Je Souhaite II: Alternative lifestyle choice

Authors: Fayth and Emily

Pairing: W/S, mention of W/T

Rating: PG-13

Distribution: Bite Me, Please? Near Her Always, Soulmates, and my site, What a Lovely Way to Burn. Anyone else, if you want it, just ask.

Disclaimer: The basic premise and characters belong to lots of people who aren’t us.

Spoilers: Through “Into the Woods”

Summary: Sequel to “Je Souhaite: Reality TV.” Spike gets his wish. Now it’s time for Willow to get hers.

A/N: When Fayth retired from Spillow fanfic, she bequeathed this fic to me. The first three sections are hers; my writing picks up in halfway through section four.

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~Part: 1~

No sooner had the words left Halfrek’s mouth than she had vanished, leaving Spike perplexed and more than a little plastered, the abundance of alcohol he had consumed before his little side trip finally catching up with him. Moving was difficult. Speaking would be a major challenge. Analytical thought was out of the question.

Spike blinked in the direction where Halfrek had stood for a few seconds.

“Uh Spike?” the weasel-like bartender squeaked, then gulped nervously as Spike swayed towards him.

“What?” It wasn’t a bark; more a concentrated effort not to give in to the urge to puke while his mouth was open.

“We’re closing now.” He swallowed, wishing for the millionth time tonight that the vampire had chosen somewhere else to have his little pity drink, especially as it seemed it was on the house.

“Yeah?” Spike growled and turned on his heel, promptly falling over his other foot, which despite all brain signals had remained where it was. “Who moved the bloody floor?”

Willy, wisely, didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he cowered behind the bar and watched in silence as Spike stumbled close to the door, and then into the wall next to the door, and finally, at long last, through the door.

Instinct and habit carried him through the graveyard to the familiarity of his crypt. For some reason, his bed was dancing on the ceiling and all the other furniture was swirling around the room, but he bravely tackled the bed, wrestling his way onto its softness. He tugged one pillow under his head and the other against his chest, stroking his fingers over the smooth silk pillowcase.

“Willow,” he whispered. “Mmm, Willow.” He placed a sloppy kiss on the pillow as he cuddled it closer, and fell asleep.

~*~*~*~

Contrary to popular theory, vampires can get hangovers, a fact of which Spike was all too well aware when he woke up the next afternoon, both arms and both legs wrapped around a rather squashed pillow, wishing he could detach his head.

It had been a weird night all told. First he’d gone to tell Buffy about Soldier boy getting sucked on for cash. (He wrinkled his nose at the memory; like he’d have bitten the great oaf, even for cash.) Then Buffy had beaten him up for telling her. (Spike growled at the memory and then immediately wished he hadn’t as his head threatened to spontaneously combust.) Then he’d gone out to get well and truly sloshed but Halfrek had turned up and . . .

Bloody hell.

Spike sat up and then immediately lay back down again as he waited none too patiently for the world to stop circling so he could build on his last thought without re-enacting a Jackson Pollock on his crypt floor.

Halfrek had taken him back in time to see the vampire version of Willow come to this reality. He fallen hard for the vampire and even harder for the human version and had recognized his pathetic little Slayer obsession for exactly what it was. Nonsense. Complete and total, mind-numbingly excruciating bollocks. He was a vampire for hells sake; not a wimpy, second-class, soul-carrying corpse in a rut like his sire Paingel. He was a proper vampire.

And he was gonna get himself a witch.

He jumped off his bed and crumpled to the floor.

As soon as the world stopped spinning.

~*~*~*~

Willow sat at the window in the Magic box staring out into space. It was a dark night with heavy cloud cover promising rain for the next day.

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Willow Rosenberg the weather witch.” She giggled softly to herself at her ridiculous thoughts, glad that no one else could hear them, even if the gang researching away behind her would look over. They were too into what they doing—which sounded like a discussion on the merits of marshmallows.

Xander was heading the conversation of course, championed by Dawn and Anya with Tara and Giles on the opposing side. Willow had left them to look out the window a while ago and was content to simply watch and enjoy them.

Of course, she thought, her smile darkening, that was probably all due to the strange thoughts she’d been having recently. She had always tried hard to fulfill people’s expectations of her: the dutiful daughter, the smart scholar, the best friend, the girlfriend, the hacker, the researcher, and now the witch. But recently the idea that she was so much more often came thundering through her brain, especially when they asked her to do something to fulfill her role.

“Hey Willow, jump on the computer and research this?” In response, her mind snaps at Giles, What, you speak ten different languages and the computer frightens you?

“Hey Will, can you talk to Anya about proper public conversation again?” No you’re dating the demon; deal with her crap yourself.

“Hey Willow, can you take care of Dawn for me? Mom’s out of town and I have to patrol with Riley.” Yeah, I bet you get a lot of patrolling done with his tongue down your throat.

“W-W-W-Willow? Do y-you want to do a spell w-w-with me?” No, I am sick of all our time being spent on spells; don’t you ever want to just talk to me?

It wasn’t like her to think such hurtful thoughts, especially about her girlfriend, but it was getting harder and harder not to just blurt it all out. Last night had been the final straw. Tara had been going on about a spell while they were in bed and she snuggled closer to Willow but suddenly Willow didn’t want to snuggle with Tara, she wanted to be left alone. She had forced herself to lie there until Tara fell asleep, and then she had taken the couch, to be gone before Tara woke up.

Willow sighed; maybe she was sick with something.

The door to the Magic Box rattled open forcing her out of her thoughts. It was Buffy, looking a little anxious.

After greeting the others with a too-bright smile she turned to Willow.

“Buff, you okay?” Willow asked quietly.

“Yeah, it’s just . . .” She sighed “I had a fight with Riley this morning about that vampire joint that I burned down last night.”

“The pay to be sucked on thing?” Willow frowned, she couldn’t imagine why they wanted to pay to be bitten—it was painful.

“Yeah.” Buffy sat near her and lowered her voice. “Can I tell you something, Wills?”

“Anything.” She vowed and Buffy grinned like she knew it, which she did; Willow would always drop everything to help her friends, it was part of who she was.
“Spike came to me last night; he took me to a vamp hang-out. He took me to see something. Riley was paying to be bitten.”

Willow gaped. “Why?”

Buffy stood up and began to pace restlessly “He said something about me shutting him out and wanting to get back at me for the whole Dracula thing. There was even something about Angel in there.” She huffed. “I just don’t get it.”

Willow sat quietly waiting for Buffy to run out of steam or thoughts, whichever came first.

“Will?”

“You have been pushing-away girl lately, which is understandable, with the new training and your mom being sick. It’s part of being a grown-up to take things on for yourself and part of being a slayer to think you have to do it all alone. But you are not alone, Buffy; you have all of us and Riley. Riley feels bad because he doesn’t have his superpowers anymore and he needs to feel needed, just like any guy. He knows that Angel will always be special to you and he feels threatened by that because Angel can help you and can fight with you without you having to look out for him. The whole sucking thing was probably a way for you to notice that he needs you.” She paused to let her words sink in. “Talk to him, tell him that it’s him you choose and him that you want. Don’t push him away, and let him help.”

Buffy swallowed painfully and smiled at Willow. “Thank you.”

“Oh, and it might make him feel better if you cried on his shoulder. Big, wet tears, with added sniffles,” she added teasingly. “Makes him feel all manly.”

Buffy snorted. “Thanks for the visual. Of course, I may just do that, anyway. I just can’t believe the lengths he went to and that Spike knew. This crush Spike has on me is disturbing.” She got up to leave and then turned back giving Willow a kiss on the cheek. “I love you, Will.”

Willow beamed and pointed over her shoulder. “Tara will get jealous.”

Buffy’s face was a mask of horror. “I didn’t mean . . .” She stopped when she saw the look on Willow’s face. “Minx.”

“But I got ya.” Willow grinned at her friend. “Say goodbye to Dawn, and then go smooch with boyfriend.”

“Later.” Buffy, as always took Willow’s advice. After all, Willow was her best friend and knew how to make things better.

“Hey Wills, come back me up here. There is a difference between white and pink marshmallows right?”

“Yup, the pink burn easier over corpses,” Willow said without thinking and then turned slightly as the conversation stopped.

“Ew,” Dawn giggled. “That was gross.”

Willow gave her a lopsided smile. “I try.”

“Come over, sweetie?” Tara simpered with stretched arm that normally Willow would crawl under.

“I need some air actually,” Willow amended hurriedly and went out the back entrance to the alleyway to sit on the crates that were kept there from the shop next door.
Where was everything going in her life? She was doing great at college, she was a natural at the book learning, and her Wicca skills had come along further than any of them knew. She found herself having to hide how great her talents really were from Tara who had started to look at her oddly every time she used magic. It wasn’t right to have to hide things from your lover, but here she was delving into the harder volumes and being able to master the things in them with worrying ease. She was fast approaching the breaking point and the strange thing was that up until a few days ago she hadn’t even realized that she had one.

It had all started so innocently. Annoyingly, it had been Spike who had bought it up. (The thought of the bleached blonde never failed to put a look of confusion on her face; he was such a mystery, and yet not really at all.) It seemed that all he needed in life or unlife was to be needed and loved, he didn’t crave power, he just wanted his bite back which she supposed was understandable, she knew that if someone stole her Wicca powers she would do anything to get them back. But that was his whole philosophy, to have fun and be loved. It was so simplistic it blew Willow’s mind, which had had trouble coping with Buffy’s Carpe Diem theory anyway.

