Curled pillbug-tight on the unyielding ground, Buffy buried her face in her knees and sobbed. The numb grey void in her soul was void no longer, overflowing now with a memory of transcendence no living mind was meant to bear. Peace. Light. Warmth. Love. The promise of that moment just before the jump fulfilled: her whole life laid out like a tapestry before her, and for the first time every freaky thing in it made sense. She'd seen, and understood, and been at rest, in a place that was no place, for a time that was all time.
          She yearned after vanished bliss like an addict after the needle. Pain flowed through her in its stead, every nerve and vein a tributary. You woke up to pain, drank it down, breathed it in, wrapped yourself up in it, fell asleep and dreamed of it. The pain of uncertainty, the pain of fear, the pain of love. The pain of humanity, helpless against the encroaching night. The pain of a single child with a skinned knee. The pain of knowing your war was endless no matter how many battles you won. The pain of fathers who left, lovers who betrayed, mothers who died, sisters who depended on you, friends who tore you out of heaven. The floodwaters would never recede until...
           "Buffy, honey." Her mother was kneeling by her side, her voice rain on parched earth, soothing and cool. "It's hard, I know. But it's almost over. You've won, sweetie. You stopped Willow and saved Dawn. You can rest now. It's time for you to come home."
           "Mom?" Buffy lifted her face, masked with tears and dust, to her mother's shimmering form, floating now above the Hellmouth just as Willow had. The brand scored across her cheek by Willow's spell-dagger throbbed angrily with every movement. Somewhere far away, someone else was touching her, calling for her, crying for her--a crow-harsh voice sounding in her ears, a hard hand striking her good cheek. Buffy crawled to her knees and twisted away, her outstretched hands straining after her mother's immaterial caress, always a hair's-breadth out of her reach.
          " All you have to do is follow me, Buffy." Joyce was smiling at her, her arms spread invitingly. So close, so real. "I'm here to take you back where you belong. Just a few steps and we'll be together again forever."
          Buffy took one staggering step towards her mother, then another. Something was holding her back, but she was the Slayer, she was strong. The Slayer forges strength out of pain. Swaying on the edge of infinity, she looked down. The Hellmouth yawned at her feet, a bottomless, inky deep. Far, far, below, a glow illumined the murk, a pure, lucent radiance that made her breath rasp in her dust-dry throat. Tears welled up, pricking in the corners of her eyes and forging a trail of salty agony down her burnt cheek. She knew that light.
          Joyce beckoned, her eyes shining with love. "That's it, honey. Just one more step and it'll all be over."
          One step. Easy. That other voice was still yammering on in the distance. Buffy, come back to me, love, you've got to come back, we can't send Will to tiptoe through your skull this time round, pet, my Buffy, my sweet Slayer, Dawnie's down a bloody well and you can't leave little sis, now, can you? God, Buffy, don't leave me again, don't you fucking leave me, please, love, oh, please...
          She turned the words over in her mind, examining each as if it were a stone she'd picked up on a beach in an idle moment--keep it, or throw it away? Whoever had spoken them was in pain, too; it reverberated through every syllable.
           "One more step, and it won't hurt any more."
          She was the Slayer. No matter how much it hurt, the Slayer always got back up and flung herself back into the battle. Once more into the breach. Whatever a breach was. Because, because...why? Because it was the right thing to do? Why was that? There had to be another reason, didn't there? Joyce Summers beckoned again; she could smell the roses her mother had used to fuss over, and the richness of fresh-turned earth...and there was something wrong there, because it wasn't exactly that smell, and wasn't even quite right for the smell it was...
          Scent was the most primal of senses, rooted deep in the animal recesses of brain. Where anxious faces and pleading words couldn't penetrate, charred flesh and the bitter earthy musk of terrified vampire set her internal alarms jangling. Buffy gulped down cold December midnight and Spike-scent, and opened her eyes to a landscape of crumpled black leather. Her nose was mashed into Spike's shoulder, and she could feel his whole body trembling against her, every muscle iron-hard with strain. The skin of her unburnt cheek still tingled where he'd struck her, trying to snap her out of it. She could feel the print of each individual finger. They were half a step away from oblivion, and the ground for several yards behind them was a drunken trail of cross-hatched heel-gouges, the marks of Spike's struggle to drag her back from the Hellmouth's edge. "Spike?"
          "Love!" Spike's lean face lit up around a smile, and his voice broke with relief, snapped right in two. His crushing embrace nearly snapped her in two along with it. His hands molded the shape of her face from the darkness, his lips pressing out the details of cheek and brow, branding the particulars of his being into her skin. Making her over. "Buffy, sweeting--"
          "Spike, it's--I'm awake." Couldn't say all right, not yet, but--awake. "I remembered. Where I was."
          His breath halted for a second, then resumed in a long slow hiss of comprehension. "It was...a good place, then?"
          "Yeah." The word was half a sob. Spike said nothing, and if he had no words at a time like this, there weren't any to be had.
           "Buffy." Her mother's voice had grown sharper, more urgent. "If you don't come with me now, it will be too late."
          She scrunched her eyes shut, wrapped her arms around Spike's waist and held on, as hard as he'd held on to her. His arms were an opiate against memory: forget the Valium, Spike was vampire methadone. Not because his embrace was a greater bliss than what she'd left behind (It comes close, an irreverent part of her opined) but because this was what he lived with, every second of every day: a gnawing, cell-deep craving for something right under his nose, something he had only to reach out and take.
          If Spike could do it, she damned well could too.
          Buffy looked up at the thing that wasn't her mother, and the lost little girl within her wailed in bereavement. But she wasn't that little girl any longer. "Even if you were real--" Fifty-one days lay between her and the siren allure of death, each one fragile as a cobweb. Buffy set them up one after the other in her mind, layer upon layer of living. The day she'd bought makeup. The day they'd unpacked the Christmas ornaments. The day she'd killed the Krallock demon. One false move would tip them all over like dominos. "--I couldn't follow you."
          Joyce sighed and shook her head, the very picture of exasperated parental amusement. "Ah well, it was a long shot."
          Buffy's grip on Spike slackened as the image fizzled out, and ashy scraps of cloth flaked away beneath her hands as they drew apart. Scorch-marks raked their raw-edged talons across most of his chest, at their deepest revealing the dull pale gleam of bone where muscle and skin had been seared away. Spike caught her look and poked a finger into the hole in his chest with a slightly hysterical giggle. "Lightning bolts. Didn't last long enough to catch me on fire. Will forgets I'm bleedin' demised. I wouldn't 'voom' if she put forty million volts through me."
          She could see Spike's ribs. Literally. Never a good sign. Would his lungs look like those emphysema scare-posters from health class, or would vampire healing keep them clean and pink and tar-free? Buffy grabbed his hand and pulled it away from the wound, swallowing hard as her stomach made every effort to perfect its triple backflip, crawl up her throat and run away to join the circus. He'd heal. He had to. "Is Dawn all right?"
          "Dunno yet. Will made a bloody mess before she went down." Spike waved an arm, wincing as the motion pulled on damaged muscle; they were standing in the middle of a vast shallow crater, centered on the Hellmouth and rimmed Tunguska-style with debris and toppled machinery. The glare of the remaining floodlights revealed dozens of limp, skew-limbed bodies. Harbingers and crazies littered the ground, dead or unconscious, the abandoned dolls of some bored deity. Tara was slumped against the winch. Filigrees of wheaten hair draped across the handle and braided rivulets of her dark blood trickled from her mouth and nose. Her chest rose and fell in tiny unsteady hitches.
          Buffy dropped to her haunches beside the Hellmouth and peered over the edge. "Dawn?"
          The bubble of light in the depths was expanding, oozing upwards like the globs in a mystic lava lamp. Fifty feet below, the annular scaffolding Xander had bolted to the inner wall of the Hellmouth was clearly visible. If she had fallen for the First's lure, even odds she'd have hit the scaffolding, broken a few bones and hung there, helpless as a side of beef, rather than falling to a more-or-less clean death. Goody, fuel for future nightmares. Dawn's upturned face was a pale smudge on the wooden landing just below the winch. Willow's fetal silhouette punched an irregular hole in the background of luminous haze, cocooned in the meshes of the cargo net they'd fastened across the width of the shaft below the scaffolding.
          Buffy's shoulder prickled with anticipation, and a second later Spike's hand came to rest on it, his thumb massaging the line between blade-bone and spine. Reassurance for both of them. Buffy swiped a lank and dusty lock of hair from her eyes, tucking it back into her ponytail. "We need to get down there. Can you tell if Dawn's still hooked to the winch cable?"
