to get Willow to do a spell but when Anya felt that leviathan starting to return when Willow had started to prepare it she'd stopped and had taken a deep breath. 

"Xander-" she'd taken him away and Willow had broken down crying in relief and had gone up to her room, for a while. So they'd turned to Tara instead and she had taken some of Will's magic supplies and had done that spell......only to find that the sword-demon broke out. It moved through the walls and it found Willow curled up and Willow was forced into a fight at close quarters with the leviathan lurking at the edges, the demon aware of this and strangely far more cautious and yet she'd broken the sword and stabbed it and watched as the demon blew up into dust, and had made her way down with new slashes and another ruined shirt and one of her pants legs hacked off and the other fraying. Tara had stared at her and there had been a moment where she went full Anya and had prepared herself to say something but all Anya did was scowl. 

"I don't get it." 

Willow had noticed Dawnie's look of bemusement and had quietly taken her aside and talked with her about her day and had paused. The thing that was off the most was the overly concerned school employee who posed as a social worker. Other than the one, who'd shown up that one time, for Dawn there was a much deeper absence of this in and around Sunnydale. And without needing to do a single spell beyond making Buffy's potion and that, at least, didn't trigger the Leviathan in the same ways because it was chemistry with properties that were somewhat beyond aspects of chemistry and physics that treated physics like a nerd with a sufficient amount of lunch money....she'd resolved it. 

They had all (except Spike) actually met the famous Halfrek for the first time and Willow had zoned out even when the leviathan had briefly stirred and she had held herself and closed her eyes and Halfrek's ranting speech had trailed off then and she had tried to teleport away the first time, only to fail. She tried a second time, had also failed then, and then.......well. She had undone it, and in the midst of all of that drama and some weird elements with her and Spike Willow solidly ignored this because she was standing over the edge of that abyss and clinging to it with fingers turning bloodied and she could not fall, she couldn't fall.........

But it passed. The beast beneath the waves sank and the ocean was clear and she would open her eyes to find herself in bed, held by Tara, who was sound asleep and looked peaceful and as nothing had ever soothed her sleep like this, she let herself sleep, too. 

--------

And woke up to go downstairs to find that Dawnie had an excused absence from school, a very wide-ranging set of collections with Spike giving her a mixture of anger and admiration, Anya and Giles holding up magic things and yelling at her......and she saw several of her own things that were missing in that list, too. Dawn had heard her, had seen where her eyes went, and gave her a sickly grin and bowed her head bracing for that anger. 

"I don't have much else to do besides housework and coding. I'll help her fix all of this." 

Buffy took a deep breath. 

"Good. I can't believe she did this." 

Willow kept her own words back but Dawnie, teenager that she was, saw things just as she did (and that in itself would give her pause and made her go back and look at her views and start deciding to carefully reassess them just in case) and yelled at her in various ways and she zoned out with that. Going to the stores and helping to make up with things meant, too, that Dawnie spent time with the one person who kept her anger under an even keel, which a part of her felt her surrogate daughter needed. And....it meant she wasn't too deeply in her own head fearful that being there would let the monster out to play. 

They even paused near Kingman's Bluff and she got out and took Dawnie to there so they'd just sit on the grass in the Sun when Dawnie had told her why she'd done it. 

"Why do you think you're not real?" 

"Because....I'm not." 

Dawn frowned. 

"We all know I'm not. Almost all the memories you guys have of me are fake." 

"And.....why does that bother you this much?" 

"Because.......I don't feel like I belong." 

Willow tilted her head. 

"You do." 

"It doesn't feel like I do." 

Willow took a deep breath and decided to unburden herself of certain things, feeling that same spike of the closest to maternal feelings she ever expected to have, as Dawn listened and when it was done, they hugged and she would have the satisfaction, at least, that she'd fixed one set of things without needing to do a single spell. 

--------

As disasters went it wasn't that bad. Buffy was pretty calm about that and when she'd gotten home to find Giles sitting there and Willow wiping her face and walking off in silence, with Giles giving her a worried look he'd turned to her. 

"How could you and another vampire-" 

"That's my business." Her tone was one of steel, and decisiveness. 

"And besides, the vampire's Spike. He's still neutered." 

Giles' nose twitched. 

"He also won't turn into a monster because he gets a happy. And he's friends with Clem, you like Clem, right?" 

"I can't say I know the chap well but he was fairly tolerable company, yes." 

Giles nodded his head. 

Silence, for a moment. 

"I know I said I would be gone only for a time. I didn't leave you by choice. Any of you." 

Buffy bit her lip and looked away. 

"It felt like it." 

Giles took a deep breath. 

"I know. I was wrong, not that you are any less the incredible woman that you are, but in the view that...." he bit his own lip. 

"I yielded to my own selfishness. And not just with you." 

His gaze flicked upstairs for a long moment. 

"I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forgive myself for only thinking of Devon after the fact." 

"Who's Devon?" 

"There's a coven there," he said. "If I had sent Willow and Tara there, none of this would have happened." 

Buffy tilted her head. 

"I do not regret," he said decisively, "that she brought you back. The power she played with, I regret that very much. She did not really have any choice, and I am not sure she was in full control of herself." 

Giles winced. 

"It's Willow. How bad can things get?" 

Giles exhaled slowly. 

--------

Willow had paused when she'd finished up with the second set of stores with Dawn and had taken the car in when she'd frozen. She'd glimpsed very familiar brown hair and had paused, for a moment, turning, but that hair had passed and she'd shaken her head, scoffing. Faith was in jail. The murderous bitch wouldn't be back here. Certainly not without attacking Buffy. Tara had paused strangely when Willow had said she'd thought she'd seen Faith and Willow had just shrugged and gone on eating and missed Tara's relief in that. And anger. She had gone up to work on her coding, taking a quick kiss from her Tara and accepting her statement she was going out for a bit. 

------

Whatever Faith had expected, a return of an angry T at her doorstep wasn't it. 

"Now what?" 

"Did you go by my girlfriend?" 

"I went by B's house." Faith frowned. 

"I wanted to be sure the last time I was there didn't mess it up too much." 

Tara took a deep breath. 

"Look, I literally went to jail for stabbing someone to death, you think I wanted a Slayer dream about stabbing someone to death? Even Red, who hates my goddamn guts?" 

She glared at Tara. 

