Chapter Text
Slayer Organization Central Command, Scotland, 2004
-----
Meeting up with Faith had been a challenge. Seeing Rosenberg again, the witch growing powerful enough to have at a single stroke overthrown tens of thousands of years of consistent power against the Dark, altering the world, and magic, more than any had dared to dream they could be altered....that was a greater challenge. They were here, now, in the world. A new Council, a new age. Magic tensing in the ways he felt as dim embers but he, like everything else, felt that growing weight of power and majesty veiling a girl who had seemingly fallen back in time. From a drab military-like appearance of an older age back to bright colors, from a somber and more to a point masculine appearance to one defiantly feminine, even if parts of the scars so long-veiled showed. More to the point.......she talked, now, as she had come close to stopping outside a few, babbling in a way that brought smiles to the face of her friends.
And she was right in front of him, the inaugural meeting done.
"For what it's worth," he'd found it in him to say, "I'm sorry. I did think I was doing the right thing."
Those green eyes lingered on him in a long stare, not unlike those her ex-girlfriend gave him, though rather less hostile and with an edge of impending murder. For so long the Scoobies had spoken of dear Tara Maclay as a figure virtually saintly, and he knew there was at least some truth to it. She had saved all their lives, and she had saved the world in quietness, even if the greatest danger it faced was in his view every bit one of her making. And yet from the first when she'd seen him that aura hovered then as it had come perilously close to. It was that further irony, that of the two witches it had not been the monster in the making that fell into darkness, but the good witch, who kept the nickname and finally embraced it with a savage irony. The gaze was....
"You're not angry?"
Then it became every bit as hostile.
"Believe me," her lips were thin and her teeth gritted, "if it were purely up to me I would not want you here. You and Giles are the only Watchers with connections to the old Council to survive the war with the First."
He flinched.
"Were any others, even dear Quinton," and the tone of venom in that had a beauty truly British in its understatement, "alive you would not be here."
"You accept that Wells bastard when he used the same-"
And then he was against a wall with that touch still more powerful than it had been when it had first been used against him, the deceptive gentleness against an iron strength that could rip him limb from limb with a micro-flex of the wrist.
"I took away from an enemy a useful weapon and found someone I can tolerate in small doses as long as he's far away from me. You have years to go, Mr. Wyndam-Pryce, before you even get to the point of Andrew Wells."
He'd nodded, then, and she set him down and then stalked off with a barely-hidden fury that roiled out from her like a thunderstorm, as frightening and as deadly as that day on the Bluff had been. His eyes narrowed when Martinez, the most disliked of all the Potentials and a much bigger braggart and danger as an activated Slayer almost materialized from shadows and pulled her by the arm into a quiet but active conversation that made him raise an eyebrow. He would turn then to see Tara Maclay looking at him far more openly hostile than Willow Rosenberg dared to do, and when he opened his mouth she stormed past him, as her gaze became still more dour at the other woman talking to her ex, the woman briefly looking over to see her and giving her an ugly and utterly insincere smile. Rosenberg for a moment met his gaze and there was a single instance of very human awkwardness between them, one of the few truly human moments they'd have for a long time, and then the moment passed.
Christmas Eve, 2000
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It was a sober and a sobering thing to realize that the Supreme Court had handed a man the Presidency, and a man at that barely more intelligent than a shaven chimp. That was Giles' view rooted in a deep contempt for a family with connections to the old DRI (though not, as far as the Watcher's Council knew, to the new version). Wesley could not deny the truth in those words, but he was also musing on what had happened in that past month. In the wake of the destruction of the Sisterhood of Jhe and the emergence of newer, more powerful vampires as fledglings and minions, Wesley could not deny to himself that the Council had proven entirely right in its view of what had to be done about that monster building to monstrosity in plain sight. It meant everything to him that she was a woman cursed to enter womanhood too soon, that she had been denied a childhood and that ordinarily she might have been taken in and honed as a great weapon on the side of right.