Anyhow, Spike had been talking about something to Dawn and out of the blue he had said something about humans only having seventy-odd years to live and people on the Hellmouth even less so unless they were planning on being vamped, it was important that they take as many risks and live. Although she hadn’t been strictly listening, his words struck a chord with her.

What, exactly, had she done in her twenty odd years on this earth? Dated twice. Saved the world on occasion, graduated high school and gone to college. That was it and that was when her feelings of discontent started to filter in. Then over the last two days, they had gotten worse and worse until she hardly knew what to think and only knew that she couldn’t go back to how she had been now that the thoughts had been had.

Spike stood across the street and watched the chit as she left the Magic box and sat on some boxes across the alleyway from the shop. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, lost deeply in thought. He took the opportunity to watch her unhindered. She really was beautiful; her long red hair even looked luminous in the fluorescent lighting that lit the alleyway. Her skin was peach soft and he knew that if he got close she would have the smell of vanilla and strawberries on her. She was looking lost and Spike wondered what had her so confused and alone and why she wasn’t in there with the rest of the damn Scoobies doing whatever it was they thought was so all-fired important.

Still, he was never a vampire to waste an opportunity like that so he pulled his coat closer to him, braced himself and waltzed over to her.

“Hey, Red.”

Willow looked up, speak of the devil and he shall appear.

~Part: 2~

“Spike,” she nodded and went back to staring at her feet, tensing when he decided to lean on the wall opposite her.

“Everything okay, pet?” he asked sincerely

“Hmm,” was her noncommittal answer.

“How come you’re not in there with the rest of them?”

Willow looked up. “Why the questions?”

“Expressing a bit of interest.”

“In me?” Her look was openly skeptical and it irked Spike.

“What if I am?” he said defensively “I seem to be the only one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He threw up his hands. “I meant that here’s you looking all puppyless and they are all in there talking about hell knows what and yet here I am asking you what’s wrong.”

“Marshmallows.”

Spike froze “Say what?”

“They’re talking about marshmallows,” she said with pursed lips and a mischievous look in her eyes.

“Huh.” Spike gave a snort of laughter, he reached into his pocket and after pulling out and lighting a cigarette, he leaned back against the wall “So the conversation not intellectual enough for you?”

Willow ducked her head to hide her smile “Not really.”

“Right.” He bit his lip. “So you want to talk?”

Willow sighed and thought for a second. “You know when you’ve looked at someone a certain way for so long—” she paused, talking slower to choose her words more carefully “And then one day when you look, it’s like you’ve not really seen them before?” She looked up at him.

Spike swallowed hard—was she talking about him? “I think so, pet.” He took a drag of the cigarette and blew out the smoke.

“What do you do?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I guess you re-evaluate your relationship with them then.” He watched as a troubled look appeared on her face.

“But what if it’s you that’s changed and not them?”

“Same diff. Everyone changes, pet; you grow up and grow apart or together. You have to move with it or you end up unhappy.”

Willow looked up and did a double take at him. “Wow.”

“What?” His lips curved at her appraising look

“I think that’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“I have my moments.” He smirked at her and watched her blush. “So what inspired the introspection?”

Willow wasn’t sure what to tell him, it wasn’t like they had ever been bosom buddies; in fact he more often than not ridiculed her and tried to kill her. Why was he playing nice now?

“Stuff,” she shrugged.

The back door opened startling them both and Tara popped her head around the corner. Her eyes narrowed when she saw Willow and Spike’s little one-on-one.

“Hey Willow, we were wondering where you were.” She glared at Spike and smiled at Willow.

“Just needed some air.” Willow gave a sigh and pulled herself to her feet. Shooting Spike an apologetic look, she walked back into the shop.

Spike finished off his smoke and thought deeply about the look in her eyes and her words. Had she been talking about him? Could she be as intrigued by him as he was her?

Spike couldn’t help the grin that graced his sexy features as he thought about the witch. She definitely was an enigma; a bundle of darkness and light. Sweet innocence and devilish deviousness, her thoughts alone were enough to keep him entranced for centuries. He never knew what she was thinking; okay, previously he hadn’t given it much thought, but having totally eradicated the slayer from his thoughts, his attention was now free to focus on the delicacy that was the witch. And focus he would. She thought she was gay? He was Spike, he was the Big Bad; she would be helpless against his persistence. She’d be his in no time. He smirked as he thought about stealing her away from that wet dishcloth she called a girlfriend.

Well, no time like the present to start.

He took a final drag and crushed the glowing cigarette under his boot. Then he opened the door and whirled into the Magic Box.

Willow ignored the curious looks that her girlfriend was sending her and smiled at Dawn.

“Buffy was going to sort something out with Riley so we can take you home.”

Dawn smiled at them. “Actually, I’m going to Janice’s tonight, all-night slumber party.”

“Oh, I remember them,” Willow grinned. “Junk food, talking about boys, pillow fights, girls walking around in little pajamas.”

“Hey, that was my fantasy,” Xander protested with a mischievous look at Anya. “Want a slumber party?” He paused. “Without the ‘talking about boys’ part.”

“Yeah!” Anya bounced in glee as Tara looked askance at Willow.

Willow shrugged, not really wanting to get into that tonight.

Tara sidled over. “So we have the place to ourselves?”

“Uh . . . I . . . uh . . .” Willow stammered, not wanting to tell Tara that the last thing she wanted to do right now was have sex with her girlfriend, and that in fact the very idea made her feel awkward.

“We could go now?” Tara purred not noticing the stiff way Willow was standing next to her.

“Uh . . .” It wasn’t the brightest thing she could have said but she was short on excuses and she had never been a good liar.

Spike watched as Willow swallowed and stiffened as her girl moved closer. His eyebrows rose as he sensed her reluctance to touch Tara, and his demon crowed that it obviously wouldn’t be as hard as he’d thought to break them up. When the blonde witch snuggled into her he could practically feel Willow recoil. He watched her flounder for an excuse not to go straight home and to bed with the girl. And since her plans and his obviously meshed—that is, to get her away from her witch—he decided to help her out.

“Actually, Red’s coming on patrol with me while the Slayer is chewing on her boy toy.”

Willow turned to him and her relief and gratitude evident in her eyes went a long way to soothing his demon.

“Uh yeah, I kinda asked Spike to patrol with me since Buffy went to make up with Riley.”

Tara moved away and scowled at Spike “Can’t he do that by himself?”

“No bleeding way. I’m not a sodding Scooby; if some demon gets a bite out of me it’d be weeks before any of you lot noticed. If Red comes with me, at least I get some insurance.”

“So you’re gonna put Willow in danger just in case you come across something bad?” The girl could be aggressive when she chose to be, Spike noted.

“It’s okay Tara; he was doing it as a favor for me. I would have gone alone.” Willow tried to placate her lover as the others looked on in surprise at mild-mannered Tara arguing with them.

“I could have gone with you,” she insisted.

“I thought Dawn was at home; I wanted you to stay with her.”

“Well she’s not now, so I can come,” Tara finished smugly.

“Not bloody likely.” Spike glared at her “You have to make sure Nibblet gets to her mates okay, and around demons you’re about as useful as a wet rag.”

Tara glared back with anger. “I could turn you into a toad.”

“Ew, frog fear!” Willow shuddered, drawing attention to herself. “It's okay, baby. Me and Spike can patrol and you take Dawnie back. We’ll be done in no time.”

Tara backed down slightly as Willow touched her arm.

Spike smirked at the fact that he had gotten his own way and fought the childish urge to stick his tongue out at her.

He helped Willow into her jacket, much to the bemusement of the rest of the Scoobies.
But he didn’t care about their confusion as his fingers ‘accidentally’ grazed her chest as he went to help her zip up.

“I can manage,” she hissed at him.

Spike held his hands up in mock defeat.

“Okay then, pet.”

“Bye, guys.”

~Part: 3~

Willow wasn’t sure why Spike had helped her out of that tight spot or why he seemed to want to be a therapist suddenly.

As they walked through the graveyard, she watched him out of the corner of her eye. He seemed nervous about something and then it hit her—of course. She sighed.

“Spike, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but it has to be said.”

“What’s that then, pet?” he asked with a smile at her anxious tone.

“Buffy is happy with Riley; she really is. I know that you told her about Riley’s habit and I’m sure she’s grateful to you for bringing it all out in the open but—”

“But what?” He put his head on the side and watched hungrily as she bit her lip.

“She doesn’t like you like that, Spike. This crush you have on her is only going to end up with you getting hurt, either by Buffy emotionally or by Riley physically. I can see why you’d like her but it’s not healthy for you, Spike.”

Spike stared at her. “Worried about me?”

Willow didn’t know how to answer that. “We—I guess.”

He started to give her a slow smirk “Nice to know, but have no fear, pet. I came to the same conclusion last night after she was done rearranging my face into her own portrait of pain.”

“She hit you?” Willow frowned. “She didn’t mention that.”

“What Miss Stake-happy? She tried to beat the crap out of me. I, happy to say, am over her.”

Willow breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good. For you,” she added hurriedly.

“So, why the concern about my love life all of a sudden, Red? Jealous?” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“N-no, I just was wondering why you were hanging out with me and then I got it.”

“Got what?” He seemed to be annoyed at the statement.

“Well, when both Angel and Riley wanted to date Buffy they both came to me first to get inside information on what she liked to do, where she liked to go, her favorite stuff. I figured you were the same. Except for you I guess you’d already know quite a bit, having been around us for so long.”

