Part 9
First I explained "Kate Gardner's" attempts to force me to show her my darkness.
"Should, should that have worried me?" I said. "Her methods, I mean."
"It isn't a common practice," Giles said. "But there are those, even on the side of good, who prefer the confrontational method to the subtle."
Everyone turned to look at Faith. "What?" she said after a second. "So I ain't one for goin' around when I can go through. It works."
"It wasn't a criticism," Giles said mildly. "And for you it does, indeed, work. Tara: Continue, if you would."
X X X X X
"You're Amy Madison," I said.
"Took you long enough," she said.
"Well, I never actually had the pleasure," I said. "What little pleasure there, you know, seems to be." I didn't ask her what she was doing. I'd already figured out the broad strokes -- instead of seeing whether I had any darkness, she was trying to force some into me.
That had been the meaning of my dream of Willow, when I stopped the book's dark words from crawling up my arm.
"I can be a lot of fun," she said. "Willow knew that."
"Was, was that before or after she broke Dawn's arm?" I asked.
"Before," she said sulkily. "Afterwards she was so concerned with what she'd done and winning you back that she didn't have time for me any more." After a pause, "So, how'd that winning you back thing work out, anyway?"
She was trying to provoke me. I wasn't about to let her. "She died happy," I said.
"And maybe if she'd had her magic, she wouldn't have died," she said.
I said, 'Okay. So how is any of this explaining what you're doing here? Is, is this some kind of bizarre act of revenge? Do you blame me?"
She looked at me as though I was crazy. "Yes. Of course I do. I blame you for all of it. I blame you for Willow not bringing me back sooner. I blame you for driving Rack out of Sunnydale. I blame you for Willow being dead -- the one person who understood what it was like to have this much power, and to know what to do with it. Look at you," she said, laughing. "You've had all this power for a couple of weeks and all you've is done is read a few auras."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I felt the transfer of power."
"From LA?"
"I was in Cleveland. I think there are people in alternate dimensions who felt it when you got all this power. And what do you do with it?"
It goes without saying that she was deranged. Still, even deranged people operated by a kind of internal logic. Hers was telling her that I didn't deserve the power Willow had given me, and that she did.
And since she couldn't force me to embrace a darkness I apparently didn't have, she was going to take the power Willow had given me and embrace it herself.
So really, you see, she was doing me a favor.
"I wait," I said calmly, "Until I'm sure I'm able to use it." Then I yelled, "Kennedy! Help!"
She turned towards the door and gestured, saying "Nice try." A force field popped up. She turned and looked at me. "All that power and you know so little about how to use it that you're calling on someone else for help."
Then, she moved forward and grabbed my forehead.
Why didn't I stop her?
Partly, I was still a little reluctant to use my new power, even under these circumstances. It was kind of like I was the Hulk, only smart, but I wasn't sure how hard I could hit and didn't want to kill someone with one punch.
If I was going to learn, now was the time.
And that was the other reason: She wasn't going to tell me if I asked her outright. This way, while she was trying to invade my head, I could invade hers, and find out exactly what I needed to do to stop her.
Dangerous? Yes. But she was going to try anyway, and I wasn't sure enough even of my telekinesis to risk flinging her across the room.
I didn't want to kill her unless I had no other choice. Even in self-defense.
The first thing she did was take me back, in my head, to when I had Anya curse Warren. But this time, instead of pretending like I'd really cursed him to be in agonizing pain, we went to what really happened.
"So you think you're not dark?" Amy said.
"I'm not," I said. "I have a little -- everyone does. But I'm not tempted to give in to my base desires."
"Really?" as we watched the scene play out; as I wished for Warren to have a conscience, and to think about what he'd done, every single day for the rest of his life. "So you think this isn't dark?"
"He's still alive," I said.
"Alive and suffering," she said. "He's being tortured. Every day he has to relive what he did, to think about it, to, as you so quaintly put it, 'suffer the loss.'"
"So?" I didn't get what she was getting at.
"Are you for or against the death penalty?"
"Against."
"Why?"