And it was the version of her with long brown hair and in those brightly colored overalls and sweater that stood by him and looked at him with desperate eyes, too. Angel had reported more than once seeing the face of a dead technopagan and others of his former victims. He had told him that, and Giles, and the other man had almost staked him at mentioning the name and he understood that. It seemed the O'Hara girl had started with that and had shamefacedly admitted that she'd been dealing with visions of the dead more than once, too. To Angel and O'Hara there was something wrong in this. To him......to him there were souls pleading for the undoing of what had been done.
Please Mr. Wesley, you have to help me.
The girl was on her knees, hands clasped.
My mind isn't me anymore, the magic's taking me. Kill me, please!
The very small part of him that dealt with magic felt a chill when the shadowless dead walked and spoke, and a chill of foreboding at the frequently repeated request. It was a little too convenient that a figure like this would offer him what he'd become convinced he should do. Still moreso when he had found not just a spell, butthespell, and when it would become an easy thing. To his right was the Dagger of Kandar, one of the weapons that the late Kendra Young had brought with her. Against the invulnerable monster that flew around in the skies and which had rejected one fumbling overture of an invitation (and it would be this, in the eyes of his contemporaries, that would lead to the view that what he was going to do tomorrow morning would be the reaction of a jilted would-be lover). In but a day he would regret not listening to those instincts, to the quiet frenzied work by others.
He would regret all the more not listening to the first time the Slayer he was supposed to Watch had gone to him. She had said, eyes slightly wide "I saw Diana. She tried to..." she dry-swallowed. "Things are kinda bad here, Dubya."
He'd not listened, because these were the words of a child who knew what the Council had also known, and because he could see a quiet desperation and fear in those eyes, a fear that neither the werewolf she'd become so close to nor the witch who hovered around her like a longer-haired Xander with breasts and curves and equal entitlement to anything and everything she deemed hers in a woman she wanted could fix.
Initiative Base, Christmas Eve, 2000
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"Dr. Walsh."
She saw the sneering face of a white-haired man, one strangely and unpleasantly familiar.
"Mr. Vice President."
He looked at her.
"In the timeframe that you have been given oversight into this wasteful exercise in vanity your facilities have been destroyed twice, you hemorrhage soldiers at a rate that would make the former Soviet Army blush or have you shot out of hand."
She stiffened.
"The President and I agree that Clinton's overreach is not something to be tolerated, or accepted. And overreach very clearly describes-" and then she saw footage of the flying form of the being Sunnydale, even the newspapers, were now calling the Red Witch, their very own home-grown superhero, "a program that makes someone this dangerous and loses all pretense at control of that someone. You have a year and three months, doctor, to wrap up the entire program, disband it, and then utterly destroy it."
She'd blinked at that.
"Mr. Vice-President!" Her protest was sincere and wounded. The pale-haired man's face was in its trademarked ugly scowl as he leaned forward.
"I made my point, Doctor. We have thrown good money after bad and with something unpredictable and dangerous, that we cannot control and where we are fortunate beyond words that it has remained on the side that thinks monsters deserve destruction because they are monstrous. We are going to be making good use of our assassins to target various leaders of terrorist organizations, and that program has born plentiful fruit indeed."
He looked at her and then shook his head.
"Your demon-catchers have delivered a single superhero to the world, a force of power that no power we have short, perhaps, of the kind of absolute destruction that can only be unleashed at a price of destroying the world by means no less certain to these supposed world-ending crises that exist around these Hellmouths, can scratch, let alone counter. She escaped your control, and more power to her for that."
She squawked.
"Mr. Vice President, both parties approved the decision then!"
He nodded in a single motion.
"So they did, and the President has other priorities. There are enemies of this country who deserve a greater focus of our efforts, military and otherwise. Scores to be settled. Demons and vampires are not in that list."
And then the screen went black, as Maggie Walsh formed her right hand into a fist and slammed it down.
"f*ck!"
Restored Mansion of Angel, Christmas Eve
-------
Three days and two nights ago he'd had a small housewarming party with Buffy and Willow and Tara and Oz, just the group of them. The mansion, rebuilt and his invitation given. Rebuilt and improved, the full weight of the funds he'd accumulated as a monster making a very shallow dip into them, shallow enough that in a month's time he wouldn't have even noticed. There was lighting now, there was electricity....and there was a vampire sitting in the darkness as a figure who looked the very image of Janna Kalderash stalked around him.