“And that’s the only reason I’d hang around you?” he asked, his voice thick with sarcasm.

Willow shrugged, trying not to show her sad face. “Sure, why else would you?”

He stared in disbelief at her. “Are you serious?”

“What?” She didn’t see why he appeared so shocked.

“Pet, did it even occur to you that I might want to be around you?”

The look on her face said it all. The thought had obviously never even crossed her mind. He fought the urge to chuckle at her confused expression. She looked so adorable when she was trying to figure something out. He wondered if she’d take it the wrong way if he grabbed her suddenly and kissed her senseless. She probably wouldn’t go for it, he thought. At least, not yet.

“Why would you want to be around me?” Willow couldn’t help but ask.

Instead of answering, Spike let his gaze linger a bit on her lips, waiting for her to notice. Her steaming blush gave it away the second she caught his eyes’ direction, and Spike couldn’t help but grin at how deliciously innocent she seemed at that moment. Reminded him of that younger self he’d seen in Halfrek’s vision, she did: all hesitant and blushing. It was possibly the cutest thing he’d ever seen, and it made him want to pull her to the nearest mausoleum and just cuddle her for a few hours. Mmm, Willow-cuddles. Spike let his imagination run with that thought for a bit until he felt his body start to . . . respond. Spike was momentarily grateful for the way still-blushing Willow avoided looking at him as he hastily adjusted himself in his jeans. Best save to those thoughts for later, he decided, or he’d have a fair bit of trouble getting through the rest of the patrol.

“So pet,” he started, searching for a new topic of conversation, “about that stuff you were saying before, about suddenly seeing someone in a new way . . .”

“Yes?” Willow looked up, clearly relieved to be switching to a new topic of conversation.

“You never did get ’round to telling me who you’ve been changing your mind about.”

Willow frowned slightly as her eyes took on a slightly faraway look, and Spike’s face fell. With that frown on her face, it didn’t seem likely that she’d confess she’d recently indulged in fantasies of her lovely self, a certain bleached-blond vamp, and some type of edible restraints.

“Myself, mostly,” she answered, her frown deepening as she tried to examine what, exactly, she’d been feeling lately. “Sometimes I look around, and I just . . .”

“Wonder how in seven hells you ended up where you did?” Spike suggested.

“Yeah,” Willow sighed. “Pretty much. It’s not exactly the life that I used to think that I would have. I mean, it’s not that I don’t love my friends, but sometimes I feel like I spend so much time just running in circles, taking care of them that I—”

“Forget to take care of yourself?”

“Kind of. Does that sound bad?” Willow looked up at Spike with wide, searching eyes.

“No, pet, it doesn’t sound bad at all. Like I said, it’s all part of growing up.” Spike began to warm to the subject, his initial disappointment fading. It had been foolish of him to even hope that the girl might have started to see him in a different light when he’d only woken up enough to drag his eyes off the slayer in the past day, but if she was starting to see herself in a different light then that was something he could work with. Yes, this had definite room for potential, especially if her shiny new perspective including trying something that the Scooby gang’s perfect little Willow-shaped friend would never have done. Like vampires, for instance.

“Time’s got to come sooner or later when you start making decisions based on what’s good for you.” Like me, he added mentally. I could be so good for you, if you’d let me. “Live your own life, and all that. If your mates don’t have the sense to catch on and pull their heads far enough out of their arses to back you up, then bollocks to them. It’s your life, love, not theirs, and it’s your choice what you do with it.”

Willow nodded slowly, and he could tell just from looking at her that she was truly considering what he was saying. It gave him the courage to push for just a bit more.

“If you could do something right now, something for yourself and not the slayer’s little pet hacker, or your girlfriend’s trained seal of a witch, or the watcher’s walking database, what would it be?”

He could see the building excitement on her face for a long, beautiful moment before it vanished, as rapidly and completely as a snuffed candle.

It was the wording that had caught her ear. Computer abilities, witchy skills, disapproving friends . . . gee, what had happened the last time she and Spike had had a conversation about those things? A bolt of white-hot hurt shot through Willow and she fought back against the tears that tried to fill her eyes. “This is just like last year, isn’t it?” she managed to whisper in a low voice that, hopefully, hid how close she was to tears.

“What?”

Willow bristled even more at Spike’s look of utter confusion. He was faking, she was sure of it. Just as he’d been faking all along for the whole conversation, pretending to be all nice and understanding, and she’d been foolish enough to fall for it. Well, no more. They’d never really properly yelled at him for it the previous year; fighting through a massive pile of Initiative-captured demons swarming them on all sides had kinda taken precedence, and once they were done with that, creepy nightmares of a cheeseman had kept them from reaming Spike the way he deserved to be reamed. But his hour had finally come. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it this time.

“You’ve decided you’re not in love with Buffy anymore, so you’re right back at the old plan of trying to hurt her any way you can? It’s not going to work this time, Spike. I’m not going to listen to you put me down and tell me that my friends think I’m worthless. Goddess, I can’t believe I almost fell for it. Whatever plan you have to split all of us up and make us hate each other, it’s not going to work. If you think I’m going to fall for whatever lies you’re spouting, think again. I’m through listening to you. They’re my friends and they’re the ones I trust, not you.”

For a second, Spike looked like she’d punched him in the gut with a cross, and Willow felt a sliver of doubt slipping in with all her righteous anger. She’d been right, hadn’t she? No matter how wonderful and supportive those things he had said had sounded on the surface, he was just saying those things to break up the gang again and hurt her in the long run . . . wasn’t he?

Then Spike’s tightened into a hard mask of anger and a bit of fear starting getting mixy with the anger and the doubt churning around somewhere in her gut. She knew Spike couldn’t hurt her physically, but she also knew he could be downright devastating with just the right cutting remark to make her feel horrible. From the look on his face, she was about to get it from both barrels.

“Very good, pet,” he began in a low, biting voice that made Willow flinch just from the sound of it. “Very good, indeed. You’ve learned the first lesson any watcher worth his salt would teach you: Demons can’t be trusted. Sure, they might fight by your side for over a year and they might save your life and the lives of your miserable little friends so many times that you lose count, but don’t let that fool you. Deep down, they’re all the same; they’re like animals, they’re subhuman, they’re cockroaches, vermin, filth, and they deserve to be harshly judged from your lovely, self-righteous, holier-than-thou moral high ground because being a slayerette makes you saint-like and beyond reproach. What a crime I’ve committed, daring to think I might be allowed to empathize with one of you and actually have a conversation that doesn’t consist of every bloody word out of my mouth being analyzed for some hidden meaning that shows a way I plan to screw you all over. Of course I’m far too low for any such thing. Beneath you, aren’t I? Can’t be trusted. How nice to know exactly where we stand.”

No force of will could have stopped the tears this time from welling up in Willow’s eyes. She’d known instinctively that whatever he was going to say would hurt, but no amount of bracing herself could have prepared her for that. With the remarks about cockroaches, vermin, filth . . . she’d aligned herself with the Wiccan faith by choice, but she was still Jewish by birth, and nothing he could have done could have made her feel sicker or more disgusted with herself than when he’d flat out compared her to a Nazi. The idea that she could be that instinctively, stupidly, inherently bigoted made her want to throw up. Shame followed hot on the heels of queasiness, and even though she doubted it would do much good, her apology still couldn’t come out fast enough.

“Spike, I—”

“Save it,” Spike growled. “Go home, witch. I’ll take patrol from here.”

Willow grabbed his arm before he could get away, her determination making her stronger than either of them expected; strong enough to hold him in place for a moment. “Spike, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I did; I shouldn’t have even thought it. Please forgive me.”

“So what if you’re sorry?” Spike spat out, wrenching his arm out of her grip. “Why should I care?” Willow barely had a chance to blink before he was gone, leaving Willow feeling strangely deflated.

“I hate it when he does that disappearing thing,” she sniffled as she seated herself on a conveniently located marble slab and started digging in her bag for a tissue. “And I hate it when he does the whole ‘you just make a complete idiot out of yourself’ thing. Especially when he’s right. Goddess, why do I always manage to put my foot in it when I’m around him? He was being so oddly nice and understanding before I went and screwed it up. And now I have no idea what to do to make it right.” Sniffling again, Willow let out a sigh of relief as she dug out a very crumpled pack of Kleenex from her purse, pulling one out and wiping at her eyes. “I just . . . I wish I understood him better.”

She chose that moment to blow her nose, rather forcefully. The timing was somewhat unfortunate. Over the noise of her blowing nose, she didn’t hear the soft voice directly behind her, or the single word it spoke.

“Granted.”

~Part: 4~

Willow’s plan, once she opened her eyes after blowing her nose, was to stop moping, cast a nifty little locator spell, find Spike, and make him accept her apology, whether he wanted to or not. It was a good plan. A solid plan. A perfect little paragon of a plan. There was only one problem. When Willow opened her eyes, she wasn’t in the graveyard anymore. She was in a nicely decorated room that she didn’t recognize, and she would have bet dollars to donuts that she wasn’t in Sunnydale anymore.

In fact, once she headed over to the window and took a peek outside, she started to get a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach telling her that she wasn’t in the year 2000 anymore. She was no expert on slapping a date on fashions, but just to hazard a wild guess, based on what she saw, she’d say she was probably somewhere before the year 1900. That was . . . surprising.

The man who came barreling into the room a minute later wearing nothing but a towel was even more surprising, especially when he walked right through her.

“Holy Fu-fu-fudge!” she managed at last.

