Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.
"Wants me dead?" Willow said. She was in open mouth shock.
"Yeah, seems the ringworld considers you a threat." Spike looked at her for a moment. "What have you been up to red?"
Willow looked pensive. She was looking for words to explain.
"I gave the ringworld a soul. I gave it a part of my soul." She said. Willow left out the part about combining it with the essence of her evil twin from another universe.
"Normally, suddenly getting a soul is enough to drive any soulless thing crazy with remorse for a short time. I have no idea what getting a soul does to a machine that's been around for hundreds of thousands of years."
Willow looked puzzled. Spike answered her.
"The Ringworld is over two hundred thousand years old. I'm going with the crazy as hell theory." Spike said.
Willow was staring at him strangely.
"What?" He said.
"You're alive." She said with a smile on her face. "You're alive."
Spike could tell Willow desperately wanted to hug him. He could hear whispering on the speakerphone. The slayers were all a buzz with Spikes return.
Spike attempted to deflect the oncoming display of emotions. Where's Buffy? Don't tell her I I'm alive. I want to see the expression on her face myself." He said.
"Not a problem." Willow said with a certain amount of understated irony. "Spike why are you here?" Willow asked.
"Need a favor red. I need you to recreate the Gem of Amara. "He said.
"You want me to recreate a ring that makes you indestructible? Why?" Willow asked.
"I'm going to war against the Ringworld. It killed Buffy. It killed my Buffy." Spike looked both sad and angry at the same time. Through the frown on his face he bared his teeth. It simply uncreated the Buffy that got copied to the Ringworld. It didn't even ask her if she wanted to continue living. It just took her!"
"If she wanted to continue living?" Willow was puzzled. "Was she hurt? Was she in pain?"
It took Spike a moment to understand Willows confusion.
"No, no nothing like that. When Future-Buffy transferred your Buffy into the future the transfer got messed up. Messed up in the sense that it wasn't exactly like the Buffy-Protector remembered. At the moment the transfer was changed the timeline was altered. The Ringworld fixed that by anchoring the Buffy-Protector to this reality with a set of quantum calculations you could call a realty altering spell. The Ringworld simply ended the spell and uncreated the Buffy-Protector."
"Spike."
"Yes."
"What's a Buffy-Protector?"
Spike rolled his eyes. "Just call her Buffy."
"Ok. So your Buffy is gone. What about the bad copy that was pulled through time? She should be around somewhere?" Willow said.
Spike smacked his forehead. "I can't believe I just now got that. There's a second Buffy running around the Ringworld and a second Dawn. I wonder what she's like."
"Something else you should keep an eye on Spike." Willow said. "The magics of the Slayer are not affected by the Ringworld antics. Slayers are still slayers."
"So?"
"So, when the Ringworld uncreated your Buffy-Protector it essentially killed her. "
It took Spike a moment to put the pieces together.
"Someone got chosen. There's a new ringworld slayer running around somewhere and I'm still a vampire."
"Do you have a soul?" Willow asked suddenly worried.
"Yes, but not the way you think. I wear my soul on the outside. My soul is in my skin."
Spike was about to speak again when his laboratory was rocked by explosions. The slayers could hear the sounds of gun fire in the background.
"Gotta go luv. Got a war to fight. "Spike stopped a moment to stare at Willow. "Recreate my ring, Willow and I'll kill Ouroboros myself."
Spike's image disappeared in fire and smoke.
The room was silent for a moment then all the Slayers began to speak at once. In the back room, the Buffy-Baby began to cry.
His command center was under attack.
Spike stood in the center of the pentagram, protected from the chaos around him. The Fist-Of-God Mountain was under siege. Within hours of announcing to Ouroboros that he was going to kill him, the Hellmouth that he had stood guardian over had opened fully.
Thousands of demons poured out of it.
The few automated defenses he had was overwhelmed. Spike had been fighting them for days.
"In retrospect, it's probability not the wisest thing to tell an all powerful being you're going to kill it." He thought.
Ouroboros had opened the Hellmouth and poured down his wraith upon Spike.
He pushed the dying body of something that looked like a cross between a bear and a pig off of him as he pulled Buffy's scythe out of its bleeding body.
"Screw this nonsense. I'm out of here." Spike pressed the ordnance detonator around his waist. He had just armed several metric tons of high explosives.
He pressed a certain spot on his chest and teleported out.
The explosion could be seen for miles. It produced a sound pressure level high enough to kill everything within a five mile radius.
Spike appeared in a cave. He could see the smoke billowing from Fist-Of-God Mountain. His black jumpsuit still sparkled from the teleport. Years ago he had learned how to tap into the Ringworlds superconductive grid and take some of its power. The suit he wore was closer to being a keyboard/monitor combination. It sent commands to the ringworld grid and acted as a focal point for the output. If Ouroboros ever noticed the connection it could kill Spike in a nanosecond by simply ordering the suit to teleport in a billion different directions at one or set him on fire. Wearing the suit was a risk, but it was a risk he was willing to take.
In the cave was a small generator and a radio transmitter.
"Stormcloud, this is Spike, over." Years ago Spike had began to cultivate connections with the Ringworld natives. A particularly savage warrior had caught his attention. Spike spent years training him and obtaining his loyalty. A static filled voice answered the transmission.
"This is Stormcloud, over."
Spike smiled. "Begin operation 'Chosen-Retrieval.'"
"Yes, my lord." The deep voice said.
It was time he found the other Buffy and made sure she didn't try to kill him. Spike waited for the shadow squares to bring on the night. After dark, he packed his things and made his way to the map of Mars.
Dawn watched her sister return.
Buffy had been gone for weeks. Spike had tried to kill her by firing the Ringworld meteor defense laser at her. Spike had burned several million square miles of land and only managed to piss Buffy off even more.
"I'm still your protector." were Buffy's last words to her.
Dawn watched Buffy coming towards her and noticed something odd about her. There was something alien in the way she walked. Her body language was aggressive and minimalist. She moved like someone with somewhere to go and not enough time to get there. Her hair was shorter, her body was more muscular and as she approached Dawn could see an ugly scar running down the side of her face.
Future-Buffy approached within a few feet of Dawn and stared at her cruelly. She stiffly brought up her arm and shot Dawn once with a tranquilizer gun. Future-Buffy leaned over Dawns prone body.
"Oh." She said. "You're the other one."