Redemption is a dream,she'd said.A dream for humans. A vampire with a soul?
She'd scoffed.
How lame is that! You're not a man, you're a monster, the soul does not change that. It does not undo the blood, it does not undo what it was to snap someone's neck. You know all that I have said these last months is the truth. I and all the others like me.
Months, and how ironic those months, of a demon plagued by demons of his own, and the last embers of the demon's defiance led him to snarl a question.
"Why is there only one of you at a time?"
She'd shaken her head then with a fine look of scornful wrath.
Even now you fail to understand. You don't deserve the plaudits for murder of parades of your victims. The only thing you can do, Angelus, is die.
"I didn't escape Hell for nothing."
And the last embers died when Jana Kalderash became something very distinct, a shimmering diaphonous mass of power and force that seared its way into his presence. The voice was now utterly inhuman, a deep reverberance that shook the very elements of the building.
You truly think you escaped Hell, little vampire? I set you free. You did not get out, I released you the better to DESTROY YOU.
And then it was Janna Kalderash again, as she smiled and looked at him.
You and the Red Witch both. Two great enemies, things that should not be. Mockeries of the demon and the human condition, respectfully. One a vampire gifted with immortality and brute force beyond even the likes of Heinrich Nest or Kakistos to wield, pouting in the darkness. Beautiful girlfriend who is so devoted to you she risks her own family of choice, a witch you tried to murder who aided you at cost and has found to her own dismay that she likes you! And what have you done with it? Sat in the darkness weeping like an overgrown infant. And the Witch? For her death will be a kindness. It will spare her a fate worse than itself, and that it will be to my own gain, of course, is no great loss either.
You must die, Angelus. Die, and die permanently.
A lonely and a fearful fight with his demons.....and then he bowed his head, and the thing in the shadows smiled and it was back to being a glimmering manifestation of eldritch power and rippled away.
Rosenberg Apartment, Christmas Eve night
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It was the greatest irony of them all that the point that tilted friendships to a path that would lead to near-destruction over the course of the next year, and to the final break with someone who had continued to debate her choices began when a Watcher, invited in as if he were a vampire, had taken a blade and prepared it, and a ritual. A still-greater one that in her bedroom above as he was below a witch waited in the darkness, her aura-vision telling her that she could not sleep this night even if she had been inclined to, which she was not. She had taken the longest of everyone to warm up to Kendra Young for fear of her doing what it was she'd felt in Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. Even Oz thought that it was the same jealousy that had marred things with him for so long before she'd finally warmed up to him, and to at least seeing the girl she loved happy. Tara knew one thing above all others, that Willow Rosenberg's life was not a mistake, and that there were ways around it. Murder was not one, even if it could work, and she knew one of those spells she'd found, and what it could do.
And the appraising stare that Wesley had directed to Willow enough that it had made Faith defensive of her before she could get to it had led to a deep sinking feeling that he was going to try something. Faith was still out on patrol, that night, though by a further irony she would arrive in but a few minutes.
-------
In theory it was simple. Brute force would not work, magic could. In reality....Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was nobody's fool anymore than Quentin Travers was. It was not the girl's fault that she had become the thing she had, but an atom bomb was not at fault either for endangering the world. The Watcher's Council could not put the nuclear djinn back in its bottle but they could prevent the eruption of the weapon that all indications pointed was a future aspect in Sunnydale. It was not lost on Wesley either that if Kendra had actually tried to kill her, that it might have created the very problem it was supposed to forestall.
Neither was it lost on him that it would majorly complicate the problems facing them with the Mayor. The Red Witch was an invincible juggernaut, none of the rest of them were. But every Superman or Supergirl had a Kryptonite factor, and it was at least hoped that this spell would count. By further irony it had been Tara Maclay who had discovered it, in the course of her research and the counterspell. He knew nothing of this, and he had no particular reasons to suspect that Tara might have seen something..... off about his aura, and what that meant. Nor that she had been faking sleep and extending readings to give him essentially the rope to hang himself. None of them could have predicted the ultimate outcomes here, nor the ironies that a spell most infamous for its role in creating the very time bomb it was theoretically meant to forestall years later was spoken as brilliant green light shimmered around the Red Witch.
