Act I
The man in the tweed suit made his way carefully through the crowded airport terminal, clinging to his inbred sense of civility in the mass. It was no mean struggle, but he was a man used to struggle in many forms. He was glad he had packed lightly, just his briefcase and a duffel bag, which at the moment he was using as a shield to plow his way though the crowd.
Finally, after an interminable length of time, after a thousand excuse me's and pardon's, he found his way to an exit. He fingered the collar of his dress shirt - though it had been pleasant enough on the plane trip over, the heat of the bustling crowds in the terminal had induced a light sweat, and already he could feel that the night air ahead was indecently (and quite typically) warm, foretelling another hot summer. When he had last left it had been just the opposite - a cooler breeze off of the mountains, with the veiled promise of what passed for a cold winter in this part of the world. Only a few months, he knew clinically, but oh, what had happened in his absence...
He tried to forcibly remove the anxiety from his face. There would be a time and a place for that later. No need to indulge himself before -
"Giles!"
He turned at the sound of his
name, to her, the reason for his visit, and was thunderstruck. She looked ragged, even more so then when he
had left. Her hair was done in a
careless ponytail, the eyes bloodshot and bruised, her clothes (so typically
the one vanity of her otherwise almost viceless personality) disheveled. But she smiled, a slight expression, so much
unhappiness in it that it was hardly a smile at all. He smiled back, walked to her, took her in his arms as she
started to sob, not for the first time and certainly not for the last.
Giles listened carefully as she filled him in, detail after horrible detail. He knew most of it already, of course - but it was useful to hear it from a fresh perspective.
Tara. Such a beautiful creature, to be cut down just at the time she was of the most use, as a lover, as a surrogate mother. Giles remembered her as the most centered of the young ones, the most adult, though in many ways she also seemed to be the most fragile and sensitive. To have her leave them in such an offhand and careless manner...it made him sick.
The Trio. He remembered Jonathan, of course, and Warren in the sort of way that he remembered all the minor foes they had faced and vanquished together on what had seemed like a nightly basis. The other boy he hadn't known, and, he supposed somewhat coldly, now never would. Funny how before they had seemed like a nuisance, a bother to be handled in the course of a weekend and forgotten. They were human, and yet they had managed to do what some of the most powerful forces ever to set foot on the planet had failed to do - they had killed someone that the Slayer had called a friend.
"I want to be angry," Buffy said in a very small voice. "They murdered her. In cold blood, just because she was where they didn't want her to be. But, God...I c-can't. After all the nastiness I've seen as a Slayer...what I saw...when I saw what she had done..."
Her voice had broken then, and she hadn't spoken again the whole way to the Summers home.
It was a bittersweet homecoming, to say the least. Xander and Dawn greeted him at the doorway, Dawn with a peck on the cheek, Xander with a strong handshake that melted into a brotherly hug. Like Buffy, Dawn's eyes were red and puffy from shed and unshed tears. He supposed that in her own way Dawn was feeling a grief equal to Buffy's own. In the wake of Joyce's passing, Willow and Tara had served as surrogate parents in the ways that Buffy couldn't as Dawn's sister. He thought that the loss of two (and now, he thought grimly, perhaps three) such motherly figures might very well have shattered many girls Dawn's age.
The signs of strain were less obvious in Xander, but after years of association, Giles could tell they were there. Giles thought Xander would feel Tara's loss in the way he felt the loss of any mere friend, with a relatively remote sort of sorrow. But having to face Willow, with whom he had been best friends for far longer then they had known either Buffy or Giles, would be potentially devastating. And his own personal problems (Giles had heard from Buffy's phone call of a few weeks previous the story of the wedding fiasco) were icing on the cake.
Buffy wanted to get directly into business. It was very obviously a case of self-diversion, but he supposed it was understandable. In any case, he acquiesced.
"My thoughts on the plane ride over," he started. "Willow...is in a very fractious state of mind right now. I think that she does not want to harm any of us. But her feelings for us are secondary now to her feelings about Jonathan. She believes fully that she is in the right, and that we, despite our good intentions, are in the wrong. She has opened the door to something very powerful and now she can't close it."
"So it's a possession thing," Xander said quickly. "Will's not in control."
"No," Buffy said quietly. "No, it's her."
Giles nodded sadly. "She is in connection with this...this dark power, from outside, but she wants to be. She is bending it to her will, not the reverse."
"But it's been three days," Dawn broke in. "Why she hasn't she tried again?"
"I expect she has," Giles said. "There is too much security in the hospital. She is powerful enough, conceivably, to force her way in, but I suspect she wants at all costs to avoid a confrontation of that nature."