          Spike dropped to one knee beside her, leaned over and squinted down into the shaft, blinking as if the brilliance suffusing its depths pained his eyes. "Looks like she's clear of it," he said at last. "Good to go." He scooted over to the winch, took Tara by the shoulders and shifted her to one side, careful to lay her down gently upon the torn earth. She moaned, her fingers clenching on a handful of dirt, but she didn't come to.
          Buffy checked her watch. Eleven-thirty-five, and according to the reams of graphs and equations Tanner had produced, the Hellmouth was due to reverse itself at three minutes after midnight. She looked over her shoulder at the wrecked, desolate lot. Her sword was lying in the dirt several yards away. No one else in sight was conscious. Except for a lone figure trudging towards them across the spell-ravaged earth. A naggingly familiar lone figure. Too short to be Xander or Giles or Tanner, too male to be Anya. One of the crazies? Cheap suit, battered fedora, loud shirt...
          Spike rose and shaded his eyes with one bloodied hand. "Who the hell...?
          "His name's Whistler. Balance demon and general pain in the ass." Buffy got slowly to her feet and moved to stand beside him, shoulder brushing shoulder--a bracing little shock crackled between them, evidence of the slowly building forces around them. Or maybe not; no Wint-O-Green Livesaver sparks when Spike touched Tara. "He showed up the last time. When I had to send Angel to hell."
          "Am I feeling the love, or what?" Whistler looked the two of them over with the dissatisfied air of a man who'd been expecting someone taller. "Summers, what is it with you and vampires?"
          In two economical strides Buffy was abreast of her fallen sword. She snatched it up, swiped the congealed gore from the edge on the hem of the nearest Harbinger's robe, and sighted down the blade at Whistler. "Let me guess," she said. "You've got something incredibly important to tell me, but somehow none of it will be even slightly useful. I've got hard choices to make, we're all alone in the end, blah blah use the Force, Luke." She flourished the sword overhead and made an experimental slash, the point of the blade whickering by an inch below Whistler's nose. "What say we skip all that and go straight to the part where you scamper off on your little Bobby Orr legs and let me get on with the world-saving?"
          The First's illusory form popped back into existence, perching on the winch arm and grinning with Angelus's face. "You're making the big assumption that it's world-saving he wants you to get to. Our scruffy little pal here serves the Balance. Have you ever thought about what that means?"
          Whistler gave it a look. "The leather pants? So very you." He turned back to Buffy. "Tall, dark, and gruesome's right, though. You got this big plan to save your pal. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Miss Cleo I'm not. But either way, the Balance is still fucked, and the forces of goodness and light are gonna come boiling up outta the Hellmouth like roaches up a drainpipe, ready to dish all the naughty boys and girls a spanking."
          Buffy tossed her rapidly-disintegrating ponytail over her shoulder, braced the tip of her sword against the right toe of her third-favorite boots and leaned on the hilt. "Let's make one thing perfectly clear. Considering all the help and support the Powers have given me over the years, I'm thinking I owe them something in the neighborhood of squat." Her eyes went flinty. "I'm the Slayer, not the Balancer. My job is to slay demons before they can munch on humans. I don't care what side it's on, anything that comes out of the Hellmouth with a license to kill is going to have to go through me--"
          "Through us," Spike corrected, over the firecracker snap of vertebrae as he rolled his head on his shoulders, loosening up.
          "Through us first. If we die, we die." The thought of a legitimate return to that glorious realm of light and warmth was almost enough to unlock the shackles of fear and anticipation around her chest. "But not until Willow's free."
          The little demon sighed, produced a grimy handkerchief from his breast pocket, and dabbed at a mustard stain on his too-wide lapel. "Touching. Also stupid. Stop this wave, and another'll be right behind it, as long as the Balance is out of whack--"
          "So we fall on our swords before midnight and everything's blood and roses, is it?" Spike drawled. "Capulets and Montagues chatting each other up over our cold and dusty bodies?"
          "Pretty much, yeah," Whistler said.
          Buffy's eyes narrowed. "That leaves the First in control of Willow's body. Willow's my friend, but besides that, leaving Ultimate Evil in control of the most powerful witch in Southern California? Look in the dictionary under 'strategic blunder.'"
          Angelus laughed. "So kill her first."
          Spike tucked his thumbs in his belt with a snort. "Black sheep here, not a sacrificial lamb. Buggered if I'll roll over and slit my own throat, or Red's, without being bloody well positive I'm taking you with me. And Buffy's died twice for you prats already. I'd call that enough."
          Whistler shrugged and spread both hands in a gesture of amiable indifference. "Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just sayin'. It's not like you two are looking at a long-term relationship anyway. Come on--Slayer? Vampire? Do the math."
          Buffy glanced at her watch, then at Spike; if the vampire clenched his jaw any harder, his molars were going to disintegrate. "Math was never my subject. Spike's changed. I've changed."
          Angelus chortled, his dark eyes glittering with amusement. "Has he? You killed a man today, Spike. You drove a sword into his belly and pulled it out through his ribcage. You watched his blood run red along the blade, and dragged his guts out spill into the dirt all pink and pretty and glistening. You saw the life flicker and go out in his eyes. You inhaled the scent of his terror. And you felt... what? Satisfaction in a good deed well done? I'm curious."
          Gold wrestled with azure for dominance in Spikes' eyes, and his lips curled ever so slightly back from his gleaming teeth. "Doesn't fucking matter what I feel, it's what I do."
          Angelus's massive frame dwindled and Darla sauntered towards them in a swish of plaid and knee socks, hands clasped schoolgirl-fashion behind her back. "What we feel--or don't feel--informs what we do. How often have you come close to killing someone in the last week, sweet William? It's only a matter of time, and you know it." Angelus again, in game face. "Sooner or later you'll sink those pearly whites into a nice warm juicy neck. And when that happens--when, Spike, not if--she's gonna have to take you down. Assuming it's not her neck to begin with."
          "You're really grasping at straws, aren't you?" Buffy asked, scornful.
          Spike's volcanic growl relaxed into a sneer. "Buffy? You'll have to do better than that, you git. Never happen."
          "Grow up, both of you," Whistler countered. He produced a mirror from an inner breast pocket and held it up--a cheap thing backed in pink plastic, like the ones Tara had used for her glamor spell. "There are a million million dimensions--wanna take a guess at how many of them feature the two of you living happily ever after? Take a gander." He shoved the trinket at Spike's face; startled, the vampire flinched back a half-step.
          Buffy blinked; there was no reflection in the mirror, of course, but there was--
           She came back a shambling thing which he couldn't bear to dispose of while any spark of Buffy remained. He kept her in the basement of the crypt, brought her dresses and jewels to hide her slowly decaying flesh, until Giles found them, staked him and sent her rotting shell back to the arms of death.
          She came back broken in less obvious ways, and the realization that she wanted him only made her hate herself the more. She poured out all her confusion and self-loathing on his head, until she broke him too, and they cut one another to ribbons on the shards of their pain. On the day the chip stopped working, they found him weeping over her eviscerated body, cradling her still-warm heart in his hands.
          She used him as muscle for years, trading on his love for her and for Dawn, taking whatever he had to give and doling out the minimum consideration necessary to keep him in line. He went to dust with her name on his lips. She took the Scoobs out for ice cream afterwards, because they'd saved the world again.
          They lived together for six months until someone made him an offer he didn't see reason to refuse. Buffy stumbled on the hatching Suvolte eggs unawares, and he spent the last hours before daylight took him in a drunken stupor, trying desperately to blot out the horror and betrayal in her dead eyes.
          They lived together for three wonderful years until she found him with his fangs buried in a mugger's neck. He tried to explain why criminals deserved to be eaten. She ran a stake through his heart and was dead within the week at the hands of a fledgling.
          They lived together for eight years, until...
          World after world, variation upon variation. It took weeks, or months, or years. It happened in alleys, in bars, in the illusory safety of their own home. He failed. She failed. They destroyed one another again and again. Buffy wanted to scream her throat raw, to grab Whistler and choke from him the admission that it was all lies, but she knew. The anger and the hatred were curled deep within her, awaiting only the right conditions in which to bud and grow, as real and integral a part of her as the love. Her knees were quaking and her sides ached. Probably because she wasn't breathing. Spike's hand was a bar of ice on her arm--after that carnival of horrors, how could he bear to touch her? But air was moving in and out of her lungs again, counterpoint to the rhythm of his. Sometimes it was an advantage to have to remember to breathe.
          Angelus leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, regarding them with a Cheshire Cat grin. "It just gets funnier every single time, doesn't it?"