Willow felt the blankets and the way things were with her for the first time in years and thought that it was the cruel nightmare again and curled over in her sleep. That gave Wesley pause for a moment, and he knew that this was not a monster, again. This was a human being twisted and warped into something that should never have been allowed to exist, in a manner she had not asked for, but to sit back and let the monster take shape was to leave the Council complicit in the hubris and incompetence of the Sunnydale gang, as he'd thought of them. And as it was, the invulnerability was gone, so he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and raised the Dagger of Kandar, the weapon that Kendra Young had refused to use. Willow woke up when Tara's voice rang out with a resounding "Vincere!" and then she realized that Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, effete Watcher, the man notorious for inability to even slightly get the least shred of respect for any of them, was frozen in place holding a dagger over her and that it wasn't in fact a dream.
His mouth opened and then shut and then he turned green when he saw the tattoo on her wrist, and then his words were a near-whisper.
"I did have some spiel about only following orders prepared but...."
"Solutum."
The binding cracked and then in a single slight motion he was slammed against the wall so hard he passed out and he had the first of multiple concussions in his lifetime, as Willow had moved with a speed fast enough that he hadn't even registered it, not until the hand had touched him hard enough to leave a deep bruise in the shape of a hand on his chest. And that was when Faith, who'd heard the sounds of a struggle, had found the Watcher in the midst of that stabbing as Tara had stepped in and acted and as the Red Witch had slammed him against the wall with a flick of her wrist. He'd had just enough time to look up and see her hand moving toward him when there was a smacking sound and he fell, by which point Faith went to the phone and called the man she was entirely happy of, after this, to think of as her Watcher.
-------
Only a few minutes later the Scooby Gang arrived loaded for bear, as a vampire skulked out into the darkness, haunted by misery and ready to end it all. It was then that Tara Maclay saw the image of the smiling face that was once Willow, the long-haired brunette in bright red and yellow sweater and red overalls, the serpentine grin and the aura of malice that turned into a look of contempt as the figure pointed with its pointer finger right in time for the Scoobies to witness it, and a Willow who was staring at the vision of her past self in genuine unadulterated shock matched by the rest of theirs.
You had one job, one job!
"You." Tara's voice was menacing.
"What are you?"
The thing had sighed, then, and as it had at least the satisfaction of Angelus's destruction it revealed its true face for the first time, a howling mass of light that was not light, a glimmering diaphanous manifestation of a concept, loops that were sharp edges, wheels within wheels, eyes within eyes.
As I have told you many times. I am the evil that men do, the malice within their hearts. The power and majesty of the darkest impulses and thoughts of mankind and demonkind alike. Before this miserable mass of mud was formed I was there, and I shall be there when the dying Sun casts red rays upon your bones, demonkind departed and mankind as extinct as the dinosaurs that once trod this world in majestic splendor, hunted by demon-dinosaurian creatures like dear Kenneth.
Faith blinked.
"The dino's name is WHAT?"
The First Evil scowled and she stood defiantly.
It matters not. One of the two great swords is already knocked from the hands of the Powers That Be.
A sudden stillness in the room and then it was the image of Spike standing in front of them, a sad*stic leer on his face.
Angelus will never become the great weapon of good he has the potential to be. He will fall, and fall, and fall. Even now he goes to that cliff of destiny, to await the dawn and the Sunrise. For months I have whispered into his ear the thoughts that his own mind tells him, reinforcing it. The faces of those who speak the most deeply, in all times, and in all ways. Angelus shall be dead by dawn, and then-
And then it was the vampiric Tara who slouched toward her counterpart with predatory gazes and her tongue flicking from her lips in a fashion that left the true Tara ill-at-ease to see it.
One down, and one to go.
-------
It was the point that marked the true-rupture, in a way, though only two women understood that. One had seen the casual malice that so-called good presented to the woman she loved and was willing, now, to make a Faustian pact of her own to avoid it. The rest had seen the reminders that the Watcher's Council had, after all, dispatched the late and much-lamented Kendra Young on a mission she had spurned. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce had not, and in the end that discovery and Willow's vulnerability affected them as morbidly as did her awareness, when Tara had told her and the look of grief that crossed her face, that two hours offeelingthings would fade. She retained her ability to fly and she took advantage of that, slipping out the window while everyone else but herself and Buffy ringed the Watcher, finally tying him up in a way that nobody as devoutly orthodox a follower of the traditional ways of the Council would be able to escape, Giles' expression a morbid satisfaction.
