Long time, no update. I'm sorry, guys, I promise this was almost entirely done on my flash drive and now it's just… *poof* so I have to finish again. Promise I'll get it going good, and the second ending will be even better than the first.

For now, enjoy!

Chapter Nine- The Mirror on the Wall

True to her word, Emily didn't say a word. Beyond her original defiance, she made no other sound. No matter how broken, bloody and disheveled she looked, she spoke not a word, nor made a semblance of an acknowledgement of pain. When Wilkins was finally satisfied that she wasn't going to talk and that she was probably going to die, he set Mr. Trick about dropping her off in front of her house, for the others to see.

When they threw her out, Spike came running.

His eyes were wide and filled with tears as he dropped to his knees beside her. He brushed her ragged, bloody hair back from her face, and rocked her back and forth in his lap.

"Not… dead…" she whispered.

He didn't even question it; he had known since she disappeared two days ago that she'd been blocking the link so he wouldn't feel her pain. Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the house.

"Downstairs," she commanded.

He'd already anticipated every scenario, an ability he'd learned from her, and there was already a healing transmutation circle drawn on the basement floor. Weakly, she touched her hands together. As he sat down in the center, she let them fall to the floor. There was a blinding flash of light, and, for a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, her skin began to knit itself back together. She let out a groan, and Spike dipped his head over her, resting his forehead against hers.

"Share it with me. Please?" he whispered.

"It's bad."

"I don't care."

She unblocked the link, and the rush of pain and fear was enormous. He'd never known Emily to harbor such a large amount of fear in her body before. Fear of dying before her work was done, fear of never seeing Spike again, fear that the Mayor was going to win; all of it flooded him. There was never fear for her own safety, no; only fear for others.

It was scary, how little she thought about herself.

He was able to take some of the pain from her, to balance it between them so that it wasn't such an overwhelming mass in just one of them. And, as her skin began to knit itself together, the pain dwindled down to just her hand.

"That one's going to have to heal on its own," she whispered, sitting up.

He crushed her to his chest, whispering his own fears to her. He seemed to alternate back and forth between angry that she'd locked him out and terrified he was never going to see her again.

"And that's nothing to what Giles has been going through," he finished softly.

"We'd better call him."

"Do we tell him…"

"We've got to get them all here, and then we'll tell all of them."

Upstairs, Emily took a deep breath before she dialed the number of her uncle's apartment.

"Any news, Spike?"

"I'm not Spike, and I'm back."

"Emily! Good lord, I'm coming right over."

"Hang on, okay. Just wait a second."

"What is it?"

"Call the rest of the Scoobies. Pick them all up in your car, and pull it around back. I don't know who all is watching the house. They can't know I'm alive."

"Why?"

"Because I shouldn't be."

"Every time he turned away, for whatever reason, I… well… I drank my own blood," Emily admitted.

"That's… gross. Ingenious, but very gross," Willow said softly.

"Yeah, tell me about it."

"Wait, what am I missing? Why did drinking your own blood help?" Xander asked sharply.

"Living, breathing embodiment of the philosopher's stone," Giles said softly, shaking his head. "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but it was actually quite a good thing you tricked your father into turning you. You'd be dead if he hadn't."

"Hello? Still left out," Xander said, waving his hands in the air.

"What does the philosopher's stone do, Xander?' Emily asked softly. "It turns any metal into gold, and it produces the elixir of life. Because I'm human, I can choose when I turn a metal into gold, but I don't have the luxury of being able to control when the elixir of life is produced, because it's running through my veins."

"Wait… does that mean…"

"That I'm immortal? If I chose to drink a glass of my own blood every day for the rest of my life, yes," she said softly. "Believe it or not, there's some good things that have come out of this."

"Oh, yeah?" Giles asked.

"I know who the players are. Ethan's still doing work for the Mayor, through a relatively young vampire named Mr. Trick. Trick doesn't like getting his hands dirty, so he does a lot of subcontracting, but, after the band candy debacle, where Buffy was able to thwart his plans, he's been forced to step up to plate. He's got his fingers in everything now," she said softly.

"How has he survived this long?"

"He's made deals with demons, like Lurconis. He pays them a tribute, they keep him alive. He's in the process of becoming one; Olvikan."

"Ol… vikan?" Buffy said. "That's a mouthful."

"Call him Obi Wan if you want," she said with a smile.

"Star Wars!" Xander cheered.

"Faith, love, you are dating the king of nerds," Emily quipped.

"Yeah, and I love every nerdy second of it."

For the first time since Emily disappeared, the Scoobies laughed.

"Alright," Giles said as everyone calmed down. "There's still some questions I have. Most of which he kept you for two days, and you escaped mostly unharmed. How?"

Emily's eyes darkened, and she rolled up the sleeve of the long sweatshirt she was wearing. The lattice work of scars caused everyone to sober instantly, and Giles traced one of them.

"Alchemy?"

"It was the only way I was going to live through it. By the point they threw me out, not even the elixir would have kept me going much longer," she whispered.

Giles enfolded her in a tight embrace, a trail of tears being painted down her cheeks. "I understand now. To have you not there… If I couldn't have gone back to the apartment, I would have gone mad. In the end, I was well on my way. And then… Spike thought of everything. He wouldn't have even been there if you'd been staying at the apartment. I'm so sorry I ever doubted your decision."

"Don't be. None of us could have seen this."

Giles pulled back and wiped the tears from his eyes. Straightening his tweed, he resumed his seat on the edge of the chair.

"So, what do we do now?"