"I hate everything about this. It feels like a sick fucking joke. Get me out of jail to do the same thing that sent me there." 

She folded her arms in front of her chest. 

"Besides, if your girlfriend's gone full Dark Phoenix on all our asses we're fucked." 

Tara blinked. 

"Demon community here views me and me patrolling as a positive relief, they're that scared of Red. Red!" 

She waved her hands dramatically. 

"You haven't noticed?" 

Tara frowned. "O-Only Xander and S-Spike have gone patrolling with her." 

Faith suddenly frowned and the frown became deeper. 

"So B wasn't avoiding me?" 

"N-no. Will's done....things... to herself, magically. Something bad happened and she made herself super-strong and invulnerable and it's stuck since." 

Faith exhaled slowly. 

"But B isn't even patrolling or punching people?" 

"Not like that, no." 

Faith's mouth formed an 'o'. 

"Let me guess, fang-banging?" 

Tara cleared her throat. 

"You could uh, say that, yeah." 

Faith bit her lip. 

"Well." She exhaled. "How about that." 

Silence, for a long moment. 

"Look, T, I get that you're pissed about this but I literally did have a Slayer dream about it and in that dream she was begging for it. Said all this about 'wanting to die as herself.' " Faith grimaced. 

"I really don't want that to happen. It'd put so many things back to square one and these guys hate me enough for killing random strangers and some.." she cleared her throat "other stuff I did. I kill Red, even in a justified cause, even if she's begging for it?" 

Tara's gaze proved the point. "See? Even you. The nice happy-clappy hippie witch! You're looking at me like you want to have my guts for garters." 

And then she'd leaned forward. "But from what G-man and others said you two are broken up-" she was winded when Tara smacked her against a wall in a sudden eruption of temper. 

"We are not." She growled. 

"Damn, T." Faith's eye twitched. 

"What the Hell is wrong with all of you?" 

Tara let her down. 

"You tell me you have a dream about murdering my girlfriend and you're here prowling around the place where she lives?" 

Her glare was daggers. 

"I get that seems bad, but I'm also a Slayer." Faith's gaze was hard. "And if it was that or the world, all of you guys would be too soft for it. I know you would." 

Tara's glare left their conversation in a long silence after which she walked out. 

Spike's Crypt 

-------

Another set of money for more shipping and then Spike had stopped at the next invoice. 

"Suvolte eggs," he muttered. 

"Well, Spike old chap, this will either go very well and you'll be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck or you'll be dust on a floor." 

Chapter Text

1630 Revello Drive 

--------

"Xander," Willow's voice had the verbal equivalent of her Resolve Face, "this is serious." 

"Will, look at me." 

She did. She saw her friend, her good, deeply flawed friend, who went out to fight monsters without anything like what she had, or what Buffy had. A man who was deeply troubled by.....

"I see you." Her words were quiet. "I always have." 

Xander took a deep breath. "I'm not good enough for Anya-" 

"The Hell you're not." He'd blinked at her words. "The fact that you're worrying like this, Xander, is its own proof you're not." 

She patted her thigh in the dress. 

"I'll talk to Anya, too, in a moment." She grimaced, looking at the dress. "Bridesmaid dresses are always terrible." 

She looked back at him. 

"You are good enough. Not telling you this as a pep talk, telling you this because I believe it. I believe in you." 

She took a deep breath. "And I believe in her, and I think there's really a simple way around these issues." 

He tilted his head. 

"What?" 

"Your family's already here." 

She'd smiled at that and she saw the way his eyes widened  as he exhaled slowly. 

-------

Anya had been surprised when Willow had asked to speak to her alone and she'd braced herself for a return of the usual friction but since she'd started.....struggling, and working with Tara for a few hours each day on shoring up all these barriers against that monstrous force within her that felt like some huge sea monster poised to go on the rampage Anya's entire manner toward and with her had changed. Changed very profoundly. She wasn't entirely sure what to place as the cause of it, nor quite how to explain it, but past a point it also didn't really matter. She had taken a deep breath and then began cautiously. 

"Xander's nervous, but I have an idea." 

"Nervous?" 

So she took the plunge and gave her the very, very abbreviated version of his fears and Anya's hand went to her mouth for a moment. 

"So that's what it's been all this time." For a moment her face fell and she looked at her feet. "Why didn't he tell me?" 

"Because he loves you. He's seen this as more of his issue and he finally couldn't keep quiet about it." 

She'd blinked at that, and then leaned forward. 

"And your idea?" 

Willow smiled and said in the same tone. "Your family's already here. It could be the rehearsal. We can also make it, simultaneously, the wedding that actually counts." 

Anya blinked.

"You'll have a full week of showing yourselves you can do this." 

She looked at her. 

"You'll still have that big, formal ceremony with all the bells and whistles, all of the..." she spread her arms wide, "everything. The Harris family chaos, everything he's afraid of. He's not like them." 

"No," Anya said with a warm smile, "he isn't." 

"Right," Willow echoed it. 

Another silence. 

"Somehow I thought if this did happen you'd tell him to end all of this." 

Willow frowned. 

"I know we fight like cats and dogs, Anya, but you're a part of my family, too." 

The ex-demon's eyes widened and she pulled Willow into a hug that first startled her and then she'd returned it, the two of them sitting in silence and then Xander and Anya went with the priest for a moment and would return. By comparison to that more formal ceremony the actual wedding was simpler. 

They were all here, Tara, Dawnie, Buffy, Giles, Spike, Willow herself, and even Halfrek and D'Hoffryn. The priest was remarkably unconcerned by a vengeance demon materializing in the church, proving himself a true Sunnydale resident in all the ways that counted. The vows were simpler than the ones of the broader celebration, said with a big smile on Anya's face and a calm assurance on Xander's. It was a simple thing, and a pleasant one. Only D'Hoffryn and Halfrek had any brief awareness of the flush of desire for vengeance in the dying demon ambushed by Faith, who had been chasing him through Sunnydale and had taken him down, meaning the wedding passed without any upheaval at all. 

--------

It was the very next day that Riley Finn came back to town. Out of everyone in Sunnydale Willow was happiest to see him and his wife, but then she very literally owed them her life. She had just finished her latest set of barrier-building with Tara. They did this in short bits each day, both because Tara was as frightened of what lurked within her as she was, because Tara had a very firm set of ethics about magic anywhere near people's brains....and because Tara's power was so different in nature, and in kind, to her own. In the end she could feel each bit of this interlocking and their reinforcing herself, and as they did so the leviathan's huge presence seemed to slowly recede and bit by bit she began to feel like herself again. 