"So she's just waiting?" Xander said.
"She's willing to bide her time," Giles responded. "She's...simmering, for now."
"Where's all this power coming from?" Buffy said. "If we can find the source, we can cut it off."
"She's a very powerful witch," Giles said hesitantly. "It's conceivable that she is drawing solely from within herself, from the spells she has managed to pick up over the course of the last few years, particularly this last year."
Buffy nodded expectantly, sensing the unexpressed thought. "But -"
"But," he continued, "I would tend to think that is not the only power source she's drawing from. These magicks she is dealing with are very primordial, very dark."
"The darkest," Buffy said, her voice dead. "Warren and Andrew can attest to that."
"Yes," Giles said, troubled. "The problem is we haven't the faintest idea where to start. This power source could be anything, anywhere. We're standing on the Hellmouth, after all, one of the most intense concentrations of evil in the entire world. The problem is not so much tapping into it as harnessing it. Even in Sunnydale evil is...diffuse, diluted. It would be like trying to draw drinking water from the ocean. It's possible, but in the end you usually expend more energy than you gain."
"Will got her power before from that guy in town, Rack," Xander said. "Maybe she's gone back to him."
Buffy shook her head. "What she was doing before isn't anything like what she's doing now. Rack needs his head stuffed on somebody's mantle, but...I don't think he's capable of supplying her like this."
"Whoever, or whatever, it is," Dawn broke in gravely, "I think it's safe to assume it's more powerful than anything we've ever had to face."
They turned to look at her quizzically.
"What?" she said, frowning. "What?"
"'More powerful then anything we've ever had to face'?" Buffy said doubtfully, one eyebrow raised. "Don't think you're exaggerating a little bit, there, Dawnie?"
"Well...I mean, Willow's the Big Bad, ahhh," Dawn answered, waving her hands half-heartedly in front of her chest. "M-maybe it sounded better in my head."
"Wherever...it...may rank on the Dawn scale of evil," Giles continued dryly, "that power source is the key. If we can cut it off we might be able turn Willow away from the path she's on."
Buffy nodded, rising.
"But..." Giles stopped her, his tone dark. "We have to consider that she may be too far gone to save."
"I have considered it."
"Have you?" Giles responded doubtfully.
She gave him a stare full of ice. "This isn't the first time we've had to make decisions like this. That I've had to fight someone I love."
"This is not quite the same thing," Giles replied softly. "If it were just a matter of a missing soul, it would be easier. But Willow knows exactly what she's doing. Even if she is mad with grief and rage...she is still Willow."
"That's exactly why we have to find her."
"Which brings us crashing back to, how do we do that?" Xander asked.
"Rack," Buffy replied. "Even if she hasn't been to him, with his connections he ought to know where she's been."
"What about Spike?" Giles asked.
Buffy's face tightened. "If he's alive...we can worry about him later. Now, Rack."
"She hasn't been here, Slayer."
"Not so much what I asked. Do you know where she's been?"
He finished lighting the last candle in a circle and blew out the matchstick. "Sorry. Learned my lesson. I'm reformed. This stuff's purely medicinal -"
As he turned with a crooked smile on his face, she grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him up against the wall.
"Gonna have to cut you off, there, friend," Buffy gritted. "Normally I'm all for the playful banter before the big fight sequence. But this time, I don't know, my heart's just not in it."
She twisted him around and threw him to the ground. Before he could move, she knelt on his back, and grabbed his hand.
"I think we just go straight to the finger-snapping round."
"Alright, alright," he mumbled, face pressed against the ground. "She hasn't been back to me, but she has been making waves. She's got everything within a hundred miles hopping. Everything with a healthy nightlife, if you know what I mean."
"Where's she getting her power?"
"I don't know," he answered, and she twisted his arm, making him groan. "I don't know! Anything with a little darkness is fair game. We're on top of the Hellmouth, for God's sake. She could turn the world to cinders from here if she wanted to."
Buffy looked up at Giles and Xander briefly.
"Leave town, Rack," she said finally, standing up. "You don't have this place dismantled within a week, we'll dismantle it for you."
"Yeah, sure, sure," Rack answered, rubbing his arm. "Hey, if you do see her, tell her to look old Rack up. Remind her who her friends are -"
Buffy whirled around and sent a right hook into Rack's face. He crumpled to the floor, cursing and gingerly probing around his battered nose.
"Count on it," she said disgustedly. The three of them left.
"Bitch," Rack said, shaking his head, as blood flowed from his broken nose. He sat up, grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket. "You cut her open, I wanna count the rings, huh?"
Willow stepped out of the back room, smiling. "Count on it."
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