"Because I believe it's cruel," I said.
"And making someone relive their crime isn't cruel? Isn't crueler than just getting it overwith and killing them?"
"It, it wouldn't be a punishment if he didn't think what he did was wrong," I said. "Even if I'd made him confess --" and now he was telling the police, in detail, how he'd killed his ex-girlfriend, Katrina; how he and his two friends had used her sexually (in short, how they'd used the power of that hypnotic gem to rape her) -- "If it meant nothing to him, then all he'd do is sit and sulk in jail for the rest of his life about how he didn't get what he wanted, and how Buffy and me had, had made life so bad for him, and how we should have just gotten out of his way."
And anyway, he wasn't reliving his crimes. He was feeling guilty about them.
"So you're imposing your will on someone else, and you don't think it's dark?" She asked.
"All punishment is like that," I said. "But, let, let me accept your argument for a second, that this is really really cruel and mean of me. Why would that make me want to accept my darkness, take on any more, or, or simply give you this power? I know I'm not going to use it for evil or selfish reasons. You, though --"
"Fine," she said. "I've given you every chance. I've tried forcing you, I've tried tricking you, hell, I've even tried reasoning with you. And since that's not working," she said, her eyes going dark, her voice changing, "I'm just going to have to take it."
The odd thing was, I'd thought her conversation about the death penalty and all the darkness she absolutely couldn't believe I didn't have -- her life must really have sucked if she'd never run across anyone who was mostly light --
X X X X X
"She knew us for a while," Buffy said, interrupting me. "For a few years, I would have even said we were friends. Or at least friendly. She knew about the supernatural. She sat with us every once in a while at lunch."
"I even asked for her opinion on a couple of magical matters," Giles said. "She was unfailingly helpful."
"You needed help, Giles?" Xander asked.
"On matters of practical magic, occasionally, yes," he said. "I can cast many spells, but there are certain things that witches might notice that I might not. Rumors to the contrary, I am not, in fact, omniscient."
"Well, yeah," Buffy said. "I kinda picked up on that the second I saw the tweed."
"Are you ever going to cease running that joke into the ground?"
"Not in my lifetime," Buffy said. "Anyway, what I'm saying is, check our auras."
I did, quickly, and got her point. For all that Buffy's power came, ultimately, from a demonic source, she was fairly light. Xander was a bit darker, but not overly so. Even Giles' aura, though darker than Buffy's or Xander's, was nowhere close to the inky blackness of Amy Madison's.
Amy's had also had a strong overlay of genuine insanity. I suppose being a rat for years could do that to a person, but she had to have been partly deranged in the first place to go to someone like Rack.
It's what they're worried about. It's the reason I agreed to tone down my magic use until someone examined me. Willow got powerful, and went dark. Amy Madison, and her mother, for that matter, did the same thing.
Magic corrupts, so the theory goes. And absolute magic corrupts absolutely.
I will be the counterexample to that.
Parenthetically, at some point, I think it might be a good idea to track Rack down and stop him. I thought of doing it in Sunnydale a couple of weeks after Warren shot Willow and Buffy, but he'd cleared out of town. Smart of him. Still, he couldn't be allowed to keep "pushing" forever.
A note on auras: Even back before Willow gave me her power, it wasn't as though I saw auras as simply on the scale from black to white. I could also read someone's general emotional state. I couldn't always tell when they were lying, but a massive deception -- as when Faith switched bodies with Buffy -- that, I could spot. Still, the difference between what I could do then and what I can do now is like the difference between reading a five-page article on the life of a president, and a five hundred page biography.
"I get what you mean," I told Buffy.
"Good," Anya said. "Explain it to the rest of us." Her aura was darker than anyone else's in the room. Even Faith and Angel's auras were bright and sunny, by comparison.
Kennedy also asked for an explanation. Her aura -- and I shut off reading before I got more than a glimpse -- was fairly light, but she was very, concerned about me.
Of course, I didn't need to read auras to be able to tell that.
I explained what Buffy had meant, then got back to my story.