Dawnie was disappointed they weren't exactly together yet but the huge force was still there. It was the encounter with Faith last night on patrol that had given her the confidence that they might just get past this. She could work with Tara. Let herself trust her girl (and together or not they were still each other's) and let herself trust her girl to help solidify all the control she was missing. And in truth, too, they were also dealing with other, subtler things. Tara was right, she really was, in a way that deeply annoyed her but was still true, that the leviathan was the consequence of a long attitude of recklessness to magic on the one hand, and she had also been right, if in her own view overly harsh, that it was easy to say this as long as people benefited from that reckless power but were unwilling to take the cost of doing it themselves and insistent it had to be done. 

And beneath all this, there was Tara's insecurities, things she did her best to meet but was slowly understanding that it was Tara's challenge to meet these and having to accept that. The ease with which the power they were seeking to cage reared itself, the temptations to let it out and to bring the world in line with what Willow wanted.....they had more than challenges enough. They were spending time each day facing up to them, what Tara had called a 'long and important process' and she was right. It meant more time together, it meant that at the end of it WillowandTara would be far stronger than it had been at the start. 

And with that latest set finished, and what felt like the first of what Tara had promised would be three such......metaphorical link fences was the easiest way to imagine it, she'd gone down and had blinked. 

"Riley?" 

By then Buffy was also there. 

"Hey guys." 

They'd let him and Sam back in.  

-------

"So why are you here?" 

"We're in pursuit of a HST smuggler called the Doctor. There's been a variety of lesser, petty things smuggled in here but now this HST smuggler's gone for something much worse." 

"What?" 

"Something called a Suvolte." 

-------

The Magic Box 

------

"Oh." Buffy stared at the image of the thing, and then turned to read about their reproductive cycle, exhaling slowly. 

"Yikes." 

"Yeah." 

"So, you ready to go help me?" 

She'd shaken her head. "I'm getting to live a normal life, now, Riley." 

She turned to Willow. "She's still taking the lead with everything." 

Willow had bit her lip, and would read and listen and then decided she might as well. 

"So who do you think this Doctor is?" 

Riley had a strange kind of smile on his face, at the one hand slightly nervous, at the other gloating. 

"Hostile 17." 

All eyes turned back to him. 

"Wait, Spike?" 

He nodded at Willow. 

"Absolutely. He fits because there's been a connection between him and a few of the creatures we've already caught in and with this ring. If it's not him, then it's a directly related part of it. If he's not the big boss HST, he knows who is." 

Willow had frowned. 

"Spike's been helping with patrols. He's....very good at what he does." 

"And yet not Canadian." 

Eyes turned to Xander but then ignored him. 

"I find it hard to believe," she mused, "that he'd be doing this." 

"You could do magic to help us." 

"I could but I shouldn't and the reason I'm skeptical about all this is that I had and have a lot of magical power, a lot of things that are uh....different. For a while I could read every single mind, human and demon, in Sunnydale." 

Her eye twitched and for a moment they watered before she wiped them clean. 

"I didn't see anything about Spike doing this then in his thoughts. Lots of-" her gaze flickered to Buffy for a second and she flushed, as Xander turned and blinked and then did a double-take. 

"But nothing like this Doctor." 

Riley tapped his finger on his chin. 

"We haven't been investigating this this long and it hasn't been in effect that long, either. Maybe a month, max." 

Willow exhaled slowly. 

"Ok. All I'm saying is that I didn't sense anything." 

-------

In the end that would lead to her having to go on patrol again (which she didn't exactly mind) and Buff, very nervous about what Spike might say, or disclose, with and to Riley had elected to go with them. She found herself confused at her own reaction. It was the first time since she'd come back that Buff had taken any interest at all in all of this and she should have been happy, and relieved. The truth was that if she'd been able to contact Faith and had a number to call her she would have bitten the bullet then and had Faith involved. Patrols were now dangerous. Patrols meant she had to focus purely on the physical elements of magic, because tapping into more of it until those barriers were there and also after, really, would be and was extremely dangerous. 

Using magic meant that if she couldn't pull herself back she would close eyes as Willow and open them as the Monster, as she thought of herself this way. The worst part was that it wasn't exactly not her, it was all the things she sat on, it was her desire to control things, and the reality that almost unique among human beings she had at her very whim the power to reorient life as much as she wished. The thought of that, of near-omnipotent power in a human shape and the horror in that were what animated her to keep doing this. So when Buff belatedly started going on patrols, she would realize in her better moments even before the big snap, as she called it, happened. She wanted to be happy. A big part of her was. A bigger part felt a deep spike of resentment and wondering why Buff had taken so long and wishing that she'd started to do this sooner. 

Believing that the resentment she'd gotten into this was at least in part that Buffy had wanted her normal life and gotten it was irrational did not change that she felt it. And all of that meant that she just kept her face neutral and herself quiet, listening to Buffy and Riley and resisting rolling her eyes at some of Buffy's self pity and then briefly stopping. It was thinking like that from her own friends that had led her to the Will Be Done spell. A new bit of guilt was added to the rest and for a brief moment the barriers felt that power surging against them and lights flickered all around Sunnydale and there was that immense atmospheric pressure drop like right before a thunderstorm. 

She hadn't even realized she was on her knees or that fire was growing around bits of her hair until she smelled scorched fabric, heard Buff's words, and then looked up and found herself staring into the barrel of a terrified Riley's guns and that moment had Buffy likewise frightened. The barriers held, but they creaked and that sensation of dense organizing power lingered with the flickering worsening until Buffy whisper-yelled "Put the damn gun away" and when he did so Willow was able to make herself calm herself. 

"That is why I said no with the magic." 

Riley's gaze retained that wide-eyed fear and it never entirely went away as they'd arrived at Spike's crypt. 

------

She'd made the effort to defend Spike when Riley started trashing his stuff after they'd gotten into a fight, the moreso since Spike couldn't quite defend himself from humans. Buffy had been surprised at that, Spike moreso, and there was a brief flash of jealousy in Buff's eyes but that changed when Riley again pointed his gun straight at her. 

"Enough." 