“You can say ‘fuck,’ if it will make you feel better,” a voice announced from behind her. “No one here can hear you, anyway. Well, except for me, and after this long, it takes more than naughty language to shock me.”

“Ack!” Willow squealed as she spun around to face the demon standing only a few feet away from her. “Wh-wh-wh—”

“What? Where? Why? Who?” the demon suggested helpfully. “All of the above?”

Willow nodded helplessly.

“Well, the ‘who’ is easy. I’m Halfrek. Call me Hallie. The ‘what’ is pretty simple, too. I’m a vengeance demon. Like Anyanka, but still in possession of my powers, thankfully. And as for the ‘where’ and the ‘why,’ well . . . I’m told you’re a smart girl. I’ll bet you can figure it out.”

“Y-you . . .” Willow stammered, “vengeance demon? And you . . . I . . .” she pointed to the man standing on the other side of the room, “. . . naked man . . . What the hell did I wish for?”

“You wished that you could understand Spike better,” Hallie replied.

“I was talking to myself!” Willow insisted. “Not making an actual wish!”

“Honey, you live on the Hellmouth,” Hallie reminded her. “Just a word of advice: next time you’re talking to yourself, take a glance around and make sure you’re alone before using the words ‘I wish.’”

Willow grimaced. “Point taken,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But I still don’t understand what I’m doing here. Where am I, anyway? Some kind of alternate dimension?”

“I thought about it, but alternate dimensions are so messy.” Hallie wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Hologramic images of the past are so much tidier, don’t you agree?”

“This is a hologram?” Willow asked.

“Nope,” Hallie corrected her, “this is an astrotemporal continuum reversal accelerated with selective playback and a little bit of uninterrupting, physical but noncorporeal insertion, but try saying that five times fast. Besides, when I tell people that it’s a hologram, they at least get the general idea.”

“Can’t affect anything physically, vocally, or olfactorially, and everything will play out on its own without my interference?”

“Give the girl a cigar.”

“But why am I here?” Willow asked again.

“You wished you could understand Spike better,” Hallie reminded her.

“Yes, and?”

“And this is where you’ll learn.”

“Here?” Willow looked around the room, and her eyes, despite clear orders from her conscience, strayed just a bit too long on the man with his back to her.

The man who had just dropped his towel.

Nothing wrong with admiring a nice behind, Willow traitorous brain reminded her when her conscience started to protest. Girls can have nice butts, too. Lesbians are allowed to have butt fixations. It’s not as if I’m admiring his—

The man turned around.

—wow, that’s . . . admirable . . . Shaking her head quickly to clear her thoughts, Willow determinedly focused her attention back on Hallie.

“What does this place have to do with Spike?” she demanded. “Is this a guy he killed, or something?”

Hallie laughed. “I know he’s got a good body, sweetie, but didn’t you notice the man’s face at all?”

Curiosity overcoming the warning bells her conscience was sending off, Willow spun back around to face the man again, this time allowing herself only a cursory glance of appreciation at the strong, lean, beautifully formed muscles in his thighs . . . and his stomach . . . and the area between his thighs and his stomach . . . before forcing her attention above the neck.

“Spike?” she gasped. “But he’s human! With . . . with brown hair!”

“Don’t sound so shocked,” Hallie replied. “It’s not as if you couldn’t tell that the platinum look he has now is a bleach job. And besides, we were all of us human, once.”

“What do you—?” Willow began, but stopped when she saw that Hallie had vanished.

“Fine, then,” Willow grumbled. “Just go ahead and pop me into an astrotemporal fold and then leave me without any real explanation; no problem. It’s not like I had plans for tonight, or anything.”

Sure, the plans were to watch TV and hope that Tara fell asleep on the couch so I’d have an excuse to go to bed without her, but still, it was a plan! A good plan! And at least at home I’d be able to microwave some popcorn. Willow’s stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch . . . and that all the talk about marshmallows back at the Magic Shop had made her pretty darn hungry.

“Why can’t astrotemporal folds provide snacks?” she grumbled.

. . . other than eye candy, she thought in spite of herself, her eyes automatically sliding back over to Spike. She knew it was all kinds of wrong, (she was gay now! Gay, gay, gay, and not in the way that meant happy!) but for as long as she had known him, in every way that she’d ever seen him, from William the human she was faced with now, to William the Bloody crashing through the window during Parent/Teacher night, to Spike the Not-Even-Remotely-Friendly Neighborhood Vampire whining about wanting Wheatabix for his blood, there was always just something about him that was just so very watchable.

Back in Sunnydale, she usually passed it off as self-preservation. Spike was dangerous, even with the chip, and it was a good idea to keep a close watch on him, right? Keep your enemy close, and all that? At any moment, he could be doing something dangerous! He could be plotting against them! He could be undermining their teamwork! He could be sabotaging their weapons! He could be doing that thing where he stretched, all slow and cat-like, so that his shirt rode up, and his hips rolled forward, and she could see the muscles in his abdomen clench, and . . . Anyway, he needed someone to keep an eye on him, and Willow had been more than willing to take that job on.

But all those excuses that she usually made for herself didn’t really hold water in this betwixt-and-between world she was in. She was in no danger from Spike. She was in no danger from much of anything—she had a front row seat to whatever was going to happen that Hallie thought was so important, but nothing in this world could see her, much less harm her. But wait! Front row seat! Something was going to happen that Hallie thought was important—something that would fulfill her wish of being able to understand Spike! So that meant that she had to watch him closely, didn’t it? After all, she didn’t want to miss anything.

Like the way he looked just then, with his pants barely on and his shirt unfastened. Yep, definitely wouldn’t want to miss that.

She had plenty of time to admire his bare chest since he’d given up on getting dressed for the time being. Instead, he had thrown himself into the chair at his desk, and after unearthing a fountain pen from a drawer, had started scribbling frantically at a wad of paper.

Excitement started to build as Willow crossed the room to read over William’s shoulder. The handwriting was bad in the first place, and made worse by his over-enthusiastic speed, but she struggled to decipher the words with rising anticipation, wondering if this was what she’d been sent there to see; if this was the key point in Spike’s past that she needed to understand in order to truly understand him.

Spike was something of an anomaly as a vampire: he had no past. Or rather, he had no past that the Watcher’s Council could track. Usually when a new childe was made, especially in such a bloodthirsty clan as the Order of Aurelius, the Watcher’s Council caught on to the turning fairly quickly. Sightings of a new vampire in with the old gang circulated rapidly, and when the newspapers reporting an upswing of the death rate in a particular neighborhood mentioned an entire family suddenly and mysteriously turning up dead with the exception of one family member who’d gone missing without a trace? Yeah, pretty good sign that the newbie vamp and the missing loved one were one and the same, and had taken their new “tastes” out to dine at the old homestead.

Spike had proven rather more difficult to place. Oh, his emergence into the vampire world had no subtlety whatsoever. Even as a fledge, he’d never been the shy type, and his trademark railroad accessories made it very easy for the Watchers to learn there was a new bad boy in town. The problem came in trying to find out who, exactly, he had been before he died. His deaths were largely varied, focusing more on a social circle than on any particular family. He held an unmistakable grudge against the gilded youth of his generation, that was for certain; but what, exactly, was the grudge? Was he a disgruntled servant? A nouveau-riche social climber who resented the gentry’s implacable cold shoulder? Was his rough brashness as a vampire a carry-over from his life, or a reaction to it? Theories abounded, but no one was really sure.

It may not have been the mystery of the ages, but it was a question to which Willow had given a great deal of thought. Drusilla had not made any other childer before or since, so she must have seen something special in William that caught her eye, but what was it? Peeking over his shoulder to see what he had written, Willow wondered if the answer was about to unfold in front of her. Was this what Hallie had meant? Was this unfinished sheet of paper the key to finally making sense of the Spike that she knew?

“‘Your beauty enthralls me,’” she read aloud over his shoulder, “‘It has stolen my heart. / And the hope arises in me / That in your heart, I might have a part.’”

“Oh my God,” Willow gasped. “It’s—it’s poetry.” Her mouth hung slightly open as she stared at William. “Really awful poetry,” honesty forced her to add a moment later. Stumbling slightly in shock, she tripped, tumbling right into—and right through—both William and the desk in front of him.

She landed sprawled on the floor, with her head inside one of the desk drawers. Though the light in there was dim, she could just barely make out the words in William’s handwriting written out on another stack of paper.

“Oh, lark. Grant a sign if crook’d be Cupid’s shaft.
Hark, the lark, her name it hath spake.
‘Cecily’ it discharges from twixt its wee beak.”

“More poetry,” she realized. “Even worse poetry, and he worked so hard on it!” She could see all the places where he’d scratched out words, replacing them with new ones, trying out different rhymes in the margin to come up with the best combination before copying the final draft painstakingly onto the bottom of the page. Scooting over, she pulled her head out of the desk and went back to watching the man seated in front of it, his face tense with concentration as he searched for the perfect words to put on paper to describe his love.

“William writes poetry,” she sighed. “Lots of poetry. That’s just so unexpectedly . . .”

Sweet.

He loved her, that Cecily who inspired the appalling bad verses; loved her so much, he could barely rhyme, could barely think straight he was so dizzy with what he felt. And was it really so very unexpected? Sure, sappy poetry about a lark twittering someone’s name from its “wee beak” wasn’t exactly what she’d associate with peroxide-bleach-and-black-leather Spike, but the emotions, the passion behind it . . . maybe it wasn’t so much of a stretch to see the parallels in that respect between the earnest man seated in front of her and the vampire she knew in her own time.