"The Mayor doesn't know I'm alive. Neither does Trick. They all assumed I'd be dead before any of you could even get here," she said softly.

"Ah, ha, which means we have an asset they no longer know about," Faith surmised.

"Exactly. Not only that, but, well…"

Giles and Willow leaned forward. "There's a complicated projection spell we can do. Something that will make me look like a ghost, and let me spy on the mayor."

"Spells like that require something of-" Willow started, but stopped when Spike pulled out an ornately handled dagger.

"Something like this should do the trick, right?" he asked.

"Where'd you get that?" Giles asked.

"He pulled it out of my hand," Emily replied, holding up her bandaged right hand and flexing it gingerly.

"There's still one thing we haven't discussed," Faith said. "Something that Emily and I had been tossing around but we never brought up."

"Oh, right," Emily said. "You wanna do the honors? It'd be your neck."

"We thought about dusting Mr. Trick, and setting me up in his place."

"That's a dangerous game. At some point, we'd have to take you out, and it would likely be painful," Buffy said softly.

"That's the point," she countered. "We get him acting like a father around me, then we take him out of the game. The only way we're going to be able to kill him at this point is when he ascends. We'll have to sabotage his forces, which would surely be coming along, but it would be a matter of destroying them without his knowledge."

"How would he be able to ascend like that and have vampires come around?"

"Graduation day falls on an eclipse," Willow said suddenly. "He's making a speech at graduation day."

"Then that's when it will happen."

"I'm confused," Xander said, raising his hand. "Are we talking about letting this guy turn into a giant demon thing on graduation day?"

"Yeah. And we're gonna have to start educating people on how to fight. He's gonna have an army. So should we."

"Xander! Hey, Xander!"

Emily jogged up to him, walking beside him with a hood pulled up to cover her hair and her identity. She looped her arm through his and steered him away from the students.

"What's up?"

"I want you to come live with us," she said finally.

Xander raised an eyebrow at her.

"Look, Faith told me that you're too bloody noble to let me kill your parents, so I decided this was the next best thing. You're over eighteen now. There's nothing they can say," she explained. "And plus, Faith is too much to handle when you're not around, trust me."

Xander cracked a smile and nodded. "I'd like that. Very much."

"So… it's your choice. You can announce it, or we can sneak your stuff out of the basement and they never have to know," she said softly.

"They won't notice either way. We'll just… sneak it out and let them figure it out."

With that established, Emily found her way over to Xander's house. In silence, with boxes she had had hidden in the trunk of Spike's car, she and Faith began packing up Xander's basement room. They were careful to make no noise, and Emily kept a strict eye on the time. It wouldn't do to have Xander come home, not with what she and Faith had heard before Emily finally broke and nearly killed them.

It took the Slayer and the Alchemist almost three hours to pack up all of Xander's room and get it in the car. Emily sent Faith back to the house, and waited up the road for Xander.

"Hey, Emily," he said softly when they were within speaking distance. "What's up?"

"You… can't go home," she replied.

"What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything. It's about what they're planning to do to you," she answered quietly. "Believe it or not, Faith stopped me from doing anything 'stupid' although if you ever wanted-"

Xander held up a hand. "Say no more. I'm yours."

Emily smiled. "No. You're Faith's."

While the Go Fish semifinals raged downstairs, Emily sat on the bathroom counter, staring into the full-length mirror on the wall across from herself. The scars of her captivity in the Mayor's office were beginning to fade, but she knew that they would never fully leave her, much as the scars of Angelus's torture would also never leave. And so she resigned herself to a life of scars, physical and mental.

With a gentle finger, she traced the only facial scar she had.

It was light, almost unnoticeable; just one curved mark following the eye socket, a "gift" from Angelus. It had been intended to make her less attractive, but Angel had since admitted to her that it only made her the more beautiful because she wore it with pride. Spike, too had observed it. Emily, however, had another reason for keeping it.

It was the last cut he made before he raped her.

She'd come so close to screaming as his knife dug into the soft flesh of her face, but his penis had caused all thoughts of sound out the window. She'd shut down. And, it had saved her life, even though Angel would never see it that way. Her ability to shut down and block sensations had also rendered her totally and completely speechless. She hadn't been able to scream, and therefore couldn't have fulfilled Angelus's one requirement to kill her.

It had allowed her another good year of life.

"Mirrors say a lot about people," Xander said softly.

Emily didn't jump, but she did turn her gaze to look at him. "I'm guessing you lost."

"Yeah. It's all Faith and Spike."

"It usually is."

"You thinking about that night?" Xander asked, pulling himself up on the counter beside her.

"This was the cut that almost killed me," she said softly. "I was so ready to die, and all I had to do was scream. Right here, I almost did."

"Why didn't you?"

"What he did next caused me to shut down completely. You can't scream if you're a living doll."

"Jesus. What did he do?"

"Can't tell you," Emily said softly. "That's between him and me, like most of that night."

"Spike knows," Xander replied.

"Not much. He only knows what he was allowed to see."

"And you two trust each other enough, yada, yada, yada," he surmised.

Emily nodded.

"Do you think we'll ever be that comfortable around each other?" he asked.

"No."

"Why?"

"Because your loyalty… your friendship, even, is the sole property of Buffy," Emily said softly. "And, I can promise you that she and I won't always see eye-to-eye. You're always welcome here, but it's unlikely that we'll ever be that close."

"At least you're honest," he sighed.

"I don't know how to be anything else. Now, c'mon. Let's go see what the damage is. "