The barriers shook again slightly and there was a flash of red in her eyes and his gun disassembled itself in a neat factory floor setting with parts cured of all signs of usage, the ammunition likewise brought in perfect fashion suiting an inspector and Riley stared in that same simple shock. 

"Please stop," her voice was hazy and she'd slumped against the wall. 

------

Seeing the power Willow caged erupting outward in those small ways was anything but comforting, especially when the lights flickered and that reminded them that as much as they were also used to it, they were literally in a tomb with a vampire who was staring at them and at the witch and next to a Slayer and a man with a gun when he had a chip that said he could attack her but not Riley or Willow (maybe) that it was the one slumped against the wall unconscious that frightened him most. 

"Right," Spike cleared his throat, then his shoulders would slump and that was when they would go into the basement. In the end, Buffy's Slayer stirred and she couldn't resist enjoying herself a little too much until she'd thrown the grenade, at which point Riley and his obnoxiously perfect wife and far too happy a life would slide out of all their lives and she was pretty sure it was for the last time (and she would later find out how badly wrong a view that was but a girl could still hope). Willow was still slumped against the wall, the lingering traces of that magic powerful in the air, and Buffy's Slayer wanted a stake or a sword and to attack her and that made Buffy draw back, and take Spike out with her. 

"You lied to me." 

Spike looked away. 

" 'M still a demon, you know. I kill my own kind. Got no regrets on that." 

He kept looking away. 

"Needed to remind myself I haven't lost everything." 

"You know," Buffy looked away. 

"This isn't working." 

Spike turned to look at her. 

"Slayer, don't-" 

"No. I mean that. I've been looking for an outlet for.....a lot of things, and I thought our sparring, our dances and all of that were enough." 

She looked back at the crypt. 

"Riley almost got eaten because I wanted to fight. I wanted to take a knife and kill Will because the Slayer hasn't had enough and if I start that with you, even if you fight back...." 

Spike paused. 

"Nobody stopped you from patrolling but you." 

"I know." Buffy scowled. "Consequences are still there, anyway." 

She went back in and put her friend on her back, carrying her away until Willow reawakened and it felt wrong. Willow's skin felt more like that of a machine than a person even when it still was hers, even if she could feel that breath and heartbeat. The small taste of action had made her Slayer-senses that much more enhanced, until Willow had finally stirred and they were able to walk. That shaken look was back. 

"Buff, I can't-" 

"If you're about to say you're going to leave again," Buffy's words were soothing, "Tara will literally drag you back. Dawnie will. They won't be alone." 

Willow frowned. 

"Everyone's in danger around me." 

"Welcome to the club," Buffy spread her arms wide. 

"That's what being the Slayer always meant for me." 

"Not like this-" 

"Yes, like this." 

Buffy met her gaze. 

"You know I work hard to downplay it but I can bench press a car and snap steel without breaking a sweat. I'm able to keep up with a car going fifty miles an hour likewise. I do that around an ordinary person I can easily kill them. That's at least part of what happened with Faith, back in the day." 

Her nose twitched. 

"I live with that each and every day. I have to watch hugging or touching people before I break a bone or two." 

Willow blinked. 

"As I said, welcome to the club." 

The hug they shared, then, was the first time since before she'd died that she'd felt like herself with one of her closest friends, in a real way, and while that bothered her a bit it was only a bit. This chance to live a normal life, the tension between that and the champing at the bit of her Slayer.....her fingers drummed. One of her best friends was newly married, their honeymoon scheduled for after the now-bigger ceremony that would be for everyone else and at least for Buffy hopefully offer some fodder for amusement, maybe. And then she'd blinked. 

"Has that happened a lot?" 

Willow gave her a very long disbelieving look, then sighed. 

"Off and on," was all she said as they walked back to the house together. 

"Spike and I broke up." 

Willow hissed, exhaling slowly. 

"Oh, Buff, I'm sorry." 

Buffy stood a bit still, hunched over, waiting for the carping comments but all Willow did was rest one of those strange-feeling hands on her shoulder. 

"Post-breakup ice cream?" 

"Yes, please!" 

They would walk together in peace and Buffy was simultaneously puzzled and even a bit annoyed that no vamp attacked the two of them and assumed it was the sight of the Slayer out and about. She would have been more than vaguely disturbed to realize that the kind of power Willow channeled had driven away all but the very most aggressive vampires, and those had been given still further deterrence by rumors the old Initiative had briefly returned. 

------

The post break-up ice cream was its own reward, and so too the kind of simple moments she hadn't entirely bothered to have. She'd spent so many months with Spike, it had occurred to her, that here it was 2002 and she had been deeply out of the loop. Actually talking with Will was now like pulling teeth, too. If it wasn't her doing the monosyllabic stuff as it had been at times in the past except when she'd pulled in Will with the thing she'd known and nobody else had, for a while, then it was Will who seemed distracted and wary. OK, sure, the magic thing had given her a massive wiggins and her Slayer had wanted to kill Willow on sight but it was Sunnydale. If she saw Anya it'd probably work the same way, right now. 

And her Slayer senses had been screaming at and about Willow for months, with nothing happening-

She saw the way Willow had frozen with her own spoon, her eyes wide. 

"Slayer senses were what?" 

Buffy flashed her a sickly skeletal grin. 

"Oh, I said that out loud?" 

"Yeah." 

"Well..." she cleared her throat. 

"For a while my Slayer senses have been screaming whenever you're here-" and as Willow prepared to get up she put her hand on her shoulder and pushed only to find to her surprise that Willow could and did throw off that hand. 

"Buff-" 

"Will, I haven't done anything to keep my Slayer happy except, uh, stuff. With Spike." 

Willow paused. 

"My Slayer's hyperactive. That's all it is. It has to be." 

Willow blinked, frowning. 

"You've kept Sunnydale safe this last year," Buffy scuffed the ground. "I didn't think through the needing actual Slayer stuff part. I even almost get why Faith started killing people for the Mayor." 

Willow paused again. 

"You do?" 

Buffy nodded. 

"And..." she paused again. 

"Thanks to you I've had this shot at a normal life." She took a deep breath. 

"It's been amazing. Good grades, a steady job, a lot of hot sex...." 

Willow raised an eyebrow. 

"Very Anya of you." 

Buffy flashed her the finger as they both giggle. 

"And I know I can do it," she said, clearing her throat. 