By then, an hour later, with his ears ringing and his face marked with a bruise to match the one on his chest they were out into the night.
------
Flight was very different when her skin could feel the coolness of the air and she was freezing cold and wet, the water covering her in ways she was unprepared for when she flew through a cloud in a rush to get to Kingman's Bluff. Buff was following her but she could not quite match the speed she could in the air given the layout of both Sunnydale and that her Slayer instincts would lead her to face vampires. And that was when Willow Rosenberg landed to find herself facing not one but three dozen figures, all of them eyeless and clad with dark robes and wielding savage weaponry. She was not invulnerable, now. And before them all was the face of the past her and a savage grin.
Two birds with one stone.
It was their first experience with the Harbingers of Death and where the future Willow would fight them with invulnerability and find them very straightforwardly easy to destroy, the past Willow found herself struck and bleeding and the vampiric power within Angelus kindled in hunger at the smell of that blood. Her face was cut on one side and one of her arms was cut, exposing not bone with the depth butmetaland producing distinctclangsthat left notches on the blade. And her fists struck with blows that fractured skulls and brought down things that did not bleed as humankind did, the bloodloss making her woozy and the wooziness meaning that where a telekinetic sphere might have made much shorter work a vulnerable and all too human Willow couldn't focus enough to recall it.
That was when she'd heard Buffy's angry shout "Leave my friends alone!"
Angel had turned, then, and had thought for a moment. He would die, still, yes, and that death was deserved. The woman who had re-ensouled him and that permanently did not deserve that as a reward for so selfless a gift, whatever her own thoughts of why she did it, and so he and she joined her in bringing down the last of the Bringers, the twelve taking a stubbornly long time to go down by comparison to a Slayer with a few more years' experience under her belt. A brutal fight and then Willow was on her side, staring as she fell into the grass, paler. Adrenalin was a hell of a drug and the bloodloss had caught up to her, the older her standing near her and looking at the vampire.
A war won, years before it starts, without a shot fired.
She knelt by the bleeding witch, a look of intertwined mocking and an almost-sincere regret on her face.
Death truly will be a kindness to you that life will not.
And then Angelus put his fist through her head and stared when there was nothing, as the true face of the First Evil restored itself and turned.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The First vanished, then, and as Willow murmured semi-deliriously a healing incantation that would close her wounds and leave her on the bloodstained grass, staring in the direction where the Sun would rise, Buffy and Angel stepped away for a moment, though neither of their eyes fully left her.
"It's not wrong," he'd sighed.
"I have done enough evil in my life that there's only one way to atone for it."
Dawn, looming, and then something strange happened. A cloudless night began to see a great set of clouds taking shape, a mirror, after its fashion, of the storm that Willow had summoned in that first unintentional display of what her magic could truly do. A set of clouds, on what had been an unusually hot and warm Christmas Eve and had remained so that night.........and as the time arose for the Sun to rise the snow began to fall, and it was something that led both Angel and Buffy to look up in mutual astonishment.
-------
An hour later, after the uproar that had broken out in Sunnydale, Quentin Travers, who had had a very good day as far as the Watcher's Council went received a call from Rupert Giles, listening to the man screaming more like Ripper than the orthodox Watcher he acted as these days. After the fifteenth 'f*cking' in a Faulknerian masterpiece of a bloated sentence he'd sighed.
"No, Rupert. I meant every word I told her the day the helicopter thing happened. We are at peace with what it is that you and yours do, and we extend that peace as long as it can be maintained."
He repeated it twenty times and when he put the phone down delicately, he then leaned forward and banged his head against his desk muttering "f*ck you Wesley" each time he did for a quarter of an hour.