          "So, kidlets," Whistler said, "Falling on your swords isn't such a bad option, is it?"
          "No! You can't know that!" Buffy spat. "Things don't have to happen that way! Any of those ways!"
          "Of course I know it." Its voice was Angelus's, black velvet over razor blades, with an undercurrent even darker and colder. It trickled down through the cracks of self-doubt, and froze inside of you like dark ice, until you succumbed to frost heaves of the soul. How long had Willow held out against this thing, all alone in her skull? "Way down deep, in the dark corners under the basement stairs, in the place where you keep your nightmares, is a little piece of me." Angelus's tongue curled out and caressed his lips with voluptuary delight, tasting imaginary blood. "And that's only if you're an ordinary human being. Neither of you qualify. Vampires--you're connected to me through a thousand generations of your sires. I know your bloodlust because I am your bloodlust." It prowled across the remaining space between them and ran phantom fingers down Spike's cheek, its hand passing close enough to Buffy's face to raise gooseflesh on the back of her neck. "Someday it's gonna be just you and the chance to inflict a little pain. All that needs happen is for you to have one... bad... day."
          Spike's gaze had chilled to something considerably lower than room temperature. Fear lurked beneath the icy surface of his eyes, but it got no farther than that. "I'm not Angel, wanker. You can't scare me off with fairy stories and might-bes. If good intentions aren't enough, then I'll find something that is. Get a spell. Get a bloody muzzle if that's what it takes. There's a way, I'll find it."
          Angelus's features blurred and shifted as he paced away, and Spike's own pale angular face turned to smirk at them, the eye in a storm of black leather. "Oh, yeh, there's a way. You held it in the palm of your hand and carried it around in your pocket. And then you had an O. Henry moment and traded it for her. Your soul, you pathetic git. The only thing which would have allowed you to keep her, and you gave it away to get her back. You're well and truly buggered, mate." The smarmy grin broadened. "But seein' as I'm a compassionate bloke, I've got a proposition for you. The witch's proposition, actually." It jerked a thumb down the shaft at Willow. "We revive her, she restores your soul."
          Her dream from the cemetery hit Buffy full-force with the image of Spike burning up from within, consumed by his own inner light and lost to her forever. Her stomach dropped to the bottom of her gut, cold and heavy as day-old donuts. Spike cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "You'd winkle my soul back, and I'd trust you to, why?"
          Faux-Spike stalked over to the lip of the Hellmouth and gestured towards the encroaching light. "Because I don't want the saints to come marching home any more than you do, mate. Give you a soul, and you're not an affront to the laws of nature any longer, just a second-rate copy of Peaches. May bugger up a few prophecies, but it's better than what's coming."
           Whistler grimaced and clutched his hat, crumpling the brim. "No, no, no! Too risky! Dudley Do-Right and Nell here mucked up Rosenberg's sacrifice! You could blow out the aether and--"
          The First shoved its hands in its duster pockets, threw back its bone-white head and laughed. "Then go for the risk-free option, children. Slit your own throats."
          Spike stood there tight-lipped and impassive, staring himself down, the muscles in his jaw working. Impassive for Spike, at least. Fear, hope and surmise strobed across his face, all displaced in the end by that utterly insane determination which presaged something incredibly heroic, incredibly stupid, or both. At the slight flare of his nostrils, Buffy realized with instant, irrational conviction that he was considering the offer seriously.
          "Spike, you can't--" Buffy cut herself off. Can't what? Trust him? Do this to me?
          "Don't think I can handle it, love?" Spike thrust his chin out, insouciant despite the underlying tremor in his voice. "Angel managed. Hundred years of crushing guilt and general uselessness and I'm home free. Already got a jump on the rat-eating." He dredged up a chuckle. "Or is it the side effects you're worried about? I'd hunt up something to fix that bloody damn quick, and in the meantime there's no rule says I can't keep giving you perfect happiness."
          "That's not what I--" The dream couldn't be literal, could it? Matters of the First's trustworthiness aside, this should be Spike's decision; to pressure him was selfish, selfish beyond all reason. Wasn't she owed a little selfishness? Just a crumb? "It won't be--" Spike gazed down at her with a small, questioning smile, the shadow of heaven in the curve of those sinful lips. She dropped her head, staring at her knuckles whitening around the sword-hilt. "It won't be you anymore. I--I'm sure William was a good man. But he's not... you. He--he wouldn't... wouldn't know me." She was running short of air again. "When Angel..."
          Spike laid both hands on her shoulders, heedless of the sword's blade between them, and the tenderness in his eyes set the marrow of her bones afire with shame. "There is nothing," he said, in the same tone of voice that he might have used to observe that the sun rose in the east and Dawn liked anchovies, "Nothing that can make me stop loving you, Buffy. I'd...I'd be inside, somewhere. Always. Those things we saw--" He was talking to the top of her head, his breath stirring the fine hairs that had escaped her ponytail. "Told you I'd fight all the hordes of hell before I let myself hurt you, didn't I? Do anything, I said. Here's my chance to prove it, yeh? Christ, Buffy--after seeing that, how can you ever trust me without a soul?"
          "After seeing that, how can you ever trust me with one?" Buffy shook her head, still focused on the toes of his boots. She =knew= what he was capable of; it was discovering what she was which turned her stomach. Could she ever look him in the eye again, knowing what could happen, or was she going to be stuck forever talking to his--
          --shadow. Long and black in the floodlights' glare, inseparable from her own. Stretching out away from the Hellmouth, their shadows, the shadow of the winch, and...
          Buffy moved before the thought could run its course, jerking free of Spike's grasp and lunging past him to straight-arm Whistler in the throat with the hilt of her sword. Her fist met only empty air. "It seems to me," she said, "that the last time we met you were a little less not there. At least, I'm pretty sure I remember you leaving a dent when I threw you into a wall."
          "Ah, crap," said Whistler, and winked out.
          Spike's right eyebrow joined his left in the general vicinity of his hairline. "Curiouser and curiouser. Is that a con I smell?" He settled his weight on one hip and folded his arms across his ravaged chest. "It's obvious why Morphy here'd want us to conveniently off ourselves before the big blow. Leaves him free and clear in possession of the 2001 Witch Turbo. But where's the catch in Red cursing me with a soul, aside from the obvious limitations? Somehow I don't think you're vitally concerned with my love life."
          Angelus growled low in his throat, a figure of looming menace for all its insubstantiality. "The offer's real, Spike. And it's your only chance."
          "I'm operating on a limited budget, mate. I don't fancy buying when I don't know the price." The dark wings of his brow swooped down to meet in a scowl over incandescent blue eyes, and Spike snapped his fingers. "The--you fucking bastard. That's it."
          Buffy frowned. "What?"
          "The price." Spike shrank in on himself, all the larger-than-life bravado gone, and the ghost-lines sketched about his mouth and eyes tallied every day of his hundred and forty-nine years. "All magic's got a price, and the price of your life was my soul. If Will magicks it back... you'll die. Again."


          When the shock in her eyes gave way, it wasn't to an emotion so feeble as longing or nostalgia. This was hunger, and there was nothing a vampire was more intimately acquainted with. The next words out of his mouth were the hardest Spike had ever spoken. "Is that what you want, love?"
          Her lips parted, and her eyes grew huge and shadowy, all moss and charcoal, mist under a moonless sky. Buffy made no answer. Something he should be grateful for, most like--a quick reply to a question like that wasn't one he could trust. Seconds ticked into minutes, and beyond, while Buffy stood gazing at the sword in her hands, a slender contemplative Galatea. She lifted her head, her chin firm and her face blazing with conviction--he'd got it wrong; she was the Pygmalion here. "No."
          Angelus snarled, his stolen face a distorted Kabuki-mask of rage. "No? You could be at peace, and certain you'd saved your world! You'd rather take a thousand-to-one chance you can save your friend too? Or can't you bear to give up your vampire fuck-toy? You have no hope, no future together--what the hell are you fighting for?"
          Lightning flickered in her stormy eyes, and Buffy brought the sword up, wielding the long blade as lightly as a rapier. "Now. This moment. That's all anyone ever has. Maybe there's no way to win, but you know what's worse than losing? Not trying. You know what hurts more than all the worlds where we crash and burn? The ones where I'm too much of a coward to love him, and we really do die with nothing." She jabbed the sword-tip at Angelus's chest in deliberate mockery of a long-ago thrust: You have no power here. "There's never only one choice. Every day, for the rest of our lives, we'll have to choose again, Spike and I--to live, no matter how painful it is. Not to kill, no matter how good it feels." The words were tumbling out of her now, a passionate flood that buoyed Spike up, light and giddy as a cork. "So we weren't meant to be? Tough. We are. Come on, Spike." Buffy sheathed the sword in its cross-shoulder scabbard and strode over to the winch, the corners of her mouth tucked back in grim purpose.