"That's a wonderful thing to know. Before this, I'd kinda forgotten it but...." she waved her hand. 

"Normal life does a lot of things. Requires a lot of things. I've figured out how to take care of bills, get along with coworkers, all that." 

She took a deep breath. 

"And what I've also found out is that normal life isn't exactly what I wanted." 

Willow blinked at that. 

"Unfortunately after keeping my Slayer under control for so long it's basically a time bomb waiting to go off and that means I'm going to have to be careful about it." 

Willow nodded. 

"OK." 

Chapter Text

Sunnydale Church 

-------

All things considered, Xander Harris mused, the bigger ceremony after the smaller wedding idea worked amazingly well. In the way that actually counted he and Anya were already Mr. and Mrs. Xander Harris and the two of them had made full peace with that. His worries....well, they'd proven pretty much unfounded. Marriage changed a few emotional factors, quite a few legal ones, but otherwise? It changed surprisingly little. Will going out of her way to solve jitters meant that Anya liked her now so he was no longer the guy lost in a tug of war where he kept himself quiet the better to not set off the extremely dangerous minefield. Whatever extremely dangerous magic thing that had all the demons giving Willow the look of a lawyer in a Jurassic Park film seeing a Tyrannosaurus was there wasn't too there to him, not that he could tell. 

If anything Will was more like her high school self in some ways with the dress sense of her college self, and of course the Tara of it all which the high school version wouldn't have said jack shit about if that was true or not. The worst thing that happened was the second rehearsal with everyone else there had his father vomit straight into Buff's purse, which was the act of a very foolish or drunken (since it was that jackass it was, of course, both) man. Beyond that the Harris clan as a whole was every bit as embarrassing and cringy as he feared but it amused him that they saw all those demons, many of whom were themselves frightening-looking to humans looking at his slender best friend as if she was Godzilla and they were humans running in Tokyo and it left them confused and less boorish than they might have been. It meant that the bigger ceremony gave Anya all that she could have wished, and in that, too, there was wisdom. 

It was one of the happiest points in their lives in a year that had seen them growing apart as much as they had toward the end of that first year of college. Tara had been quietly speaking to and with all of them in the last few weeks and pushing back against that, making the comparison. Xander also suspected given circumstances that Spike and Buffy had broken up and to his own surprise he actually felt bad for the vampire, an opinion he kept to himself. It didn't lead to a lot of drama at the ceremony, only to some painfully yearning glances that to his own surprise were shared by Spike toward Buffy and Willow toward Tara.

"Hmm." 

Anya looked over. 

"What?" 

"Oh nothing." 

And that was its own distinction, too. Since that talk and that ceremony he'd talked to Will a couple of other times and she'd quietly reminded him that as much as she didn't exactly like Anya that as her husband he should try to give her the same understanding that she gave Tara, when they were together. And when they were together, they had perhaps the best relationship he'd ever been in proximity to so he decided that was good advice. He wasn't entirely clear on why that same wonderful relationship had disintegrated but that didn't change that the advice Will gave him worked. And Anya had some idea that she'd given it and it deepened the initial kindness between them that was now a genuine friendship and he wondered at one level why it had taken so long, why things had gotten as bad as they did with Olaf (but if it hadn't they would have been up shit creek with Glory so it at least partially worked out). 

They had said the more formal vows, Anya wore this gorgeous dress even by human standards. She had been smiling with that broad sweet smile without the slightly manic edge of derangement that usually clung to other kinds of smiles she raised. They had woken up as husband and wife, they had made hot, sweaty monkey love as husband and wife, they had gotten back into the wedding dress and tux. He was also pretty sure at this point that when Will had stopped patrols it was because of why Giles was evasive and what had made him stop in Stockton when he'd done some reading on the Internet at things that were in Stockton and things had aligned up. 

It was also a surreal world when he thought of a vampire and a Slayer and decided he was on team Vampire but everything changed, in the end. Even he did. As much as he was still bitter and angry over Jesse and as much as he was the one who was only outmatched by Spike in sheer unrelenting hatred for that douchebag known as Angel, there were points where even he could admit as such. Of course it also helped when the other Slayer was Faith, known rapist and murderer, and where he had every reason in the world to distrust her. But it kept his best friend from having to patrol, she looked healthier, and they all were.....better, really. 

Dawn was dancing with her friend.....Ken? Kit? Something like that. Willow and Tara had finished a dance and were sitting and giggling together in that 'are they or aren't they together' thing. Giles was sitting on the side as well with his old flame Olivia from back in the day, the two sharing serious looks and that meant his mind went weird places so he looked away. Buffy was sitting at her table, nursing her drink and looking around and slightly twitchy. She wasn't exactly back doing patrols yet but Xander was pretty sure it wouldn't be that long. It had to be hard to just pick up everything after the world changed around you. Just dust yourself off, try to get back into life. 

For all of that she seemed at peace with herself. Spike....was drinking down blood and looking around himself and no, he was wrong, Spike wasn't sitting on his own, there was Clem and even his most boorish family liked Clem and that was the truest second ceremony miracle of them all. He snorted at that. 

"What?" 

"Oh nothing," he muttered, "just thinking about Clem actually being able to charm my dad. I didn't think anything could do that except one of Will's really dangerous fuck you up spells." 

Anya grinned. 

"Well, see? Not all demons are bad." 

"No, no they're not." 

And that too was a very fortunate thought, he realized, when he'd set up to live his life with someone who'd been a demon. That change had been quite literally hard fought. Months of patrolling with Spike even when super-witch Willow left them both feeling like 800 pound weaklings trying to keep up with Superman. No......the Phoenix, he mused. That was the analogy that had finally settled for him and there was some comfort in that, at first. Jean Grey. A perfect analogy for his best friend. And then for a moment he thought about one of those comics he kept that entire arc of, a woman in crimson and gold flying through space, a star eaten, a planet burned to ashes. 

And from then the lights flickering, the immense power that seemed like a brooding weight on Sunnydale, the kind of strange reactions Will had to magic these days and-

"You're pale. Is it because your dad's puking into something again?" 

"No." 

Anya turned to look at him. 

"It's because I got to thinking about this last year and magic and all." 

"You mean the Willow as time bomb capable of going off very messily at any moment thing?" 

He gave her a double-take as Anya's nose twitched. 

"I was worried about that for a while, and sad because there was only a single set of paths here. She snaps, Buffy has to take back the stake and then she has to make a terrible decision. And yet here we are" She squeezed his hand. 