------
The Scooby Gang found red snow with a deeply gashed Willow lying in it, new scars joining older ones, the healing-incantation sealing the wounds but the combination of cold and the heat from the spell making her sick enough that she was glad it was a holiday and she wouldn't miss work. And in its own twisted way for illness serving as a reminder that she reallywashuman. Flashes of metal where bone should have been remained visible, the cuts very deep, and the fallen eyeless corpses of monsters that were outwardly human in some ways but the dark purplish-black blood that stained the snow no differently to Willow's red showed that truth. They arrived there, too, to find an Angel standing in the snow, which had collected on him as if he were a statue, eyes closed, and lost to both the depth of thought and of an understanding, and a determination, that had grown.
It was the vampire who picked up the witch and held her bridal-style, something that Oz had not objected to. The wolf was in the throat and if he had to hold her with that much blood flavoring things the wolf would rise and rise as a monster seeking to devour anything in its path.....and it was a long walk from Kingman's Bluff's top to the car, and then an equally long drive, none of which would work if he went fullAmerican Werewolf in Londonon things. And there was the guilt, too. He had met Veruca a second time, and they had talked of wolfy things, the memory of the dark-skinned Tibetan woman leading him to that intriguing encounter. He had done nothing wrong, he kept telling himself, but he had not told Willow about the other werewolf he'd met nor the ease with which they interacted and he knew without having to know it that such secrets would always come out, and come out at the worst possible time.
They went not to her apartment but to his mansion, while Tara and he drove to Willow's apartment and arrived back with a change of clothes and it was he who went through the trouble of bathing her and bandaging her and letting her dress herself, haunted by the secret guilt and the intertwined delight and the greater worries of the way his wolf in the throat longed for another wolf like his. If his touch lingered longer and he kissed her with an unusual ferocity that left her questioning and then meant that she undid the bandages, showered to remove the smell, and looked at him questioningly afterward, well that was his affair.
She'd certainly enjoyed the way he'd relieved that guilt, and arrived flushed and looked almost ashamed at others, not that they really noticed. Nor was it the awkwardness that indicated they very much were aware, because-
They'd paused. Angel had just finished a long-winded explanation of things and Buffy had sat down hard on a couch, looking devastated.
"But I don'twantyou to go."
He'd knelt by her.
"I have to do this, Buffy."
Their eyes met.
"I know what we have with each other, and for each other. There will always be a part off my heart that loves you. Nothing will ever change that."
And then he'd sat back on the ground beneath her, a symbolism that was not lost on anyone, as Xander and Giles gave him stony looks.
"I've done very many evil things, and I know that more than anyone. But I can't fix them if I just wallow in my own grief here, let alone...."
He was quiet for a moment. And then there was a moment of disorienting effect as a sensation of vast and primordial power and something new as the morning dew set in, and into his realm strode the serpent, clad in clothes that wouldn't have looked out of place on a gangster in the 1930s. A long black trenchcoat and a black fedora.
"Who the Hell are you?"
Two Slayers asked it, while the bandaged Red Witch could feel the traces of pain from her injuries ebbing, humanity reasserting itself, the healing spell regrowing flesh over the metal and where the other deep cuts had struck again, and that pain too ebbing.
I am Whistler, one of the Powers That Be.
His gaze lingered on Cordelia Chase longest of all of them, the girl arriving last and with the greatest confusion, having spent a merry Christmas Eve hanging out for the first time in a long time with Harmony Kendall, the other girl missing her and letting some of her contempt file away in a moment of all too human longing. That meant her bemusem*nt at a bandaged Willow was as much there as the statements about some kind of evil thing that walked as the evil dead, and she remained, as yet, blissfully ignorant of the tied up Watcher in Willow Rosenberg's apartment.
"Why are you here?"
That was her question, asked as if it were something more than herself speaking.
I am the architect of the Balance. In my blood flows equally that of good, the Powers Above, and of evil, the Powers Below. Mine the power and the product of a union stranger by far than that of a Slayer and a Vampire.
His gaze lingered meaningfully on Buffy and Angel in that moment.
And I speak here as the architect of the balance to note that moments of destiny are fixed things, things that cannot be altered. Your destiny, Liam O'Connor, is to become a champion of the right. In your veins, cold and undead though they be, a force for righteousness. Into the valley of the shadow you had to fall, the better to rise, for in that depth you would understand what it is your gift to fix as none else can. Even an ensouled vampire experiences emotions at the start in the abstract where they are not the negative ones and the harsher ones.