As she watched him, memories of Spike crying on her shoulder about Drusilla leaving him mingled with the image in front of her of a totally lovestruck William reverently pulling a pink hair ribbon out of a desk drawer and caressing it gently. It was undoubtedly hers: the mysterious Cecily to whom he addressed the poem, and Willow watched as William blushed while raising the ribbon gently to his lips for a moment before scratching out the word ‘enthralls’ in the first line and replacing it with ‘enraptures.’ It was very clear to Willow that as a man or a demon, when William loved, he loved completely.

“And now he loves Buffy,” she reminded herself. “Buffy who treats him like an untrained puppy who keeps making messes on the floor.” She winced as she remembered how dismissive Buffy was of everything Spike tried to do to show his love for her, and the wince deepened as she remembered what Spike had said about what Buffy did to him after finding Riley in the ‘bites-for-cash’ vampire den. “An untrained puppy whose owner has aggression issues,” she amended. Sure, Buffy was having a hard time with her mom and her slayer training and issues with Riley, but that didn’t really excuse the way that ‘kick the Spike’ had become her favorite pastime.

“He’s probably luckier in love here,” Willow mused, “with his Cecily. There’s no slayer/vampire-who-repeatedly-tried-to-kill-her issue to work through for them, so how could she help but love him back? She probably gets all blushy and happy when she sees him walking toward her, him all handsome and hopeful with his love for her written all over his face, and a new poem in his hand for her to read. What woman with a brain in her head could possibly resist?”

“My heart . . . expands,” William muttered under his breath, writing the words as he spoke. “Tis grown—”

“William?” a voice called from the hallway. “Are you ready, dear? Thomas has brought the carriage around.”

“Curses!” William hissed, jumping out of his seat so quickly that he knocked it over. “Barely half-dressed, and the carriage already here. And I did so want to look well tonight . . . I’ll be out in a minute, Mother!” Buttoning his shirt as quickly as he could, he shoved the shirttails into his trousers while stumbling into his shoes.

Willow was too distracted to notice his frantic efforts to get ready as she processed what William had just said.

“Mother. Wow. I’m going to meet . . . well, see at any rate, Spike’s mom.”

~Part: 5~

Willow jumped to her feet and began smoothing her hands over her hair and her clothes, wishing she’d worn something prettier. Sure, the woman would be unable to see her which meant that making a good impression was kind of a moot point, but she couldn’t manage to rationalize away the urge to look nice so William’s mom would like her. Stepping in front of the mirror to check her appearance, she frowned when she realized that she didn’t have a reflection.

This must be what it’s like for vampires, she thought to herself. How annoying. And yet Spike always looks so good . . . how does he pull that off, anyway?

Her thoughts were interrupted when William, oblivious to her musings, walked right through her to stand in front of the mirror and make an absolute mess of his necktie, struggling with it through shaking hands before finally giving up, muttering something about ‘time enough to fix it in the carriage.’ Vest and jacket were thrown on haphazardly before he flung open the door.

A genteel-looking woman of advancing years stood outside the door with a soft smile and bright blue eyes that Willow recognized instantly. Spike’s eyes. Spike’s mother.

“Oh darling,” she gushed, beaming at him, “don’t you look handsome in your new suit!”

William blushed and ran his hand nervously through his hair. “I had some difficulty with the four-in-hand.”

“Yes, I can see that, dear,” the woman replied with a warm smile, stepping forward and guiding him closer to the lamp so she could see to untangle the tie, straightening it out into a very respectable looking knot.

She patted her hands over his shoulders, smoothing out any wrinkles in the material while smiling up at him with such pride and affection that Willow felt her eyes start to sting. She was glad that William had a mother who loved him so transparently, but she couldn’t help but wonder what that must be like, to have the person who was supposed to love you first and best actually be someone who truly cared about you.

“You’re definitely luckier here,” Willow whispered to an oblivious William, “because you sure won the lottery when it comes to moms.”

“There now, perfect,” William’s mother assured him as she stepped back. “Your Miss Underwood cannot help but be impressed.”

William’s blush deepened as he smiled shyly. “Do you really think so?” he asked, clearly nervous, and Willow stopped to marvel a bit at the sight of Insecure Spike. All right, so it was actually Insecure William, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but still. Spike always seemed to absolutely embody arrogance in that (really sexy) challenging sort of Yeah-you-know-I’m-everything-you-could-ever-want-so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it way. It boggled the mind to realize that there had ever been a time when he hadn’t known he was gorgeous and desirable.

“I do wish . . .” William’s voice trailed off as he lost himself a bit in his thoughts, but a moment later he shook his head hard, pushing himself back into reality. “There will be so many other gentlemen there tonight, and I’ve seen the way Lasher looks at her. Her father thinks well of him, admires his confidence, and I—”

“You are sweet, kind, generous, and thoughtful,” his mother interrupted. “And Charles Lasher is a braggart and a bully.”

“He could provide for her,” William countered sadly. “A fine home, expensive trinkets.”

“And you would give her your heart.” His mother reached up to pat his cheek gently. “Your love is a tr—”

“A treasure. Yes, mother. I know. You’ve said so before, and I know that you believe it to be true, but does Cecily share that opinion?”

“It’s not an opinion, my William,” his mother insisted. “It’s a fact. Your love is a treasure, and if your Cecily is the right woman for you then she will cherish it.”

“Yeah,” Willow agreed quietly, “what she said. This Cecily’s not worth your love—she’s not worth anything—if she doesn’t appreciate you.”

Willow’s eyes were on William, not his mother, so she was startled by the sound of an aching cough. William’s concerns were immediately forgotten as he concentrated all his attentions on his mother, leading her over to a chair, and fetching her a glass of water.

“It sounds like it’s getting worse,” William muttered under his breath. “Perhaps I should stay home tonight.”

“Nonsense!” his mother replied briskly . . . well, as briskly as she could, given how out of breath she was. “You’ve been looking forward to this evening for weeks!”

“But you sound so . . . I could stay. Truly, I could.”

He knelt beside her chair, and she smiled down at him as she ran her fingers gently through his hair. “I’ll be finest, dearest,” she assured him. “You see? It’s already passed.” William’s eyes were closed as he rested his head against the arm of the chair, leaning in to his mother’s gentle touch.

He didn’t see—but Willow did—that the handkerchief his mother had coughed into was stained with blood. Willow started to re-evaluate her opinion. Maybe William wasn’t so lucky after all.

“I’d give anything to make you strong again,” William said softly.

“I know you would, love,” she replied. “But my handsome son is strong enough for both of us, yes?”

“I try to be.” His voice broke slightly on the words and without thinking, Willow reached out to hug him, cursing under her breath when her arms went straight through him.

Was this what Hallie wanted me to see? she wondered as she knelt beside William, aching to reach out and hold him. Does his mother die tonight? Is that what makes him the way that he is? As much as she hated the thought of it, it did make an odd kind of sense. It would explain a quite a bit about the hard, cold shields he put up around himself, trying to seem as if he was impervious to pain, strong enough to take on anything that the world could throw at him . . . and it would definitely explain the way those shields absolutely fell apart when his heart got involved, leaving him completely vulnerable to anyone that he loved.

Willow couldn’t bear the thought of the pain he’d feel at the loss of the mother he so clearly adored, and cursed herself yet again for the foolish, thoughtless wish that had brought her there in the first place. She didn’t want to see this; didn’t want to watch him suffer when there was nothing she could do to help or comfort him.

“Damn you, Hallie,” Willow whispered. “Damn you for making me watch this poor woman die.”

William and his mother froze in place, shock-still, and Willow’s breath caught in her throat. Had they heard her? But no, that was impossible! She wasn’t really there, she couldn’t interact with them even if she wanted to! They couldn’t be frozen because they heard her, they—

Wait a second, how had shock frozen them to the point where they weren’t breathing anymore?

Looking more closely, Willow realized that they had literally frozen in place, like a tape in the VCR when someone pressed pause. Time had stopped, and they had stopped with it. And since there was just one demon in charge of this projection reel, Willow knew full well who was responsible.

“What do you want now, Hallie?” she asked, turning to glare at the demon that she found, just as she expected, directly behind her.

“She doesn’t die tonight,” Hallie answered without preamble.

“Huh?”

“William’s mother. She doesn’t die tonight. That’s not what you’re here to see.”

Willow’s surprise and confusion quickly gave way to anger. “What the hell am I here to see then, huh? What part of Spike’s soul-that-was are you going to rip open next for me to watch, up close and personal?” Rising to her feet, she stomped over to get right in Hallie’s face.

“Do you have any idea how much he’d hate this? I’m his enemy! He can’t stand any of our group—except for Buffy—and he hates that he’s dependant on us in any way! You think he’d want his past, his vulnerabilities, exposed to me like this? God, I wish I’d never gotten out of bed this morning, wish this day had never happened at all! Then I wouldn’t be here in the first place, seeing things it would kill Spike to know I’d seen!”

“No can do,” Hallie replied with a sick attempt at a smile. “I can’t grant that wish since it interferes with letting this wish play out. Only one wish at a time.”

“Well, as soon as this wish is over I’m going to wish to forget it all!” Willow growled.

“Don’t you dare!” Hallie yelled, startling Willow into taking an involuntary step back. “Don’t you dare throw this away! You think I don’t know that he’d hate this? Of course I know, but he needs this, needs someone in your screwed up little band of misfits to show him some understanding. And if not you, then who, huh? Xander? Buffy? Don’t make me laugh. They’d use every scrap of information they found here to hurt him, and don’t you even try to deny it.”