"We're all here, nobody's even emotionally perturbed today. Except that one Chaos demon flirting with your cousin." 

Xander craned his head and made a single low whistle. 

"Feel sorry for the demon," was all he said. 

"Think about that." Anya mused. "Other than the incidents with those three idiots and the brief weirdness with Amy there hasn't even been any kind of major thing. Just life, with the occasional literal monster and demon in the shadows wanting to pick a fight. So many of you guys wanted a year that was about ordinary and.....we got it."

That smile hadn't faded. 

"And you know, this is one of the things I really did always want." 

"Hmm?" 

"The ability to be both things. The demon and the woman. Mrs. Xander Harris and Anyanka, patron saint of scorned women. Sharing stories of that long, storied career where I caused at least a few major parts of human history. I've seen the entire rise and fall of entire civilizations." 

Xander turned, listening to her in one of her more reflective moods. 

"Until now I always thought it'd come down a hard choice that would be harder to make. Anya or Anyanka, Mrs. Harris or the life I wanted to live. You weren't the only one feeling insecure." 

"And now?" 

She squeezed his hand. 

"A happy day. And a good one." 

She rested her head on his shoulder, eyes closed, smiling. 

"Our family is here.....and so are a bunch of demons and the broader Harris family." 

Xander laughed, sincerely, though most eyes were drawn to a budding brawl between two of the Harrises and two demons. Not even Xander could bring himself to care too much about that, those cousins were assholes who deserved whatever the demons they were picking fights with did to them, especially when the demons were twice their height and at least double their mass. 

Chapter Text

Sunnydale Cemetery 

-------

The fetters existed and they were strong enough that she was reclaiming her sense of self, and she was standing side by side with Buffy in one, under the light of the Moon. It was Buff's first patrol, her first willing patrol, since the beginning of all this, and they were standing side by side, the witch and the Slayer. The blonde and the redhead, both small, both slender. In both in different ways the capacities to tear down and remake and reforge worlds as they saw fit. The fetters held, and with her work and with her girl holding her hands and both of them sitting on her bed they were working to restrain this. She could sense, instinctively, that there was a secret to overthrow this power, that there was a connection between it and the fetters of iron that bound her flesh. She was working on it, Buff was finding herself all but dancing for joy at finally being uncaged. 

From standing side by side to walking side by side, and while Buff's senses registered the demon rushing toward them she did not entirely differentiate it after so long of training herself to ignore it from the screaming poised by the woman walking by her side until the thing was there, the waxy-skinned thing that had paused and then it had frozen when she turned her gaze to it. 

Oh Hell no. 

And then in a moment of desperation it had lunged straight at Buffy and had stabbed her-

Buffy Anne Summers felt the doctors' hands around her and was shouting and yelling. 

"Get off of me you bastards!" 

The needle went in to her thigh and she lost consciousness and fell forward 

Willow for her own part levitated and moved in front of the demon, which snarled and then decided 

Fuck it and tried to stab the invulnerable witch. The skewer skated off of her flesh but then a fleck of its venom slipped into Willow's open mouth as she growled in disgust and then slammed a fist hard enough into its skull to leave an impression of her knuckles, dropping it 

And she was standing in a landscape that was very different. An eternal classroom with two desks. Empty, except for one being, so very like her except that her veins were magma and so were her eyes and her hair trailed off in fire. 

Let me out. 

The woman was fettered by chains that bound her, tied as much as an Egyptian mummy save her mouth, which snarled at her. 

Neither you nor your whore can cage infinity. A human mind, no matter how mystically reinforced, cannot do it. I have had time to take shape, Willow. I am you, and I am not. Let me out. 

"No." 

It was the venom, and she could feel its poison at work in her and as her body stumbled and fell forward at the same time the demon did her hair began to trail in fire and the chains seemed to creak as the thing within them began to flex but then there was a symbolism of fire and Willow coughed and exhaled smoke that smelled foul and gasped, waving her hand in front of her face and muttering "Ew." 

She turned to the demon, and picked it up on one shoulder, Buffy on another, and gritted her teeth. Magic was dangerous for her, but if what she saw was anything like what was happening to her best friend she had a life to save. 

Buffy Anne Summers awoke in a common room in what was and wasn't the mental hospital she was in. It was, in all the particulars. The damned posters, the people standing around in pajamas talking incomprehensibly to things only they could see. The part that was off was her best friend sitting in front of her in a maxiskirt and boots, her hair short like the first year of college, and staring at that one poster with a frown on her face. 

"I always hated that thing." 

She turned to look at her. 

"Willow?" 

There was a simple question. 

"Yes, Buff." Her words were gentle, and soothing. "It's me. I remember when I was in this place, because my parents learned I might be gay. They sent me here, they..." she paused. 

"I hate it. I come here because you need my help." 

"I do?" 

"And as a favor to Hank and Joyce. I can't exactly turn down the people who treated me as family when my own didn't, at least until Tare and I met." 

There was that warmth on her face. 

"You were lucid," Willow's voice cracked, "and you're starting to fall back into it, Buff. This world of vampires and magic and monsters and hellgods." 

There was a scoff of disbelief. 

"I know my girlfriend's into the woo and the Wicca of it all but magic isn't real, not like that. It's skyclad ceremonies-" she saw Willow's leer, "and weed and a lot of food and booze with people who both believe it and are mostly in it for the booze and food." 

She shrugged. 

"She's a witch. I was raised a Jew and after my parents did that to me 'honor thy father' ain't it so I'm an atheist. You're in Los Angeles, in the Palisades, in the big city." 

Willow flexed her fingers. 

"Is this real?" 

"Yes, Buff, it's absolutely real. The doctors here are terrible, so you need to be able to accept that reality. I refuse to lose my friend to this idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer." 

She'd shaken her head and then pulled her into a hug, one that Buffy returned-as Willow sat staring at her. 

"This is really weird." She looked at the two of them. 

"Evidently whatever this is, it's like that thing Anya mentioned with that wish. I'm in a mental hospital with her in a hallucination." 

Her nose twitched and so did her eye. 