          Now that was his girl. Spike swung in behind her. "Thought you'd never quit jawing, Slayer."
          Quick, flashing Buffy-grin. "I get one inspirational moment per apocalypse. Fine print in the Slayer contract."
          The First dogged their steps, flinging words at their backs like venomed darts. "Well, rah rah rah. The big motivational speech. Do the right thing. Easy for her to say. Half the time you don't even know what the right thing is, do you, Willy-boy?" Spike's shoulder muscles tensed; his own face smirked back at him, a mocking, hateful grin which made his knuckles itch to smash it. No wonder people were lining up and taking numbers to punch him in the nose.
          Buffy set both hands to her hips and surveyed the wreckage at the lip of the chasm. Spike looked over her shoulder; Xander had provided a rope ladder, but there was nothing left of it but six feet of frazzled nylon flopping mournfully over the side of the chasm. She threw a sideways glance at him, catching her lower lip in her teeth. "Can you manage with..." Her outstretched fingers hovered tentatively over his chest.
          Plan B, then. It wasn't the pain; part of the whole vampire package, the ability to set pain aside at need. He wasn't vulnerable to shock, and up to a point, blood loss would only make him hungry. But he'd lost half his range of movement and there was no guarantee he could keep a grip with the amount of damage he'd taken. Spike swung his arms experimentally and flexed his hands into fists, masking another wince with a terse nod. "I'll do."
          Buffy eyed him for a long moment, the general assessing her troops, then returned the nod. She checked the safety catch on the cable, climbed up on the winch and crawled out along the arm. Wrapping her legs around the heavy steel cable, she slid downwards, catching herself with both hands. The cable swayed, the hook on the end rattling against the boards below. "And they claim you never use anything you learn in gym class again." Buffy spat out an errant strand of hair and glanced up at him. "Do I look as bad as you do?"
          Arms criss-crossed with nicks and scratches, face smeared with blood and dust, weeping burn-scar seared across half her cheek, eyes bloodshot and savage--Bloody fucking gorgeous. Spike grinned at her. "Worse."
          He let Buffy get five or six feet down the cable before crawling out after her. Hot needles lanced through his chest as he came down off the winch arm and Spike bit his tongue hard, turning the yell of pain to a muffled snort. There just wasn't enough intact muscle left for him to exert his full strength. He gripped the slippery coils of the cable more tightly between his ankles, using the soles of his boots to brake himself, and tried to take as much of his weight off his arms as possible. Foot by foot he descended, fighting his own weakness and the bucking of the cable under Buffy's weight below. His palms were sweating. Stupid sodding stress reaction; not like it could cool him off.
           "Dropping arse-backwards into your grave," his platinum-haired nemesis sneered. "Fitting. You're going to be stumbling backwards through the dark for the rest of your damned existence, Spike. And for what? A little Slayer nookie? How's that gonna play in a few years when things aren't so high and firm?"
          "Sod off," Spike muttered, eyes fixed on the rough granite before him. Flecks of mica shimmered in the grey stone, and veins of pyrite crystals striated the walls like symbols in a vile and unknown tongue. With every foot of descent they became brighter, more regular, until the walls were a glittering latticework of crystal that melted into Daliesque crenelations of limestone or tortured layers of cracked and flaking shale. Dimension and distance squirmed like Silly Putty around them; one moment the shaft was claustrophobically close and he could all but feel the opposite wall scraping his back, and the next they were suspended in infinite space.
          Buffy's boots hit the two-by-fours of the platform below with a thump. "Dawn? Are you OK?"
          "Buffy!" Dawn scrambled to her feet and wrapped her sister in a bear hug, her voice spiced with panic. "Is it--is it over?"
          "Not hardly, Dawnie."
          Dawn backed to the far edge of the landing with a terrified squeak, pressing herself up against the wall of the shaft. "Now is that any way to greet an old pal?" said Angelus. "Long time no see." He looked down at Willow's netted, helpless form with contempt. "Poor little Willow's crapped out on me. My own fault for putting all my eggs in one basket, right?" He took a step closer to Dawn, fangs bared in a leer. "But she's not the only one here with power, is she?"
          Spike dropped cat-footed onto the boards and walked through Angelus with a sneer he hoped was every bit as aggravating as his doppelganger's. "It's not real, Bit. Just ignore it."
          Dawn's hand twitched, as if she'd smooth his wounds over with a touch if she could. "Dumb question time. Are you all right?"
          Professional inquiry, there. No squeamishness for his Niblet. "Right as rain, pet." He rubbed the edge of the burn. It was starting to itch, but there was more to his current discomfort than the injury. He could feel the Hellmouth curdling around him as the reversal neared, a prickly ache crawling around inside his bones, as if his skeleton might leap outside his skin at any minute. In the corners of his vision, faces crowded together--godlets, dozens of them, human, inhuman, and everything in between, peering over the edge of the chasm, skittering up and down the eroded walls. Spike glanced upwards; night sky capped the Hellmouth with a dome of silver-flecked indigo. Something winged and glittering swooped by overhead. Well, if they were to have an audience, he'd bloody well give them a show. "Feels like we're getting on for the witching hour, love," he called to Buffy. "What time we got?"
          Buffy checked her watch, though how she could tell if it was working down here was beyond him. "Eleven forty-five." She turned to Dawn, and stroked her sister's hair with an air of finality. "There's not time to get you up."
          Dawn took a breath. Nodded. Her fear was beginning to smell like a woman's, not a child's. "I'll be good here."
           Spike gave Dawn's shoulder a squeeze and looked past to Willow, who thrashed like a gaffed marlin in her bonds, spine arcing as every muscle pulled taut. Willow's scent wasn't remotely human any longer. Her eyes flew open, blank black marbles in her chalk-white face. Her mouth worked for a moment. The words came out gravelly and slurred, skidding into one another like cars on ice. "You can't afford to ignore me, Slayer."
          Spike heard Buffy's heart skip a beat, then resume its labors double-time. "Yeah?" she said, surface-cool. "I've had a recent influx of new income. The whole Ultimate Evil thing kind of works against you in the convinciness department."
          One of the six ropes suspending the cargo net was looped over a bolt driven into the stone; Buffy unfastened it, pulled it up and slipped it over the hook at the end of the winch cable. Spike grabbed the rope on the opposite side of the platform and did likewise. Buffy climbed clockwise and Spike counterclockwise along the scaffolding to reach the next pair of ropes. The radiance below had grown stronger in the just last few minutes, shooting upwards and falling back like loops and flares of light in the corona of the sun. The glare bathed him in a constant fiberglass burn. They were presiding over the birth-pangs of a new universe, and whatever dapper beast was strolling towards Sunnydale wasn't fond of vampires at all.
          Across the shaft Buffy shouted something, but Spike couldn't make her words out for the roaring in his ears. He leaped across a gap where a support beam had been dashed to kindling by falling stone, feeling the burn in more ways than one. There was the next bolt with its loop of rope. Reach out, wrap fingers around nylon, pull. One move at a time. The cargo net dipped and swayed; if he dropped the line, Willow would slide free and tumble into that pale merciless inferno. Her slight weight would have been nothing under ordinary circumstances, but working with muscle and tendon half-charred off his bones made it tricky.
          Willow's head lolled on her shoulders, flopping over to stare at him with tar-pit eyes. The dart, still glowing a sickly phosphorescent green, projected from the muscle of her thigh, bobbling a little as she writhed in her bonds. Her altered voice hissed in his ear, clear as if she were resting her sharp little chin on his shoulder. "There's no point, William."
          "Since when has that ever stopped me?" Spike tucked his chin down into the collar of his duster, squinted against the all-pervading light and swung back to the landing. Buffy'd already hooked her rope to the winch cable and set out to retrieve the next one. He handed his prize off to Dawn, who mouthed words he couldn't hear and clutched at his sleeve. He shook her off.
          "None of the others trust you without the chip."
          Eyes swimming in light, Spike groped for the last rope among the scaffolding. There it was. Grab, lift, pull, gather his legs under him for a panther-leap across the whole breadth of the shaft.
          "You get nothing out of this. Nothing, do you understand?"