Buffy looked at him.
"So he does have to go, then?"
Her voice was a small one. Whistler nodded.
I am sorry, Slayer, but he does, yes. There are greater things at stake here than the course of love between two hearts.
He turned to the flushed, bandaged witch and her equally flushed werewolf boyfriend, his gaze flickering to a moment at the brunette witch who stared at him with hostility leavened by fear.
Destiny has great things in store for all of you. But beware the partial fragments of the future sent by those who intend harm.
Willow squinted while Tara looked away.
Visions are truthful things but many a time they lack context, and what seems ironclad in one way is sent so as to bring forth the Croesus moment, that the prophecy of a fallen empire indeed brings the fall of the empire seeking the fall of its foes. You, all of you, are the great foes of the darkness, pure and unalloyed. Your greatest strengths, as difficult as it will seem, are each other. You are a gestalt, and you shall always be. It is for this reason that your foes, and those allies who are little better than they, seek deliberately and by accident to divide you.
At that his gaze lingered for a long time on a Dark Slayer who looked at him utterly unrepentant.
"Why us?" That question from Willow drew his gaze and he looked at her in a different way.
His lips curled into a smile and he sang a stanza in a lyrical voice much deeper than his speaking voice, one that lingered in the thoughts and dreams of those who heard it.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'
-------
Others would file out of the mansion, leaving Buffy and Angel to a tearful farewell that saw embraces, a desperate clasp in the bedroom, Angel promising her that his mansion was always open to her and to her friends as a place to get away when he was out, that it was a lingering take of his love for her. Kisses, and the promises that "I will not be far away. I'm going to Los Angeles."
She'd looked at him, then, as he'd brushed her hair slick against her head with her sweat.
"You went there this last summer and came out of it stronger than ever. I have a feeling it's where I'm meant to go."
She looked at him and they went to each other again for the last time for a long time, and the sense of heartbreak at his death would be matched by a lesser shade when he would be gone before morning in a car as deeply tinted as Spike's driving slowly and making a point to slide into some of the denser freeway traffic the better to find his way to a building where amidst a localized bit of cloud-cover marked by Whistler in one of the smaller demonstrations of his powers, he would find himself setting up Angel Investigations with a thoughtful look.
--------
Oz would find it in himself to slip out that night, Willow too exhausted and weary for much. The combination of having and losing a brief moment of humanity put her into the kind of shadows he could not lift, but he knew that Tara Maclay, as much as he trusted her even after the revelation that was not really a surprise that a runaway who'd fled an abusive family had changed her last name the better to hide from them, and that was what led him to Veruca, what led him to the start of the fatal mistake that built up over the next month into an increasingly pleasurable and painful set of things. She was there, in the cold and snowbound day, sitting in very light clothes utterly unruffled by the weather, sharp fangs gleaming.
"The man wasn't any use then, was he?"
Oz had blinked, swallowing, and shook his head.
"And you feel that part of you, the lupine part, lurking."
No question here, and he had nodded as well, and then she'd stood up.
"No more fighting, Dan. Let it out. Let the beast out. Run with me, and let me show you what it is to be not an enemy of this part of you, but a friend."
In a single moment they changed by the light of day and eerie lupine howls with a growling aspect echoed through Sunnydale's streets.
-------
Mayor Wilkins was out for a night stroll when an Initiative Soldier had sought to take him captive, uncaring that he was, after all, the lawfully elected (and for a considerably longer span of time than this little bastard had ever been alive) Mayor of Sunnydale or of his high-born destiny. The soldier had pointed a tranquilizer rifle at him and he'd rolled his eyes and had then spoken a Word and the soldier's blood boiled in his veins and he had fallen over, skin bubbled, and turned lobster-red. With a contemptuous shake of the head the Mayor would walk on.
------
The soldier would find himself facing a bitter and drunk Maggie Walsh with the awareness that most corpses had, which was none at all, before she finally put the bottle down and then smiled.
"Colonel Finn, son."
"Yes, mother?"
"Take him to the 314 laboratory. He's too good a man to waste."
"Yes, mother."