Willow couldn’t deny it, even though she wanted to. She knew Xander, knew Buffy, knew the way they reacted when they were angry and their blood was up (because of Spike, so often because of Spike who always knew just how to get under their skins). She knew how unthinkingly cruel they could be, using everything they knew to make their words hurt just a little bit more. They weren’t vicious people by nature, they were just . . . careless when they were angry, never seeming to realize when they’d taken things entirely too far.

Spike wasn’t exactly known for his restraint either, always picking at them with his words since he couldn’t fight them physically. If Xander or Buffy had access to these memories of the past, then all it would take was one of Spike’s trademark wisecracks too many and then they’d use this, use poor William and his doting affection, his sweet shyness, his awful, earnest, lovestruck poetry against him. Willow couldn’t bear the thought of it, and was suddenly deeply grateful that the watchers had never been able to find any information on Spike’s past. His secret was safe from the ones who would use it against him. It was safe . . . with her.

“You wished this,” Hallie reminded her, no longer yelling but speaking instead with a quiet intensity that hit Willow just as hard. “You wished to understand him, something that no one has bothered to do for a century or more, and come hell, high water, or the opening of the Hellmouth itself, I’m going to see to it that you get your wish. Is that entirely clear?”

Wordlessly, Willow nodded.

“Good,” Hallie nodded in approval. “Now stop hanging your head out of some misguided respect for his privacy and pay attention. This part is important, but it’s what comes later that really matters. That’s the part you truly need to see.”

“What’s it to you?” Willow asked in spite of herself. “Why does this matter to you so much?”

Again Hallie gave that sad attempt at a smile. “You’ll see that, too,” she whispered.

“Wha—” Willow began, but didn’t bother to finish. Hallie was gone, and time had started again.

“And if you’ll be strong for me, then I shall be strong for you,” William’s mother promised, continuing to gently pet his soft, curly hair. “Certainly strong enough to stay here at home, in front of a cozy fire, with a nice cup of tea, while you go off to see your lady love.”

William blushed again. “But mother,” he tried to protest, lifting his head to look her in the eye.

“I won’t hear another word,” she interrupted, “other than ‘have a pleasant evening, mother; I’ll see you when I get back.’”

“But moth—”

“Ah, ah, ah, what did I say, William?”

He rolled his eyes a bit, giving her an exasperated smile. “Have a pleasant evening, mother,” he repeated obediently. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Good!” she beamed her approval. “Now say, ‘I’ll have a wonderful time and I’ll tell you all about it when I come home.’”

“I’ll have a wonderful time and I’ll tell you all about it when I come home,” William said, rising to his feet.”

“And finally, ‘I’ll pay extra close attention to Mrs. Weatherby’s much-anticipated new gown from Paris and describe it to you in detail.’”

William laughed, lighting up his entire face and making those blue eyes of his sparkle . . . and Willow’s breath catch in her throat. “I’ll pay extra close attention to Mrs. Weatherby’s new gown and describe it to you in detail,” he promised, smoothing out the creases in his trousers.

“Much anticipated new gown,” his mother corrected, “from Paris.”

“Much anticipated new gown from Paris,” he parroted with a smirk, leaning over to scoop his mother up in his arms. “Now let’s get you settled,” he said, carrying her out into the hallway and down the passage.

“William, you’ll strain yourself; it isn’t nec—”

“Nonsense,” he cut her off. “You’re light as a feather. Besides,” he added as he carried her into a comfortable, well-lit sitting room, “I like to think of you here, snug in your chair, with your books close to hand.” Settling her into an overstuffed easy chair, he pulled an afghan off the nearby sofa and covered her with it gently, tucking her in. “All right then, mother?” he asked, stepping back to admire his work.

“Absolutely perfect,” she assured him. “Now run along, dear, and have a pleasant time.”

“I’m sure I will,” he replied, leaning over to gently kiss her cheek. “Love you, mother.”

“I love you, too, dear,” she replied. “Off you go.”

He crossed to the door, turning to smile at her one more time, and then stepped through it, closing it halfway behind him. Moving toward the front door, he smoothed his hands over his clothes nervously, stopping abruptly when his hands slid over his breast pocket. Running quickly back to his room, he snatched the papers off of his desk, shoving them, along with his fountain pen, into his pocket before rushing out the front door to the carriage.

Willow followed closely behind, but she just before she reached the carriage, she felt the world shift beneath her feet—rather like an earthquake except that the world spun more than it shook—and when the ground went still again, she found herself somewhere completely new.

~Part: 6~

Willow scowled as a waiter walked right through her.

The earth-spin act had dropped her in the middle of a parlor, crowded with noisy rich men. There were women there, too, but they tended to be clustered in small groupings, giggling and fluttering their fans while they watched the men who were taking up most of the space as they talked very loudly, and laughed very heartily at how very clever they were. If you ditched the British accents, threw in a keg of cheap beer, and swapped out the elegant suits and gowns for worn jeans for the men and skintight black pants for the women, it would have been pretty much like all those miserable frat parties Buffy had dragged her to after Oz left, hoping to “cheer her up.” All those parties had really done was convince her that there was not a chance in hell (or Hellmouth) that she would ever date a frat boy. Little wonder that she settled on lesbianism shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, the men crowded into the parlor were doing nothing to change her opinion. They were loud, and smug, and conceited, and obnoxious, and . . . and they kept walking straight through her! Sure, she knew no one was walking through her on purpose and, to be fair, it’s not as if she could feel it, but it was still more than a little creepy. To make herself feel better, she started making snide remarks at the more annoying specimens she encountered, and soon discovered the upside of being at a party when no one knew she was there. For once, she could say absolutely anything that she pleased.

“That dress makes you look fat,” she informed one especially ditzy woman who was so busy batting her eyelashes at one of the men that she tripped over her own feet and stumbled straight through Willow. “And everyone totally saw you almost fall on your ass. Really. Everybody. And they’re all talking about it right now.”

“If the two of you actually do get together,” she said to one man who kept sneaking glances over at one of the ladies, clearly playing up his particularly loud and overblown story to impress her, “then I pity your children. Because combining your face with her teeth? Truly a scary genetic concept.”

“Two words for you, honey,” she said to another man who kept stuffing his face with hors d’oeuvres and talking with his mouth open, “Weight Watchers. Admit you have a problem now, while you still fit into your nice suit. Although,” she eyed the way his waistcoat was straining at the buttons, “it might be too late for that, already.”

She couldn’t help but smirk as she made her rounds of the room. If Buffy had been there with her, Willow was certain she would have earned another “meow” by now, and damn it was fun to be so catty. The smirk, however, softened into a genuine smile as she came upon William, hidden away in a corner. She’d been wondering where he was.

Seated with his paper and pen, he seemed to be asking a waiter for advice on his poem. Stepping closer, Willow eavesdropped on the conversation.

“—the very spirit of vexation,” William was saying, “What’s another word for ‘gleaming’? It’s a perfectly perfect word as many words go but the bother is nothing rhymes, you see.”

“You could use luminous, instead,” Willow offered. “Or lustrous, if you prefer. Glowing, shining, or glinting pretty much mean the same thing, too . . . but if you’d rather stick with gleaming, then you could rhyme it with ‘beaming.’ Or ‘dreaming.’ Or even ‘scheming,’ depending on where you want the poem to go.”

They were all perfectly good suggestions. It was quite a shame that William couldn’t hear a word that she said, especially since the waiter just smiled at him patronizingly and then walked away. Stepping over into a side table, Willow peeked over William’s shoulder to see what he had so far, and grimaced when she saw that he’d rhymed “bulge in it” with “effulgent.”

“The rhyme there is . . . kind of a stretch,” she said tactfully, moving back to stand in front of him. “But you get bonus points for including the word ‘effulgent,’” she added, trying to be encouraging. “I’ve never seen it used in a sentence before.”

William, unsurprisingly, didn’t respond, staring instead with an expression of enraptured awe . . . directly at her breasts.

“Hey, pervert, my eyes are up here!” Willow responded instinctively, crossing her arms over her chest. Logically, she knew that William wasn’t actually checking her out, but it still made her feel . . . weird (yes, that was it, it was just weird) to have any incarnation of Spike look at her body like that. Even if he couldn’t actually see it. Even if he’d never given her a second glance when he could see it. Even if he was actually looking straight through her to—

“Cecily,” he whispered in a voice filled with pure adoration.

Willow winced, and then scolded herself for it. “Should have expected that,” she told herself. Guy completely ignoring her as she stood right in front of him so that he could stare across the room at someone else? Oh yeah, she definitely should have expected that.

William turned his attention back to his poem, quickly adding a few more words, thanks to his new inspiration. Meanwhile, Willow turned her attention to the other side of the room, hoping she’d be able to spot which newly-arrived woman was William’s beloved Cecily. Based on William’s reaction, this was clearly Cecily’s first appearance of the evening, so as Willow turned, she began scanning the crowd for an unfamiliar face. She froze in place, absolutely stunned, when her eyes locked on a shockingly familiar face. She barely even registered William rising to his feet and walking right through her as she tried to process what she was seeing.

“Hallie?” she whispered.

“Yeah?” a voice replied, right beside her. Turning to the side so quickly that she almost tripped, Willow stared in shock at the demon standing beside her.

“You!” Willow exclaimed, still too shocked to form complete sentences. “And . . . and . . . you!” She pointed across the room to the woman near the doorway; the one that William was approaching with a look of open reverence of his face.