          Spike dropped onto the landing and slid the final rope into place. Willow was dangling from the hook now, like cargo being taken aboard ship. "Spike!" Buffy yelled, loud and urgent enough to penetrate the white-noise crackle of building magic. "NOW!" She grabbed the cable and kicked off, hooked her feet into the mesh of the net as she and Willow soared out into empty space. The safety catch holding the winch cable in place groaned under the added weight. Spike swiped a coat-sleeve across his burning eyes, gauged the pendulum-swing of the cable, and leaped after her. He caught the cable with both hands, lost his grip, slid down and nearly knocked Buffy loose before one frantically kicking boot found purchase in a loop of the net. He caught one evanscent glimpse of Dawn's pale set face as they careened past the platform, and then the safety catch snapped and the cable unreeled with a hornet-whine of metal on metal.
          Down, down, down they plummeted, swinging from wall to wall in wild free-fall. Buffy's fingers were locked around his forearms, anchoring them together like two parachuters, her nails digging through leather and into flesh. The wind of their fall tore her hair free of its tie and raked it into a golden battle-flag, ripped the slashed and scorched remains of his duster up about his ears. If he had to go, this was the way to do it--Spike threw his head back and howled, lost in the exultant rush of adrenaline. Willow was squirming and moaning between them, the force within her battling the drugged lethargy of her limbs. How much bloody cable was there, anyway? Boulders cartwheeled past them, huge slabs of cold dark stone falling down, half-molten blobs of lava spewing up, as they fell towards the armies of light.
          Willow's eyes rolled back in her head while her body writhed in epileptic struggle. Her fingers crooked, clawing at the meshes of the net, and a blast of raw spellfire slammed into them, driving Spike shoulder-first against the Hellmouth wall. He felt ribs flex, just short of cracking. Buffy's face contorted over the top of Willow's head, and before they could spin out into the lighting-patterned void once more, her hand shot out, fingers latching on to the crevices in the stone. Blood oozed from beneath her nails. Spike's boot heels slammed into solid rock and they staggered onto a ledge that hadn't been there moments before. They weren't falling any longer. What had Buffy said about the Hellmouth changing? Because I really needed it to. Bloody useful feature, that.
          Spike braced his shoulders against the rock wall and stood shaky and panting, half-supporting Willow. Buffy sagged against him, her labored breathing slowly falling into sync with his, then straightened. No slender, battered girl beside him, but the Slayer incarnate, a blazing beacon in the void. He'd not seen her the day she'd called up the First Slayer's power to defeat Adam, but she must have looked like this.
          Buffy held up her wrist, displaying the incongruously prosaic (and cracked) face of her watch. "Almost time."
          Willow's body rolled and pulled free, slumping to the ground as her dead-mackerel eyes pinned them to the wall. "Your struggle is useless, William," she hissed. "You are my creature. She is theirs. The side in the great game you've chosen to champion will never accept you--what you do matters nothing to them, so long as you are what you are: Vampire. Soulless. Evil. You will never belong in the light, and they will condemn you as the thing you are."
           The sodding thing was right, of course. He was the bleeding Vamp of La Mancha, tilting after windmills, and the reasons why had got lost in the doing. Promise to a lady? No Slayer was an island, most especially this one, and he found himself enmeshed in an ever more complex network of obligations towards people Buffy loved, and the people who loved them, ad infinitum, but why he willingly accepted each new set of chains... Because Willow had baked him cookies once? Because Harris would probably come in handy installing that shower in the crypt? Because he didn't want Dawn ever again to look at him the way she'd looked at him in that alley? Because...
          Simple, really. "Doesn't matter. 'S not why I'm doing this, y'wanker."
          "Oh, really?" Willow sneered. "This is all from the goodness of your heart?"
          "'Course not. Got proper selfish vampire reasons, I do." He knelt down and patted Willow's cheek through the netting. "I been thinking on it, since our little chat in the alley. Why am I doing this? Why'd I fall for a Slayer in the first place?" William, begotten of Drusilla, begotten of Angelus, begotten of Darla, begotten of Heinrich, connected in unbroken line through a thousand unknown sires to whatever ancient essence of evil had first infected a fresh human corpse and become the forebear of his kind, stared into the fathomless eyes of the thing in Willow's body, and smiled. "It's not being treated like a man. It's feeling like one. Or close as I can come." He leaned close, brushing his lips to Willow's captive ear. "I may never be a man, but I'm my own monster. Now sod off."
          Snap. Only a symbolic severance, maybe, but the backlash would sting like a bitch. He'd lost something with those words, and gained nothing. He'd never get it, not really, but...he came closest to the feeling he craved not when he made her happy, but when he made her proud. Buffy's dark-fringed eyes met his and her hand ghosted up his forearm, raising the hairs on the back in the path of her fingertips. From the look in those eyes, he'd made her very proud indeed.
          Every clock in Sunnydale struck midnight. The bubble in the depths popped, three minutes ahead of schedule, and the hosts of heaven exploded from the Hellmouth in a dazzling radiant swarm. Creatures of light surrounded them, legions and companies and phalanxes of them: Harrier demons, whirlwinds of razor-fledged wings and luminous eyes; Aurexi with talons of light and blades of crystal. Behind those lesser beings were figures vaster still, glowing shapes the barest glimpse of whose outlines threatened to rip body, mind, and demon asunder and leave him a scatter of ash upon the wind. Things Spike had no names for, creatures that hadn't walked the earth in the light of day since the Old Ones departed.
          They sang as they came, choirs of organ-pipe voices lifted in harmonies complex beyond human comprehension. Buffy was sobbing, and so, Spike found, was he--because it was so beautiful, and because every chord was a dagger in his demon ears. The Hellmouth rang with the bell-note thunder of their wings, one great sounding-box for the approaching stormfront of heaven.
          Willow screamed, a mangled outpouring of slurred nonsense, and her hands spasmed in clumsy imitation of her usual precision. Darkness boiled from her suddenly-limp body, every orifice vomiting forth smoking columns of chill foul power that merged and swirled up in a midnight hurricane, forming a figure or horror and despair, its eyeless sockets oozing pestilence, its slavering maw ringed with serrated rows of ebony fangs. Scabrous raven-black wings mantled across the breadth of the shaft, and sulfurous clouds obscured the hosts of light. Spike half expected the background music to strike up Night On Bald Mountain. The apparition threw back its head and wailed, taloned arms spread to rend and crush.
          A maelstrom of glory whirled around them, illuminating the writhing sheets of shadow-smoke from within. A Harrier tumbled past, its severed wings bleeding contrails of light. A basso rumble built in the surrounding stone, shaking their bones to jelly as the earth itself cried out in agony. The thing in Willow's body gave a last despairing screech as searing, pure white radiance blasted up through the shaft of the Hellmouth--Hellmouth no longer--and the shadow overhead tattered like melting celluloid and burnt away.
          Spike ducked turtle-like into the remains of his duster, and retreated into the long black upthrust shadow of the ledge, flattening himself against the cliff-face. Two feet to either side and he'd be a ball of flame in seconds. Buffy knelt at Willow's side, peeling back an eyelid; the sclera was bloodshot and the pupil a pinpoint of jet in the green iris. "It worked!" Her excited shout was half-drowned by the roar of silver wings. "Willow's free!"
          Willow's waxen face remained motionless, and her heartbeat stumbled and skipped, so faint Spike could barely catch it over the polyphonous rejoicing of the Harriers. "Balls," he muttered, "Free, maybe, but not clear. She's fading."
          Buffy looked up at the seemingly infinite length of cable stretching out of sight overhead. "At least she's a lot lighter than that demon I had to haul up last time." She sat down and began methodically ripping Willow's skirt into strips; after a moment's confusion Spike realized what she was up to, picked up a strip of cloth and began wrapping it around his exposed hands. It might keep him from combusting for a few minutes, anyway.
          A Harrier wheeled and curvetted above them, its whirlwind of eyes gazing down upon them with aloof and alien regard. YOU HAVE SERVED THE POWERS WELL, SLAYER, the organ-chorus voice intoned. IN ENSNARING THE VAMPIRE YOU HAVE ASSURED OUR VICTORY, AND SOON WE SHALL CLEANSE YOUR WORLD OF ALL TAINT. THERE WILL BE NO FEAR, NO DOUBT. ONLY ORDER AND PEACE.
          Buffy was on her feet facing it, her right hand closing on Spike's left with crushing force. "Taint? Like Xander? Like Anya? What about Willy the Snitch? He serves drinks to demons. Or Mr. Kohlermann the butcher? Or Sandra, or Clem, or Spike, or--me? The Slayer's power is born of darkness, or haven't you seen the E! Behind The Slaying special?"