In the event, it wasn't that much for Tara and Giles to identify the demon in the basement, to get Spike's help to snap off its stingers. By then Willow was luckier- 

--------

She was in her house, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Back to Slaying. Her friend Willow the witch, not Willow the former mental patient and best friend, was here. Her friend whose very aura screamed with power and danger and she didn't even have Tara's sight or her gifts and that word 'aura' came to mind with what she saw. That woman was talking to Giles and Tara and her best friend wasn't here now. Now she was in a room with a doctor, a man with an angular face and a sour turn to his mouth. 

"Miss Summers," he looked at her. 

"The last year you told me about this elaborate experience with a Hellgod and that was admittedly a case where if you became lucid you could make an incredible set of stories out of this. But this year? Completely disjointed. The witch version of your best friend becoming some kind of superhuman monster? Three nerds with guns? Things have changed, you both move forward and back. You do not have to like the real world in every way. Most of us don't. I certainly don't." 

The sour twist became stronger. 

"In truth I don't understand the logic your parents use to send your best friend to reason with you. They do care, Mr. and Mrs. Summers want their little girl back. And here you have to choose. Reality, with all its ugliness, or this fantasy world and its dream." 

"Really?" 

"Yes." 

He'd nodded. 

"It's a simple choice." 

"And how would I do that?" 

"It's a brutal but simple treatment. Hunt down each of the bits of this delusion and kill them all. When they're gone, it will just be you that remains." 

For a moment the smile on his face reminded her of the Master but she'd blinked and nodded. 

"OK." 

------

Willow's hands trembled slightly and there was sweat on her brow, but she'd turned to Spike as she looked out. 

"Very cloudy day. You're lucky." 

"Lucky." 

Spike scoffed. 

"I was lucky, Red, she'dve never left me." 

Willow winced. 

"I'm sorry, Spike. But think of it this way, really. You can save her life." 

Spike blinked, nodding. 

"I want her back." 

Willow patted his hand in sympathy. 

"We'll get her back." 

Spike just kept his jaw taut and then he noticed not just the sweat but the impressions of that danger brooding and felt the demon within him curled up in a fetal position and keeping its hands in front of his face. Not for the first time the man felt that utter contempt. 

That left him in the room with Buffy, who was staring into space. 

"If we get this back, Buffy, I don't want to hide. I don't want to be your dirty little secret. You know Red's known this entire time. She was even that unhappy third wheel with us. It was me dragged into something like that, 'specially when I was single I would have been a right cunt. It's to her credit she wasn't." 

Buffy scowled. 

"Spike-" 

He shook his head. 

"It's a simple choice, Slayer." 

And with that he turned up and she saw the mug full of the antidote. She turned to the trash, then took a deep breath and let herself flex her muscles and go slack. 

-------

"Red?" 

Faith had expected a lot of things but she hadn't expected the witch, let alone seeing her wobbling. 

"Red, what's happening she had purged the venom but the aftershocks weren't so neat, not without some of that antidote for herself. She was back again, in the school. But now the thing within her looked like a version of herself clad in a lither version of the thing she'd seen in Xander's comic, a spandex outfit with long shoulder-length gloves, thigh-high bots of golden hue and a crimson body-mass that almost looked painted on. 

You can't hold me, because there is no me. The ways I am not you are that glimpse of infinity itself, the power poured into you, drinking your cells dry. You purged the venom. You need the antidote, you arrogant bitch, and I will not let this body die and deprive myself of a human host. 

Willow was lying on the floor, Willow was standing in a room and either way she screamed as her hair began to trail in fire and Faith was staring very, very wide eyed. 

"Oh this is bad. This is real bad." 

The semi-conscious Willow staggered back into awareness, one eye normal, one eye a shining pool of light. 

"Buff needs you." And then she staggered out and let herself visibly fly up into the air, trailing fire. 

"Oh fuck real bad, this is a fucking catastrophe." 

Faith took the Scythe and strapped it to her back and let her Slayer speed take her across town. 

-------

Willow floated into the basement where the demon looked up and its confidence and serenity became an utter moment of fear and terror, because the being floating toward him was a thing caught between what it could be and what it was. 

"You have something I need." 

A magma-veined hand reached for his other stinger and then with a single jerk of a wrist it cracked and the thing stared in simple mute silent terror as the witch lurched drunkenly up the stairs, pausing at a mug she barely registered the chains held. They held and yet this figure in that very form-fitting outfit that was a mirror to her in so many ways and yet she wasn't with the magma-veins was grinning at her. 

Make it, drink. I will give you power enough. You fettered me, you and the other witch. The fetters can hold but so much can seep through the hand that held the wall was magma-veined and with that impact on solidity she was soon striding upright with both eyes shining red. 

------

"Kill the fakes, reality will be real." 

That meant the first person entrapped was Tara, who'd stepped out of the bathroom and had frowned.

"Buffy, wh-" and then a hand was over her mouth and her head struck the floor and Buffy would sling her over her shoulder and put her down in the basement, tied and gagged. She had succeeded when her Slayer senses, so much stronger and keener now, registered footsteps and a voice saying "Buffy-" and that meant that she loped in an almost simian fashion out and that was what Xander Harris registered. 

"I really want Spike here right-" and then he was out with trivial, disappointing ease and dragged down, his head and Tara's resting on each other's shoulders. 

------

The potion was made and then Willow drank it, grimacing. 

"Goddess that tastes terrible." 

She paused, seeing herself in the mirror. The fire-hair was returning to normal but it took longer for the fire-eyes to do so and for the magma-veins to fade. They were still active when she registered something moving in the house with a desperate frenzy and then heard Dawnie scream. In that instant she ran out only to see Buffy loping with her sister on her back and had paused as her eyes went wider and she'd scowled. 

"Goddess damnit Spike." 

She took the antidote and put it not in a mug but in a larger beaker with a lid and followed Buffy downstairs. 

-------

She was standing, now, with Olaf's hammer in her hand, and held it first over Dawnie.  Her sister was teary-eyed and screaming through a gag but it wasn't her sister, it was a hallucination and then she turned, registering what was standing at the doorway to the basement. A menacing element extended from it, magma-veins glimmering light in the dark basement, visible in the deeper artificial night. 

"Buffy," Willow huffed, "you need every square inch of your ass kicked." 