“I told you, Willow,” Hallie answered quietly. “We were all of us human, once.”

“You’re Cecily?” Willow gasped. “William’s Cecily?”

“I was Cecily,” Hallie corrected. “And I was never William’s.”

“Never William’s?” Willow repeated, her heart sinking down to somewhere in her stomach as she snuck another look over at William’s oh-so-hopeful face while he approached his beloved. His beloved, who was watching William’s approach without a trace of love, or admiration, or even simple pleasure at the sight of him visible in her expression. Willow’s heart sank even further. She’d been so certain that Spike had been luckier in love when he was alive. It appeared that she’d been wrong. Very, very wrong.

“But he—” she argued.

“I know.”

“And those poems—”

“I know.”

“And even just now, he—”

“I know.” Hallie took a deep breath. “Believe me, I know.

“And you never . . .?”

“You’ll see soon enough,” Hallie whispered. “You’ll see.”

She vanished without another word.

With her stomach turning in somersaults, Willow stepped up to the cluster of people William had approached. Willow’s chat with Hallie had been more than a little abrupt, but it left her with the certain knowledge that something was about to go catastrophically wrong for William, and while she knew it wouldn’t make any difference, Willow’s silent, invisible support was all that she had to offer him.

Never in her life had she felt so helpless. William—sweet, romantic, loving William with his hopeful heart pinned on his sleeve—was about to get hurt, and there was nothing she could do, other than wait, and watch, and wonder just how badly this would end, and how soon. If the twisting feeling of foreboding she had was any indicator, it was about to go very badly, very soon.

“I mean to point out that it’s something of a mystery,” one man was saying as she got close enough to hear, “and the police should keep an open mind.”

The man he was addressing turned to William as he walked by, and tried to bring him into the conversation.

“Ah, William!” he called out. “Favor us with your opinion. What do you make of this rash of disappearances sweeping through our town? Animals or thieves?”

“I prefer not to think of such dark, ugly business at all,” William replied, with a somewhat weak pretense at arrogance. Willow winced as she remembered what he had said to his mother earlier that evening. Cecily’s father admired that man Lasher for his confidence. It appeared William was trying to emulate that confidence, now.

“That’s what the police are for,” William stated, seizing upon the excuse to focus his attention on Cecily. “I prefer placing my energies into creating things of beauty,” he added in a deeper, more meaningful tone.

Even if she had wanted to, Willow was pretty sure Cecily wouldn’t have had a chance to reply as a third man grabbed the papers from William’s hands, drawing the crowd’s attention to them. “I see,” he said loudly. “Well, don’t withhold, William.”

“Rescue us from a dreary topic,” the first man added with a broad wink full of cruel anticipation.

William’s attempt at arrogance dissolved immediately as his voice went from haughty to downright pleading as he tried to get the paper back. “Careful! The inks are still wet. Please, it’s not finished.”

They ignored him, of course, except for a jeering exhortation not to be shy.

“‘My heart expands,’” the third man read in a powerful voice, designed to carry, “‘’tis grown a bulge in it / inspired by your beauty, effulgent.’” He laughed. “Effulgent?” he repeated, encouraging the others to laugh with him. (Not that they needed much encouragement.)

Willow took a little bit of relief in the fact that Cecily wasn’t one of the ones laughing at William . . . but she wasn’t exactly jumping to his defense, either. Looking thoroughly uncomfortable with the whole business and everyone involved in it, she walked off without a backwards glance for the lovestruck suitor who had just been humiliated on her behalf.

Now that the poetry reader had gotten the big laugh that he wanted (at William’s expense), he allowed William to wrestle the papers back from him, leaving William to follow after Cecily a moment later.

“And that’s actually one of his better compositions,” one of the men said to William’s departing back when the laughter died down enough to let him speak.

“Have you heard?” the first man said. “They call him William the Bloody because of his bloody awful poetry!”

Willow would have willingly traded a year off her life to be in that room in her own, solid flesh for just one minute so she could slap those jeering smiles off of their faces.

“It suits him,” replied the third man, the one who’d read the poetry aloud. “I’d rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff!”

“Burn in hell,” Willow growled. “The whole sneering, sanctimonious lot of you. Burn slowly and painfully while I laugh at all of you. See how funny you find suffering, then.”

Her eyes were stinging with tears, but she resolutely blinked them back while searching the room to see where William had gone.

She found him approaching Cecily, who was sitting on a sofa away from the main party, looking out the window. Crossing the room to join them, she was just in time to hear Cecily tell William to leave her alone. Willow crossed her fingers on both hands and held her breath, hoping that William would take the hint and walk away before he got himself hurt even more . . . but she was hardly surprised when he stayed.

“Oh, they’re vulgarians,” William said, gesturing to the other guests in a resurrection of his attempted confidence from before. Willow felt her heart ache at the further proof of how hard he was trying to keep up the façade that he thought would please Cecily the most. “They’re not like you and I,” William continued.

The jeering from the other men had obviously hurt him, damaging the confidence he had worked so hard to project, but William, it seemed, had not yet lost hope. Cecily hadn’t laughed at him, and she was the only one who truly mattered. Willow felt a sinking certainty that that was what had given William the confidence to approach Cecily, at last. He seemed to believe that her lack of amusement at his humiliation implied some sort of connection between them, a connection he was clearly desperate to maintain.

“You and I?” Cecily repeated, looking faintly disgusted at the idea of the two of them being associated together.

Then she took a deep breath, and Willow realized that this was it. This was the moment of truth. This was when Cecily was going to “get to the bottom” of William’s fixation on her. In short, this was when everything would go to hell.

“I’m going to ask you a very personal question,” Cecily began, “and I demand an honest answer. Do you understand?”

William nodded.

“Your poetry, it’s . . . they’re . . . not written about me, are they?” Cecily asked.

“They’re about how I feel,” William hedged, clearly torn over whether to tell her the truth or not, searching for whatever answer would please her the most. The verses he’d been so proud of before had been publicly mocked, after all, and William seemed uncertain whether she’d be flattered at the intent of the lines in her honor, or upset at their lack of quality.

“Yes, but are they about me?” Cecily pressed.

William straightened his spine, and Willow could tell that he’d girded up all his courage to tell her the truth. “Every syllable,” he answered, with transparent honesty.

“Oh, God!” Cecily exclaimed.

This wasn’t quite the response that William seemed to be looking for, but since he’d already started to tell her the truth about how he felt, it appeared that nothing would hold him back from showing her all of his heart.

“Oh, I know . . . it’s sudden,” he said, trying to calm her. “And . . . please, if they’re no good, they’re only words but . . . the feeling behind them . . .”

“Don’t do it; don’t say it!” Willow pleaded with him. “Get out of here while you still have some dignity left!”

He didn’t listen. Even if he’d heard her, he wouldn’t have listened.

“I love you, Cecily.”

“Please stop!”

Willow was momentarily surprised that the exclamation had come from Cecily instead of herself, but she still agreed with it wholeheartedly.

“Stop, William; please stop,” she begged. “She’s just going to hurt you.”

“I know I’m a bad poet,” William continued doggedly, “but I’m a good man and all I ask is that . . . that you try to see me—”

“I do see you,” Cecily cut him off. “That’s the problem.”

Willow’s heart clenched so hard that she gasped for breath. Her eyes were on William, who looked confused but still hopeful, and it was tearing Willow apart, because she could see the writing on the wall. Cecily’s face was hard and determined, and Willow knew that Cecily was about to end this. With the next words out of her mouth, she would close the door on William’s feelings for her so completely that he’d never dare mention them to her again.

“You’ve said enough,” Willow pleaded with her, knowing her words were worse than useless, but unable to stop herself from begging, all the same. “Stop there. Just walk away; he’ll understand. You don’t have to say it.”

“You’re nothing to me, William,” Cecily continued, ignoring the pain clearly written all over William’s face as she threw the last, hardest words at him. “You’re beneath me.”

She stood and walked off, leaving a broken-hearted William openly devastated and utterly alone in that crowded room filled with people who didn’t gave a damn about him. No one spared him so much as a glance, except for the girl kneeling at his feet—the girl who wasn’t actually there—who cried for him, even though he couldn’t see it.

~Part: 7~

Tears were streaming down Willow’s face so fast and thick that she could barely see, much less notice when time stopped again.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Hallie said softly. “It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt him, but my father—the things that were expected of me . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I didn’t have a choice,” she repeated.

Pure, fiery anger managed to dry out most of Willow’s tears and she looked up, ready to tear Hallie/Halfrek/Cecily a new one, but froze instead at what she saw.

The room they were in was sinking, literally sliding away below their feet as the ceiling came down towards them. Willow ducked instinctively as the ceiling reached her head, but it slid straight through her as if she wasn’t there (which she wasn’t, of course), and continued on past her shoulders and finally down to beneath her feet, leaving Willow and Hallie ‘standing’ in a second floor bedroom where time had clearly started again, because Willow could see 1880-Cecily’s shoulders shaking with sobs as she lay facedown on the bed.

Hallie’s eyes were unfocused and she didn’t seem aware of the change in scenery, but Willow watched closely as the next act of the play laid itself out before her.

The sound was turned off, like watching a TV on mute, but the actions came across so clearly that words were unnecessary. There was Cecily, on her feet again, head held high as she addressed a figure standing in the shadows. And there was D’Hoffryn, mostly covered by a cloak but still unmistakable with his monstrously deformed visage and curled horns, making his pitch. Willow didn’t need sound for this part; she’d heard it herself, when D’Hoffryn made the offer to her, ending by presenting her with a talisman—she’d kept it buried in a shoebox in the back of her closet ever since, wanting to hide it away but never quite willing to get rid of it—identical to the one he presented to Cecily before he vanished.