          ALL WHO ARE TOUCHED WITH DARKNESS MUST BE CLEANSED. ALL SAVE YOU, SLAYER. YOUR LINE WAS CREATED OF DARKNESS, THE BETTER TO FIGHT IT. WE DO NOT GRUDGE YOUR EXISTENCE, BUT YOU ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY. THERE WILL BE NO DARKNESS TO FIGHT. YOU MAY REST.
          "Bloody white of you, mate," Spike snarled.
          "This is cleansing of the ethnic variety, in other words? You're going all Kosevo on our collective asses?" Buffy whipped her sword from its scabbard and aimed it at the hovering demon, raging at heaven. "Is this a game to you? Black pieces here, white pieces there, and who cares if the pawns get knocked off the board? I don't serve you! I'm not doing any of this for YOU! If this is the side of good I'm not on it! I quit, do you hear me? I QUIT! I don't care about your victory!" She launched the sword upwards, striking for the Harrier's heart, presuming it had one. "I care aboutthem, the people out there in that town! I'm fighting for them, not you, and if you want to erase any taint then you can start with me!"
          AS YOU WISH. The Harrier's wing flicked out and bowled Buffy backwards with a vicious swipe of its razor plumage. Her sword shattered against the rock. As she rolled and dodged the next wing-blow Spike vamped out and leaped to join her, heedless of the pitiless light that shone now all around them. Fists and fangs against the hosts of heaven. Spike threw back his head and laughed, long and joyful--if there was ever a fight he couldn't be sure of winning, it was this one. He grabbed Buffy's hand with smoking fingers and pulled her to her feet. "Come on, y'bastards! We'll take on the lot of you!"


          Dawn clung frantically to the wooden platform as the earth rippled beneath her. Overhead the wheel of the heavens shuddered, and constellations slipped, fractured, and coalesced into new patterns. Below, the strata of the earth shifted and groaned as rivers of ancient power that flowed through the beds of stone turned in their courses. Rows of avid, inhuman faces leaned forwards, watching, watching--"Buffy?" Her sister couldn't hear her, she was certain, but she couldn't help trying. "What's happening?" she screamed. Another tremor shook the Hellmouth, and part of the scaffolding shattered with a gunshot crack and toppled into the depths.
          The dark man in the rusty tailcoat and top hat grinned at her and winked through the missing lens of his sunglasses. "Somebody finally listening to my advice,petite blanc. They changing teams." He whistled through his teeth. "But by damn, I never expect they make their own league."


          Where his hand touched hers, pain fled. Spike skimmed the contours of her shoulder, the brush of warm skin against cool fingertips sending a continuous electric thrill both of them. Her light didn't burn, and every scraped-raw nerve in his body sang with her presence, drowning out the painful music of the spheres. Each tawny wave of her hair was an aurora borealis, and the deep-water hues of her eyes were an oasis in the desert; sizzling heat became languorous warmth in their shade. The intangible cord running from his heart to hers with detours through parts south pulled suddenly taut, and Buffy's sword pinwheeled to the ground. They didn't need weapons for this. Trails of dark flame followed the path of his hand through supercharged air, and the Harrier darted forward, sensing their distraction. There was an explosive, noiseless flash, and it retreated just as swiftly.
          He'd always thought the thing about fireworks going off was metaphorical.
          Rapt in his eyes as he was in hers, Buffy traced the lines of his cheek as though his face were the eighth wonder of the world. Spike buried his face in her neck and inhaled the heady aroma of exertion and waking arousal. Buffy's head fell back, presenting the perfect arch of her throat for his delectation. Her skin was bittersweet beneath his tongue, tasting of salt and ash and promises. Hands, arms, lips--had to touch. More touch. More Buffy. Her hands were on him, balm to fevered flesh. Should've hurt, with the shape he was in, but the pain was a far-off irrelevant thing.
          In the back of his head Cool, Rational Spike observed that the middle of an apocalypse was hardly the place for a nice snog, but he'd never listened to Cool, Rational Spike before in his life and why the hell should he start now? They were moving through liquid glass, it felt like, pinned between incomprehensibly vast forces, carbon about to crystalize into diamond. He had all the time there was to lick the pooling sweat from the hollow of her throat where her pulse throbbed below, the molten heart of his world. All the time in the world to trace the blue highways of her veins, and gasp and shudder with each eager nip along the angle of his jaw and the curve of his ear. He hitched her up, back to the wall, and his knees almost gave out when she began licking and nuzzling her way along the ridges of his brow, delicate white teeth grazing deliciously against bone. Light fast panting breaths shook their entwined bodies as her hands glided up his sides, and the air was alive with erotic energy.
          He was inside her now, sweet and slow, building towards hard and fast. Not entirely sure how, since he couldn't remember any such mundane intermediaries as undressing, but this was the Hellmouth, after all. There were gods and demons all around them, angels in the architecture. He'd said he'd give them a show, hadn't he? Feast your eyes, wankers. Buffy met him, matched him, mastered him and made him love it. This was the woman with courage enough to let her mortal enemy into her heart and her bed, the woman with life enough in her to tame Death. She lay open to him, white goddess, dark mother, Queen of the bloody Damned for all he cared; the only thing that mattered was that she was Buffy and sod the allegories. This wasn't just sex, though their bodies were pressed close enough to melt into one another, grinding together in warm slow taffy-pull ecstasy, and his cock was like to die of happiness. This wasn't the sterile spiritual rapture William had dutifully attempted every Sunday, though with every stroke his whole being was singing hosannahs. This was Buffy in him, and him in Buffy, hearts and minds and bodies, soul and demon.
          Connection. What he'd yearned for all his life and all his death, to be part of something greater than himself. Something grand, something glorious, something effulgent. He hadn't found it in darkness, he couldn't find it in light, but all along it was here, in the vast and intricate tree of being and becoming that flourished in the intersection of the two. In people, billions of them, walking around like Happy Meals he wasn't going to indulge in because they made existence more interesting as something other than lunch. He was part of it, through Buffy, but also through a thousand other lesser strands--not because it was wrong, or right, but because for reasons sublime or ridiculous his existence had touched that of someone else and wrought a change in both of them. He'd =seen= them, and could never wholly dismiss them again. He could feel them all, Willow dark and silent, Dawn railing at the gods on the platform above, Xander bleeding in the wreckage, Tanner searching dazed through the bodies for survivors, and dozens, hundreds, thousands of others, witting and unwitting, laughing, shopping, sneezing.
          This was what Red had been shooting for in the alleyway behind the Magic Box, he realized; a network of minds and hearts to channel the power of the Key, but a thousandfold greater, a living dynamo six billion strong. The power lying quiescent in Dawn was the force that knit worlds together--neither good nor evil, the raw green life-stuff of the universe. The power embodied in, and called forth by, the dance. Their dance. He and Buffy, equal and opposite. Vampire and Slayer, male and female, the quick and the dead, good and evil, yin and yang, light and darkness, each of them bearing within themselves the seeds of the other. Creation and Destruction, locked in an eternal cycle. The world was the interplay of both principles, and you couldn't have one without the other; the universe would collapse. Both were vital. Necessary. There could be no birth without death, no fire without ashes. There was no end to the dance...
          ...but you could change the steps. You could be partners, not combatants. Bound to one another, connected, by love and not hate.
          Power, quiescent no longer, flowed through the conduits of life itself, drawn to their union as naturally and inevitably as water flowing downhill. They were soaring, climbing, fighting, fucking, riding the crest of the wave into shore. Buffy was gasping, eyes clenched shut, her body convulsing around him for an eternal, ecstatic moment--8.0 on their personal Richter scale--and he was dissolving in her, with her, effervescing together as a fountain of emerald light blasted outwards through the prism of their conjoined bodies and roared through the Hellmouth like the sea through a tidal bore. Around them the intricate cat's-cradle of power spinning out across the aether from the Hellmouth frazzled into moire static and reformed again in a new pattern. The Balance shifted, and settled, and neither heaven nor hell could claim dominion over the earth.
          Spike collapsed into Buffy's arms, spent beyond telling, limp as the end of a week-long shagfest. Given that they both still seemed to be fully dressed, he wasn't completely clear on whether or not actual shagging had taken place--reality seemed to be a bit on the subjective side of late--but he certainly felt as if he'd just received the most thorough, loving, and complete fuck of his existence. He rolled over, gazing up at the distant circle of the sky.
          "That was..." Buffy was still plastered to his side, all flushed and Raggedy-Ann-loose in the joints. Warm, sweaty Slayer. That was good.
          "Yeh."
          "We won, didn't we?"