The Slayer within her rejoiced and she'd turned to her only to have Willow take a desperate breath, close her eyes, and then telekinesis floated over the beaker, opening it, forcing open her jaw and with a whispered pair of words of "Forgive me." The potion drained into her mouth and in that hospital she had looked at the vision of her parents that was there, her eyes swimming with tears at the sight of Joyce Summers, alive, well, healthy. Not dying of something so cruel as an aneurysm on a couch, the kind of thing where supernatural destiny and super-strength couldn't fix it because nothing could. The hammer went slack for a moment and then normal Willow was there in a red pantsuit with golden trimming and the strangest part for her was that in the end, in this mental hospital, as in real life, she was going to find herself facing Willow Rosenberg. There was the one in that hospital, her best friend, dressed in a pantsuit and there after her parents left. Willow if she had been a normal person, Willow, there instead of herself alone, speaking quietly and the person who'd been there with her in normal health and institutionalized for much harsher reasons than she had, the kind that had led to that removal. And outwardly she could see the same knife she'd waved at her own family, the other

Buffy felt that same feralness calling to her and then to everyone's visible shock Willow had risen to her feet, the bruise on her jaw gone, and her eyes were blazing pools of light. 

That's all you get. 

"Calm down, Red." 

Faith didn't entirely register it but the sharp edge was facing her and the fire-eyed Willow had turned toward her, and then toward Buffy. 

You have no idea what you've done, Buff. 

And then she fell on her side, the magma-veins and fire eyes fading and Faith kept staring at her. 

"Hey, Xan-man, you get the feeling we're starting to live a comic, not just read it?" 

Eyes swiveled to her. 

"What comic?" There was a slightly high-pitched dread in that voice for a moment. 

Faith pointed to the streaks of soot where the fire had touched clothes. 

"The Dark Phoenix Saga. Red firey hair, flying-" 

Tara swiveled her head. 

"F-Flying?" 

"From my apartment, yeah." 

"Since when the fuck were you in town?" 

Faith gritted her teeth. 

"G-Man and a coven of super-witches had a very bad future vision." A deep bitterness crept into her words. "They wanted me freed to do something just like what sent me here. Stab a man to death for a Mayor who wants to be a demon so he can ascend? Wicked evil bitch-monster of death. Shank a witch begging someone to kill her so she can die as yourself?" The acidic tone was deeper. "Well then you're a fucking hero." 

Tara's gaze was wide-eyed and horrified. 

"Faith-" 

She looked at her. 

"Y-You won't kill her." 

"I know what I felt, T. If that's what she becomes in that vision you don't need to worry, I don't think anything can kill that." 

Willow remained unconscious, as did B. 

-------

And that was how Rupert Giles was forced to confess to an angry screaming B while Tara and Dawn both insisted very strongly that Faith sit across the room from a very awkward Red who was feeling the scorch marks on her back from her fire-hair with an adorable confusion. Confusion....and a kind of deep bleakness in her gaze that left a chill Faith observed more often than not in T's, an edge of panic that was there and showed T was nobody's fool but of course she wasn't, Red had picked her. 

"You brought Faith here to murder my best friend!" 

"I brought her here as a last ditch possibility to save the world. That weapon she has lays low gods. Nobody wants Willow dead. The thing in those visions is not Willow, it's her body run by vast power with enough of humanity about it to be worse than something like Glory and no longer human. It would be like Faith slaying one of the Scourge." 

"The what?" 

"A group of demons that consider themselves demon supremacists. Dress like Nazis." 

Willow had a sudden very horrified look as her eye twitched. 

"Y-You called the Jewish woman a Nazi?" 

Giles paused. 

"No." He cleared his glasses. 

"As I said, last resort, if all else fails." 

He turned and looked at first Tara, then Willow. 

"But then you'd know more than the rest of us, wouldn't you?" 

Tara met their gaze with her own steel in her eyes. 

"I do, yes." Her answer was reluctant. 

"I do." 

She cleared her throat. 

"Will's absorbed a source of infinitely powerful magic. It was eating her alive from within. We did healing magic together that restrained it. We are still doing it. I am getting her back, that will make all of this irrelevant." 

Faith saw Red staring at her. 

"You saved my life." 

Eyes turned to her and then to Faith, as she'd goldfished for a moment. 

"I did, yes." She finally recovered. 

"Why? The magma-veined me was the thing you saw in whatever brought you here." 

Faith exhaled slowly. 

"Yes." 

Willow leaned forward, a strange kind of sympathy leavened with a stranger hope. 

"You've changed, Faith." 

Faith had no idea that if someone other than Angel said that, one of the people with the stronger grudges against her, someone she'd been brought here with a good possibility of having to kill said this, that those words would feel like more than a platitude but they did. 

"Why are you being nice to the murderer hired to kill you?" 

Red turned to stare at lil' D. 

"She doesn't want to." 

"Oh that's great, she feels guilt. We'll make her a saint." 

Willow exhaled slowly. 

"Guys, I've been dealing for the entire year with way too much magic. Why do you think I stopped active spells and have been limited to about one a week?" 

The silence that followed was deafening. 

"Tare and I have been working hard to put restraints on all of this, because if we don't, as Giles said, the alternative is something just human enough to be in the uncanny valley but with infinite power and the only result of that is a very bad thing." 

She winced. 

"If I lose that fight, if what Tare and I do don't work, I hate to say it but what would be wearing my face would need to die. The world's existence would be left in the hands of something insane with unfettered power and something much worse than Glory." 

T flinched a bit. 

"If Faith did kill that version of me, it wouldn't be murder. In any real sense I'd already be dead." 

The silence that followed was bleaker. 

"I won't accept that." Faith heard T and B both speak in the same tone, as Xander and even Anya nodded. 

"Well if we're all lucky then what Tare and I are doing will work, will hold, and none of this will ever come up." 

"And that means back to jail with you-" 

Willow stood up, scowling. 

"Xander that's enough. I know you have reason to hate her, I do too. But it's my fault, not hers, that I went far too overboard with the magic and made a monster that's very barely caged at best. Don't take it out on Faith that I flew too close to the Sun." 

Silence lingered. Faith kept staring at her. These were the parts that had her keep expecting to wake up in her jail cell in Stockton, having read a little too obsessively the one set of X-Men graphic novels in the jail library until it was merging with life. 

She looked at all of them. "We gave Angel another chance and he proved worthy of it, and he killed more people than Faith did and did things just as bad as what she did. In the good scenario where none of this is an actual possibility, this is her big second chance." 

She was relieved that only B scowled completely at that, even the Xan-man more thoughtful.