“D’Hoffryn,” Willow whispered. “But I . . . I don’t understand.”

D’Hoffryn wasn’t just the master of vengeance demons, he was their sole talent scout and conscription officer. Whenever he heard the call of heavy-duty, dimension-piercing pain, he went running to the side of whoever was feeling it. And once he found them, he offered them a big, shiny chance to get payback not just once, but for the rest of eternity, and to bitch-slap the world every time it allowed anyone else to feel that much pain.

As a recruiting tool, it was really second to none. It took some pretty massive pain for the sounds of it to be heard all the way down in Arashmahaar and by the time someone reached that level of suffering, they were pretty willing to take any offer they could get to make it stop. Vengeance inevitably sounded tempting. Very tempting.

Willow wasn’t really surprised that the interlude between Cecily and William had set off alarm bells—William was clearly in ten kinds of agony after Cecily’s rejection—but the pieces of the puzzle didn’t quite fit. If William’s pain had summoned D’Hoffryn then the demon would have gone to William with his offer, not Cecily. In order for D’Hoffryn to be there, in Cecily’s room, Cecily’s pain would have to match or possibly even exceed the anguish William was feeling, and how could that possibly be true?

Willow wasn’t given long to ponder. Her words had snapped Hallie out of her daze, and the second the cloudiness faded from Hallie’s eyes, time froze tightly again as Hallie slammed them back downstairs in less than a second.

“What is there to understand?” Hallie asked in a strained voice. “He thought I had potential; end of story.”

“But William—”

“William still had his mother,” Hallie cut in. “He never would have chosen to leave her behind, no matter how badly he was hurting. It’s not just the pain that calls D’Hoffryn; it’s the emptiness. He only pursues those who have nothing left. That’s where he made his mistake with you,” she added. “He thought that after your friends brushed aside your pain, you wouldn’t care about their suffering. He thought you’d choose vengeance over returning to them.” Hallie shrugged. “He was wrong.”

“You turned him down, too,” Willow countered. “Did you have . . .”

“I had no one,” Hallie replied bitterly. “But I was too scared to accept straightaway. He was the first demon I’d ever seen, and I . . .” Her voice trailed off as she shrugged again, uncomfortably.

“What changed your mind?” Willow asked as she rose unsteadily to her feet, trying to regain her equilibrium after the temporal fold’s version of a free fall.

Hallie flinched and crossed her arms over her chest, folding in on herself. “My beloved father informed me that I was to be married. To Charles Lasher.” Hallie nodded in the direction of the cluster of men standing on the other side of the room. “You know, the one who read the poem.” Willow shuddered, feeling an unexpected burst of sympathy for Cecily-that-was. She didn’t know what she’d do if she had to marry a man like that, but she could see how life as a vengeance demon could seem pretty darn appealing in comparison.

“And to make things worse,” Hallie continued, speaking more to herself than to Willow, “he told me this just after I’d learned about—”

Hallie cut herself off abruptly, clearly annoyed with herself for what she’d almost let slip. “About what you’ll see next,” she concluded.

“Next?” Willow repeated incredulously. “You mean there’s more? What could possibly be left? Spike’s entire world revolves around whoever he loves, and I’ve already watched him get a double dose of having his heart handed to him in pieces, first from watching his dying mother cough up blood when there was nothing he can do to help, and then later,” she glared up at Hallie, “from having his love interest toss a wrecking ball through whatever shreds of confidence and hope and self-esteem he still had after his so-called friends made him a public joke. So tell me, Hallie, what else could there possibly be for me to see?”

“The wish was to understand Spike, and you said it yourself,” Hallie reminded her, “Spike’s entire world revolves around the women he loves. Scene one: his mother. Scene two: Cecily. Scene three: well . . . he wandered out into London streets alone and upset. At night. Who do you think he’s going to find?”

“Drusilla,” Willow gasped, instinctively running toward the door after William. She only got about two steps before the world shifted under her feet again. Closing her eyes, she waited impatiently for it to settle, knowing that when it did, she’d be with William again.

And then there he was, sitting on a bale of hay in an alley, tears glistening on his face as he tore his pages of poetry to shreds.

“Oh, William,” Willow sighed, crossing over to kneel next to him, trying to gather the torn scraps of paper together and growling in irritation when her fingers passed right through them. She was so focused on William’s pain and her own frustration at her inability to help that she jumped, just as startled as William, when they heard a soft, dreamy voice come from the alley entrance.

“And I wonder . . . what possible catastrophe came crashing down from heaven and brought this dashing stranger to tears?” Drusilla asked as she stepped into the light.

Willow groaned as she rose to her feet. “And so it begins.”

“Nothing,” William answered shortly. “I wish to be alone.”

“Oh, I see you,” Drusilla said, undeterred. “A man surrounded by fools who cannot see his strength, his vision, his glory. That and burning baby fish swimming all around your head.”

Willow sniffed disdainfully as she listened to the vintage-Drusilla monologue: eerie perception and insight, mixed with more than a bit of seduction, and then that hint of insanity at the end, just to make things more interesting. Her heart had been aching for William when she arrived in the alley, but aggravation was starting to replace empathy. William had caught his first glimpse of Drusilla about five seconds before, and already he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of her, as usual.

“Vacuous bitch,” Willow muttered. “Pulling that I’m-so-enticingly-mysterious act, and expecting him to just fall all over you. Why do men go for that, huh?” Willow asked, warming to the topic. “I mean, just because you’re psychic, and strong, and . . . well . . . beautiful, too, is he supposed to bow down and start to worship you or something?”

Willow charged across the alley, walking right up into Drusilla’s face. Naturally, the vampire didn’t notice a thing, but that didn’t deter Willow one bit. “Because he’s got a lot to offer, too, you know!” she yelled, hands on her hips in the most aggressive position she could manage. “He’s sweet and caring and loving and passionate and devoted and has the best ass I’ve ever seen! You should be so lucky that he’d even give you a second glance!”

“And you!” Willow continued, turning to confront William. “You could do better! You could do so much better for yourself and find someone who actually loves you.” By this point, Willow was standing practically nose to nose with William, who was staring right through her as he kept a wary eye on Drusilla. “You deserve to be loved—deserve it more than anyone I’ve ever known—but you’ll never get it if you keep falling for women who end by treating you like crap!”

“That’s quite close enough,” William said suddenly, startling Willow into taking a step back. Instinctively, she started to apologize, but then realized that he was addressing Drusilla, not her.

“Fine, then!” Willow huffed, stomping off to the side. “Go ahead and ignore me. You always do, anyway.”

“I’ve heard tales of London pickpockets,” William added, his eyes still locked on the vampire. “You’ll not be getting my purse, I tell you.”

“Don’t need a purse,” Drusilla replied with a smile.

Willow snorted. “Sure, because you already got the purses off of your first three victims for the night.”

“Your wealth lies here . . .” Drusilla pointed to William’s head, “and here,” she added, gesturing to his heart. “In the spirit and . . . imagination. You walk in worlds the others can’t begin to imagine.”

“You mean that world where people actually care about each other?” Willow asked. “Yeah, I’ll bet you can’t begin to imagine that, you self-centered b-i-t-c-h.”

“Oh, yes!” William gasped, looking almost enraptured. “I mean, no,” he corrected himself. “I mean . . . mother’s expecting me.”

“Yes; yes, she is,” Willow replied quietly. “Don’t let Drusilla do this to you, William. Please don’t. She’ll just make you miserable in the end.”

A horde of stampeding cattle couldn’t have dragged William’s attention away from Drusilla by then; the soft whisper of a girl who wasn’t there didn’t stand a chance. Drusilla was close enough to touch William now, and he was making no attempt to move away, not even when Drusilla reached out to open the collar of his shirt, baring his neck for easier access.

“I see what you want,” Drusilla purred, utterly confident, knowing the bait had been taken and that William was well and truly hooked now. “Something glowing and glistening,” she added, a triumphant glow in her eye as she sprung the trap. “Something . . . effulgent.”

“Effulgent,” William repeated in a tone filled with awe, looking at Drusilla with pure adoration, his heart and soul written all over his face as he beamed at her his absolute elation at finally finding someone to understand.

Willow winced. He’d looked at Cecily like that, just an hour or so before.

And in that hour, Willow had watched while the old love died, and the new love was born: a love that would last him for more than a century, and would hurt him a hundred times over again just as he had been hurt that night. Hallie had been right: she’d needed to see all the pieces, and now that she had, she felt that she truly understood.

After the way she’d wept at the Underwood’s party, Willow thought that she’d cried out all her tears, so she was surprised to feel the new surge of wet warmth slide down her cheeks and onto her lips.

“Goodbye, William,” she whispered.

Turning her back on the pair, Willow walked down to the end of the alleyway and stared out at the misty streets of London. She didn’t really need to see anymore; all that was left was the foregone conclusion. She already knew how this story would end.

“Do you want it?” she could barely hear Drusilla ask.

“Oh, yes!” William gasped in reply. “God, yes.”

There were no more words after that. Sounds of pain, and sounds of pleasure, but no more words. Willow closed her eyes and waited for it all to end. She didn’t have long to wait. After a few moments, she felt the world start to spin again, and when she opened her eyes once more, she was back in Sunnydale.

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