          "Not sure, love. Was it a fight?" Her heart pounded in his ears and Harriers tumbled past his rapidly-glazing eyes, their victory-song turned to one of mourning and despair. They swirled away in a whirlpool of wings, sucked back from whence they'd come. Pretty. Like snowflakes. Or the Pequod. Ahab should have just given the bloody whale a blow job...or should that be a blowhole job? Sorry, mate, brain's closed for renovations. He'd just lie here for awhile. Several decades ought to do it.
          The lurid glare of fire on stone splashed the walls overhead. Down from on high snaked the five-clawed dragon he and Xander had watched fly over his crypt, riding the currents of air. Astride its gold and scarlet-maned neck was Dawn, her face salt-white and her eyes glittering with determination. "Buffy!" she shouted. "Spike! It's collapsing! We've got to get out!" The nightmare muzzle poked up over the ledge and snorted clouds of brimstone at them. Buffy gagged weakly and tried to roll away; the dragon-god rumbled something in antique Chinese dialect--incomprehensible, but undoubtedly sarcastic. "Get on!" Dawn screamed. The dragon pitched over like a log in a millrace, hovering in mid-air and offering them access to its back. "NOW!"
          For a second Spike lay there blinking stupidly and trying to figure out exactly how he was supposed to do that when every muscle in his body was the consistency of overcooked spaghetti. The painful subsonic groan that presaged an earthquake stabbed his eardrums, and he stumbled to his feet, his brain finally bullying his unwilling limbs into answering to their nominal master. Buffy was forcing herself upright at his side. They hoisted Willow's body over the dragon's shoulders and melted against the creature's side for a moment; then Buffy hauled herself aboard, grabbed Spike by the collar of his duster and picked him up bodily. Spike flung a leg over the dangerously sharp ridge of the dragon's spine, grabbed a double handful of tufted scarlet mane and slumped against Buffy's back. The huge barrel of the dragon's scaled body was painfully warm through his jeans, what was left of them. Like riding a sodding radiator. The dragon rolled one basketball-sized eye skywards with a steam-engine hiss and further unfavorable commentary on foreign devils. Then it was rocketing upwards.
          Some one of these days, Spike thought, he was really going to have to buckle down and pick up some Mandarin.


          Willow's eyes fluttered opened to undulating waves of copper and gold scales. She stared at them for awhile until a thought formed, and one of the many things she would be ashamed of later was that said thought wasn't What have I done? but It's all gone! She could feel the dry-socket ache of her missing magic above all the more prosaic pains--nothing borrowed, nothing blue, all vanished as if it had never existed at all. She hadn't realized how much space the First had taken up inside her till it was gone. She was a husk, a hollow Willow-shell, abandoned by the hermit crab of evil on the beach of life. Even her metaphors sucked.
          She was draped belly-down across something uncomfortable and jouncy. A mechanical bull, maybe. Except, scales. OK, a mechanical post-Ascension Mayor, then. She was scrunched between someone's butt (pert) and someone else's knees (bony, excessively white), the latter insufficiently concealed by half-shredded black denim. Flying out of a rapidly-disintegrating Hellmouth, on the...whatever. It began to sink in that they'd rescued her. Buffy had rescued her. Res-cued. Repeat it often enough and the word lost all meaning.
          Gods were melting. Willow could feel them popping like soap bubbles, going wherever it was gods went then the world wasn't coming to an end. Her own body was abandoning her, cell by cell. It wasn't a physical wound--she ached all over, but the blood and bruises weren't the problem. You couldn't just take two aspirin and bounce back from an Ultimate Evilectomy. When it came down to it, she wasn't sure she wanted to.
          "...and the flappy eyeball guys were starting to get out." Dawn was seated further astern, talking in a jittery, nerve-driven staccato, almost too fast to understand. "And then it was like, all this green light just whooshed out of me and did something, kind of like Willow's spell, except it didn't hurt, and I think I passed out. When I woke up all the flappy guys were being sucked back, and the walls were falling in, and all these god things were just standing around watching like it was Wimbledon or something. So I got mad and yelled at them to get off their stupid divine butts and help me, and dragon guy here flew me down to get you. I totally rescued you guys, didn't I? I am igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, I so rock! I mean, OK, world-saveage bennie points go to you guys for whatever the heck you did--"
          Became the focus for probably the biggest-ass piece of involuntary tantric magic in the last few centuries, but who's counting? Willow Rosenberg, Plucky Girl Researcher, might have figured out that putting two horny supernatural creatures of opposite alignment in the same unstable dimensional vortex as the Key to the Universe might cause stuff to happen on a larger scale than the mere shorting-out of scrying spells. Willow Rosenberg, Evil Genius, seemed to have missed the memo. A loopy giggle burbled up inside and fizzled before making it outside. Sex had finally saved the world--that had to be a first for Sunnydale.
          Rolling grey nausea overwhelmed her, and when it lifted, they were no longer in the Hellmouth, and Anya and Giles were pulling her off the dragon's back. Dorsal spines scraped her side through the thin rayon of her blouse. Giles's large and competent hands were on her shoulders, and Anya's small bony nervous ones were around her ankles. Willow kept her eyes shut. She didn't want to see them, didn't want them to see her. The hands kept on moving, wrapped her up in something--the remains of Spike's duster?--and laid her down gently on the ground. The smell of burnt leather clogged her nose. There was something wrong with her brain, she was sure. Thoughts drifted in and out of her head, little scraps of fact and feeling, but nothing related to anything else. I almost killed Dawn. My toes are cold. There are dead bodies all around me. I could have picked the bell pepper off the pizza. Everyone will hate me now.
          She could see each individual tile in the mosaic, but taking the necessary step back to see the whole picture was no longer something she was capable of. No, that was a lie. She was capable. She was just terrified of seeing that picture. She was Dorian Grey, approaching the cobweb-shrouded painting in the attic.
          Please let me die before it sinks in.
          Tara was sitting beside the winch, rubbing a large purple knot on her forehead and looking as if she might throw up. Tara not crawling over to her side, Tara not looking at her, Tara...it was because she was hurt, right? Possibly concussed. Or maybe she just hates me. Willow's mind fuzzed over at the thought. She couldn't exist in a world where Tara hated her, could she? It wasn't possible. If X, then Y, and Willow disappears in a puff of logic.
          Spike sat down heavily beside Tara. His exposed chest was pitted with angry red-black burns; had she done that? Of course she had. She remembered flinging the bolts of power at him and grinning as his flesh sizzled. Someone must have turned up the pilot light on her soul; guilt spread and exploded like wildfire. She'd done a lot more than that. Willow closed her eyes, but that was worse; she could see men screaming and worse than dying, flesh melting off bones as crazies went up like torched Ents. If she weren't too weak to move she'd be barfing her lungs up right about now. There was nothing left inside with which she could fight the memories. No justifications, no excuses--all her lances shattered and her shields riven by the harsh clarity of hindsight.
          She'd laid everything that was Willow on the altar of expedience, burnt it to ashes, and it had all been for nothing, all that death and pain and guilt and sacrifice. She'd thought of every angle, come up with a plan that covered them all, and that plan... would have ended up killing Buffy anyway. The First Evil had been ahead of her at every step, playing on her insecurity and pride with the virtuosity of a Paganini. For all her cleverness, the solution had slipped through her fingers, and it had all been Buffy, stumbling onto a serendipitous solution that didn't require anyone to be nailed to a tree at all. Now she had nothing to show but bloodstains that went right down to the bone. She made Lady MacBeth look like an amateur. She could smell Bench's blood on her hands, and she would be seeing the gaslight blue of burning souls behind her eyelids for the rest of her life.
          "Xander hasn't come back," Anya said, her voice shrill with panic. "He hasn't come back and he promised me he wouldn't die. He promised!"
          Xander? Oh, God, Xander. She'd thrown Xander fifty feet through the air, buried him in debris, and laughed. She moaned, torn between hope that he lived and fear that if he did, he'd look right past the pixie face and see her for the monster she was.
          Buffy knelt beside Spike, smoothing springy coils of pale hair back from his drawn face. She didn't look much better than the vampire did; her wounds were individually less serious, but there were more of them. Willow cringed away, but Buffy didn't hear her little whimper of anguish. Or at least, she wasn't reacting to it. Why should she? It was Buffy's job to save the world, to save you, but that didn't mean she'd be be your best friend afterwards, ever again. Buffy looked around at the blast radius surrounding the crater, her eyes betraying overwhelming weariness. "Are all the crazies out by the cars? What's--what's left of them? We've got to get out of here, fast, and I don't want to leave anyone behind if I can help it--Tara, can you--?"