He'd stepped to do just that when she'd cleared her throat.
"And step up the collections. We have a year and three months to get Project Adam online, and I won't see that time wasted. If anything it spared me having to do a coin toss to see which of your fellow soldiers would become that subject."
For a moment there was a strange look on his face, but he shook his head and he would step out. Between them Riley and Forrest would bring the corpse to the room where Dr. Anglemann would step out of the shadows and bent over him, shaking his head.
"You poor bastard."
-------
Willow Rosenberg sat on the couch with her chin on her knees, looking at Tara.
"I sometimes-" she paused and took a deep breath. "I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if the Initiative didn't. Or if you showed up this year ,or when I was in college."
Tara blinked at that.
"You made my life better from the moment you got here. You always have."
She wasn't looking at her but there was a warmth in those words that fueled Tara for those next few strange weeks.
"It's hard for me to talk, now, around others. I need to be able to focus what I can do, to get as strong with the higher magic as I am with the punchy kind. Not a lot of room for talking there. Kendra and the old Council Ways were at least right on that."
She'd bit her lip.
"Keeping secrets from you just doesn't feel right."
That was when she'd finally looked at her with a smile that lingered in Tara's dreams, the warmer kind and the scorchingly hot ones that soothed a loneliness that would lead her to bed three different women in one-night stands with Faith taking three different men each of those nights to at least scratch the itch. She might be seen as this moral paragon by others but celibacy and Tara Maclay weren't a mix if she had anything to say about it and she had plenty to say. No stutter here but the words were still hard to say in any way that respected what she and Oz had, so she contented herself with taking Willow's hand and squeezing it with a squeeze that spoke all the words dammed behind the four walls of her skull, and would then remain at her side.
--------
Buffy and Faith would slay six vampires and one Polgara demon on that Christmas night side by side. Only one had real reason to expect it but it would be the last time for the next four months that they would fight side by side, Faith's thoughts her own and Buffy's expressed in angry shouts and insults at vampires that ignored them and tried quips that were repeatedly interrupted before the last word with either her or Faith staking them. It was one of the few times Faith saw what Buffy could be if Buffy fought as she did, with the same approach she used. It frightened her, more than a bit. Buffy was a small golden-haired cinnamon bun of a person, and she was looking at someone who was capable of brutality to match her own, or that of a soulless undead of the kind they fought. For the first time and one of the few times in her life where she would openly admit that even she was capable of introspection she'd been frozen in watching the way Buffy chopped in two the Polgara demon's skewer and then beat the thing to death in the way people were at how she did. And she understood, in full, how witnessing the fully realized deadliness Slaers were capable of could be a frightening thing and that being the hero against the darkness didn't make that lesser, it made it quite a bit stronger.
Faith returned to her apartment, seeing the two witches side by side and the longing loving stare that Tara gave Willow, and then she'd blinked. She'd suspected for a while that Oz had gained control over his shapeshifting, and she knew what that form looked like, all grey and muzzled. And then she'd stopped. Thatwasn'tOz. The werewolf she'd seen had looked more like a fanged and hideous Sasquatch than anything else with an eerily distorted mockery of a human face and sharp smiles.
"Two werewolves?"
She'd muttered that and then had seen something that made her eyes narrow further. Oz, dressed in different clothes and smelling of sex.....and then she'd tilted her head and smiled coldly. Her so-called Watcher, now the unwilling 'guest' of Rupert Giles, no longer something to worry about, while G-Man would forgive a lot from her, more than any other adult figure she'd known and unlike the others who promised her things to give her betrayal was the only adult she truly trusted. Even Miss S had kicked out Buffy right before she'd gone to fight Angel, after all. And there was Red,herRed. The witch that gave her the nicest place to live she'd ever lived in, the one person who believed in her and gave her things when not only did she not have to, but she had sufficient power to break her if not for that spell.
And that werewolf was cheating on her, though she knew that Slayer senses wouldn't read as proof and that Red's very fragility would mean that an effort to help here would lead to the results that were the opposite of what she was planning here. Her nose twitched. It would be interesting to see just how good a liar Daniel Osborn was, on the one hand. And on the other, what it would mean when and as things erupted.