X X X X X
Anyway, that's what I was thinking at the time -- that her life must have sucked. I know how bad her mom was, for instance.
So now, we fought.
And the strange thing was, while we were fighting this magical psychic battle -- yes, Xander, I know, "That's not the strange thing?" No, it isn't -- we were acting just like we would if we were fighting it in the real world.
The only difference was where we were fighting it. We were back in Sunnydale. On the college campus.
First she tried twice to change me into an animal. I'm not sure what would have happened if she'd pulled it off. It's possible right now you'd be talking to a me who had the mind of a rat.
Still, it didn't work, because, you know, I'm actually able to talk to you. Everything I knew of Amy Madison said that this was the maneuver she'd try first. Maybe it was her first major spell, I'm not sure, but I was ready for it.
I wasn't quite ready to fight back yet. For the moment, I stuck with defending myself, because I was still trying to figure out how strong she was.
Then it was some other kind of transformation spell. I'm not sure what she was trying to change me into; she invoked the god Neptune, so maybe a fish? I wasn't sure.
I deflected them as well.
Then the earth itself tried to swallow me. Telekinesis sent the dirt flying out in all directions.
This was making her mad, because next she, by all appearances, gave up being subtle. A jet of fire shot from her hands right at me. I don't know if she can do that in real life -- I've never seen a witch who could. Maybe she was a fan of Charmed. Anyway, I dodged it.
She wasn't completely consumed by anger, though she was pretending to be. While I was dodging the fire, she was sending darkness towards me on the floor, from the bookshelves.
Bookshelves? Now we were in the Magic Box. I concentrated, and the darkness -- exploded? I'm not quite sure how to explain it. It was like it became little shreds of confetti, which dissolved in mid-air.
I thought for a second, setting up a shield.
She wasn't picking times and places that would have disturbed me --
No. She wasn't picking these times and places at all. She'd never been to the campus of UC-Sunnydale, or the Magic Box, as far as I knew, except in rat form.
So she was taking them from my head.
She'd taken everything, except the darkness, from my head. When she was pretending to be Kate Gardner, when she was trying to convince me, and now when she was outright attacking me.
Anyway, I now thought I had her measure. She was powerful. She might have been the second most powerful witch in North America.
I was more powerful.
"Okay," I said. "Let's get one thing straight."
"What's that?"
"My head, my rules. Rule number one is --" she set up to cast another spell -- "In my head, you don't do magic."
The spell died.
"You think that'll work?" she said. "I still set this up. And as long as that shield is blocking the door, and you and I are trapped in your head, we're not going anywhere."
"Until I give in, or I kill you, or you kill me?"
She grinned. "Just like that," she said.
"I can wait. Because, you know, I had someone on the other side of that door who likes me. And they're going to get other people who like me. And they're going to come in here and figure out a way to break me out of this." Then I sat down.
X X X X X
"And that's what I did, until she started yelling in pain," I said. "A few seconds later, she broke the spell, and you all know what happened after that."
"Doesn't sound like you had much to worry about," Angel said.
"Then, then I told it wrong," I said. "Because, while I may have this power, I wasn't at all sure I could block hers the way I did. I knew the first two attacks were coming. Everything else I just blocked or dodged as it came. Maybe it was because we were fighting psychically. I'm not sure. I won't know for sure unless she tries in real life and now, thanks to Kennedy and Faith, she's not going to be able to."
I smiled at each of them in turn. Faith grinned back, saying, "Happy to help. Kenny's idea, busting in through the window like that."
"Well then," I said. "Thanks. For using your head."
Kennedy grinned at Faith, then back at me, looking as happy as I've ever seen her.
Once again, I know Jacqueline Olivierez Kennedy is not exactly a woman lacking in self-confidence. So she must really be happy that I think she did a good job.
I moved to stand up. Giles said, "Are you sure?"
"Yes. I'm fine. She didn't physically hurt me. Kennedy."
"Yeah?"
"I think I need to get out of here for a bit. Any chance we could do that second date now?"
"You sure?"
"Do you want me to change my mind?" I asked.
"No."
"Then let's go."