          "Don't think more magic's the best of ideas just now," Spike said. He sounded hoarse, like his throat was sunburned. "I can sniff Captain Drywall out. And anyone else left alive out there." He started to heave himself to his feet again, only to fall back on his ass as another quake-tremor rocked the construction site.
          "Right. Take Willow with you--this popsicle stand could blow any minute." Buffy scooped the dazed Tara up and started for the cars, corralling a stray crazy on the way. A trio of raggle-haired old women passed a single eye between them and cackled and pointed at the departing Slayer, crying out " , !" before disappearing into a tangle of girders.
          The salt-sting of tears seeped through her lashes and trickled down her cheeks, weak and useless as the rest of her. The pathetic thing was, she didn't want to die. Not now, not without telling Tara that she loved her, without telling Buffy she was sorry, that she'd never meant things to come to this. But oh, she didn't want to live like this either, with the knowledge of what she'd done a constant acid-burn in her stomach. If only she could close her eyes and open them on some deserted island with white beaches and green palms, far removed from everyone and everything else. She could live there for twenty years, and survive on coconuts and fish, and pour out the vileness in her soul to a volleyball, and then maybe she'd be clean enough to live in the same world as Tara. As Buffy. As anyone.
          No. She was fooling herself. She'd never be clean again.
          She felt a sickening jerk and a lift; Spike had picked her up. He vamped out and tipped his head back, testing the breeze, and after a moment's concentration, started towards a low point in the sea-wrack of shattered concrete and metal. Just Spike in game face, lumpies and fangs and exhausted golden eyes, an ordinary vampire of ordinary vampire abilities, and not the figure of ebony flame she'd glimpsed on the ledge, merged with the figure of light just before everything went green. She wondered if maybe, before the life and will ebbed out of her entirely, they could talk--Spike understood certain things about her better even than Tara or Xander. There were other things Spike would never understand. For all his changes, he retained at his core the straightforward and horrible innocence of a creature incapable of guilt.
          Incapable of guilt. That sounded awfully attractive right about now. It had a ring to it. "Spike..."
          Without slowing his pace, the vampire looked down at her, breaking into a grin. One nice thing about Spike being evil himself, he seldom held grudges about the times when you were. "Will! How're you do--"
          "Dying." The tears rolling down her cheeks were genuine, all right.
          His gaze slid away from hers; of course he knew. Every predator's sense he possessed must have been screaming the news in eighty-point type. If he hadn't been checking for scent trails he'd probably have lapsed back into human shape on the spot. Spike couldn't resist a woman's tears, any way you sliced it--he had to console her or kill her. "There, pet, we'll get you to hospital as soon as I dig Harris out of here."
          Hospital. Sickening thought; what if they did save her? "I don't want... I don't deserve..."
          Amazing, how his eyes could go all melty even in game face, the tawny yellow softening to hazy primrose. "Don't be daft. I've killed more men than you've got freckles, love, and here I am. You've done more good than bad, right? Saved the world six or seven times, haven't you?" Spike gave her arm an awkward pat, his eyes suspiciously damp. He cocked his head, obviously trying to work out a compromise between the reassurance he wanted to offer and his imperfect understanding of the strictures of human guilt. "And you're sorry now, so that's all right, yeh?"
          Spike sounded so hopeful, and the look in his eyes...Spike, of all people, needed her to be sorry. Wanted the comfort of knowing that Willow Rosenberg felt bad about what she'd done, as he never could, and all was therefore right with the world again.
          Her tears were half from anger now. A wave of pitiful resentment washed through her. She was spoiled. Ruined. Why couldn't they just let her go? But no, Buffy was the Slayer, and Spike kind of liked her and selfishly wanted to keep her around, so here she was. Rescued. So they could feel all hero-y and she could suffer for a vampire's moral edification. Spike wouldn't be sorry, if his grandiose plan to save the world had fallen apart in a firestorm of death and chaos. He might be disgusted with himself for failing Buffy, angry at his lack of control, frustrated because a plan hadn't worked... but no guilt. No long nights tormented by thoughts of what you'd done for a vampire, no--no nothing. Because you would be gone. Replaced by a demon. A fate worse than death.
          And wasn't that exactly what she deserved?
          The earth shuddered as a quarter-acre of ground adjacent the Hellmouth dropped twenty-five feet straight down in a cloud of dust and ash. A slab of concrete ahead of them emitted a ponderous groan and crashed to the ground. Spike glanced over his shoulder with a harried growl; he was skirting the edges of the rubble now, sniffing the air like a peroxide bloodhound. "You'll be all right if I set you down, pet?"
          "Spike...I asked you once to do me a favor."
          His eyelids dropped to half-mast and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He had a brain under those bleached locks, Spike did. "Answer's still the same, pet. Better take your chances with modern medicine. I may joke about it, but--" He broke off, embarrassed. "I was willing to turn you that night in the dorm because I didn't--wasn't...fond of you then. 'S different now." His fangs indented his lower lip for a second, clean sharp whiteness against soft pink. "Been down this road before, and it never ends up anyplace good. Siring someone--it changes everything."
           She'd met her vampire self. She knew exactly what would change. More frighteningly, she knew exactly what wouldn't. She looked up at him and smiled. "That's what I'm counting on."
          Willow flung her arm up in a clumsy arc, smashing Spike in the mouth and sawing her wrist against his fangs. Her skin tore like rice paper against the razor points of his canines, spilling precious crimson across the milky flesh of her arm. Spike's nostrils flared at the blood-scent and his eyes flashed metallic gold as wounded-starving-demon reflexes overwhelmed him. Cool lips closed on the wound, sucking down a greedy mouthful as fangs set in flesh--his Adam's apple bobbed once, but before the pleasure-pain of the bite could really set in Spike dropped out of game face, coughing and spitting her blood back in her eyes. Expending all her hoarded strength, Willow lunged up and sank her teeth into the ragged wound on his chest, tearing at the healing scabs. "Will, what the fuck--OW!"
          Cool salty fluid flooded her mouth. The movies had it all wrong--vampire blood tasted terrible, or at least tepid, half-congealed vampire blood sucked out of a semi-cauterized burn wound and flavored with charred cloth and liberal amounts of dirt was pretty darn disgusting. But oh--=power.= Willow felt like the time when she was eight and she and Xander had snuck the Manischewitz from her father's liquor cabinet into the back yard disguised as Kool-Aid. Her head whirled. It should come with frilly paper umbrellas, vampire blood. "Whole big sucking thing," she giggled, and then her stomach revolted and she almost threw up the pitiful mouthful she'd managed to choke down. Was it enough? Normally Spike would have had to drain her, but she was so close to death already, maybe it would work. Hands grabbed her shoulders and tore her away, but too late, she hoped. Spike looked for once like the corpse that he was, his face sickly with terror. Willow smiled up at him with blood-smeared lips. Silly vampire. Didn't he know he wasn't supposed to feel bad about any of this?
          The ground was rumbling underneath them and there was yelling and running and hollering in the background. The world fractured into a series of still images: Buffy herding crazies, Anya screaming for Xander, Giles pulling Xander's mangled body from beneath a fallen pillar while Spike grit his teeth and braced half a ton of rust-streaked steel over their heads, Tara bending over her, weeping--where had Tara come from? It was nice, though, to see her one last time before the end. The distant pressure on her fingers might even be Tara holding her hand. Her body would die and her soul would be ejected into the eternal stasis of the aether. Neither heaven nor hell for Willow Danielle Rosenberg--just nothing. Forever. The demon would take her body and the others would have to kill it. They'd have to. Just like they'd killed Jesse, just like they'd killed so many others, without a second thought, because that was what you did with monsters. They never talked about Jesse. They'd never talk about her. Not only existence wiped out, but all remembrance as well.
          The potent elixir of Spike's blood burned through her system as the newly-budded demon unfolded to fill that terrible empty space within her. Did demons bud? Or was there a demon bank somewhere from which she'd just made a withdrawal? She wondered what it would be like, her new demon. Exactly like her Anya-summoned vampire double, or different? Did the vampire who sired you make a difference? Something in her mourned never finding out. Maybe she wouldn't be curious when she was a vampire. Well, duh, no, she'd be dusty. And vampires were nothing like the person whose body they appropriated, anyway. Unless they were Spike, who was so very, very William, and then there was Harmony, and could you even tell the difference there, and...what if Angel was the exception, not the rule? But it was too late to worry about that now, and she couldn't, wouldn't think about it because she was dying and it didn't matter, did it? Buffy would never allow her to rise. They'd cut off her head or burn her or something and in a few minutes she'd be nothing, nothing, nothing.
          She couldn't wait.
 

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