Chapter 6
"I was always good with numbers" As he told his story to the others that Buffy and Angel had brought in, Leonard's voice became more certain and sure as he warmed to his story. "So just before I graduated; I checked on how many freshmen had been in the class of 1994. It was buried pretty deep--- I guess it's not good for business to have such a high mortality rate--- but I found it. One hundred and eighty seven brave souls went to freshman orientation in 1990."
He paused. The others--- particularly Buffy, Xander, and Willow--- were hanging on his every word. Giles knew why they were paying such close attention. It was like talking to someone who had survived the Battle of Antietam or the Battle of the Bulge. This man had survived a struggle greater than most people could ever imagine: a pre-Buffy Sunnydale.
"Seventy nine of us graduated." He laughed without much humor. "Commendatory speaker gave us the usual line of how the future was ours. One hundred and eight of us never got a chance of any kind of future. And those of us who survived we could never even figure out why."
"Did anyone ever attempt an explanation?" asked Willow.
Leonard shook his head. "Every once
in a while would they find a
body dead of severe neck wounds. A lot of
times it would disappear before the
funeral and they would say there were a
bunch of sick people out there. The rest,
they just disappeared and no one ever
heard from them again. Their parents
thought that they had run away from home.
Maybe some of them did."
Leonard looked up. "By my junior
year, I had stopped making friends. I
couldn't take having someone I know just
disappear."
"And nobody ever asked why this was happening, " said Xander. It was not a question.
"No one ever talked about it. We all just went about not going out at night and pretending that there were a lot of gangs on drugs. I wanted to tell my parents what was wrong, but..." There were tears in his eyes. "How do you say that the things that go bump in the night really do exist?"
Buffy put her hand on the man's shoulder. "We know. It was really tough for all of us. But you got through it. You made it."
Leonard looked up. "Yeah. Hurray. I spent the better parts of my teenage years hiding in my room with the windows locked and talking to no one. After I graduated, I came back as little as I possibly could. I begged, wheedled and harassed my parents into moving to L.A."
"You got them out of there; you probably saved their lives." Angel said. "There's no shame in that."
"Then why do I feel that all I did was run away?" Leonard held his head in his hands. "All I wanted was to get away from the strangeness, live a normal life." He sighed.
"And it was then that your visions started," Giles said.
"No." The others looked at him in surprise. "For three years, I had as close to a normal life as possible. I went to USC, I started making friends, everything was OK." He took a deep breath. "Then, about a week after my twenty-first birthday, I had a dream."
Wesley and Giles exchanged glances and a wave of uncertainty went through everyone. They all understood the power of dreams--- Buffy had had several prophetic ones since she had become the Slayer--- but dreams somehow lacked the potency of visions. He was beginning to wonder if this man's story was actually valid.
"I saw my English professor walking down the street to his apartment. Then I saw two men in masks walk up to him. They asked for his wallet and after he gave it to him, they shot him seven times." Leonard's tone and demeanor did little to betray his emotions, but Giles could tell that this had rocked him. "They stood over him and watched him die. Then I woke up."
"And later you found that it had happened." finished Xander.
"No." Everyone looked up in surprise. "But three days later, he was dead. They never found who the shooters were so I never found out if it was completely true. I tried to tell myself that it was a coincidence. And when the dreams kept coming, the people who were involved were strangers so I never knew if they were true."
"But you kept seeing people in trouble," said Wesley.
"That was the general theme, yes. For a year, I tried to pretend that this was just the result of a very vivid imagination; some kind of carryover from Sunnydale. I graduated college afraid to go to sleep for what I might end up seeing." He paused. "Then I reached a point where I could no longer pretend that this was all in my head."
"You had a vision." said Fred.
Leonard nodded. "June 5, 1999. I was in a bookstore looking through the latest Jonathan Kellerman novel. Suddenly, the world around me just went fuzzy. I didn't black out or see stars; it was just like this wipe cut in a film. All of a sudden I was in this fancy apartment. And I knew---" he shook his head-- "somehow I knew that I was back in Sunnydale."
"What did you see?" asked Gunn. Leonard pointed to Buffy. "Figures."
"I saw her go flying against one of the walls. There was a TV screen in it, she broke that. She got up and ran towards her." He pointed at Faith.
There was a nasty jolt in the room, particularly from the Sunnydale contingent. They all had a very good idea what Leonard was describing even though none of them had talked about it in four years.
"For a couple of minutes, it was like a John Woo film. I had never seen anything like it and I wasn't sure why I was seeing it but I had this terrible sense that one of you was going to be dead."
Suddenly Buffy had a strange look on her face. It was a strange combination of memory, pain and sorrow. Faith had a similar look on her face. The two of them seemed to be undergoing some kind of mental struggle. Finally Faith spoke with a hesitancy that she rarely showed. "Did you see me... Get killed?"
Leonard shook his head. "I saw the two of you smash through a glass window onto the balcony. Then I saw her---" He looked at Buffy. "At that point I didn't know who you were." Buffy nodded--- "take out this nasty looking dagger. Then my vision kind of swam again. When I could see again, I was back in the bookstore, scared shitless."
"I can imagine," said Buffy.
"I spent the next three days trying to convince myself that I was not going crazy. I thought it was some kind of hallucination or mental breakdown; the idea that it might really be happening was pushed to the backburner. "
"When did the next vision come?" asked Wesley.
"Five days after the first one." Leonard sighed. "I won't bore you with a vision by vision rundown. Suffice to say, I spent the better part of nine months trying to hold on to my sanity. I tried to convince my parents that I was fine but about three months in I told them. I just..." He shook his head.
"You needed to tell someone," said Angel.
"There's a history of mental illness in my family. My Uncle Samuel had the equivalent of a psychotic breakdown when he was twenty six. I thought the same thing was happening to me."
"So you tried to get rid of them," said Willow.
"And nothing worked. When my parents suggested that I be hospitalized, I was desperate so I said yes. They tried anti-psychotic drugs, hypnosis, and even electroshock therapy. At first the visions went away, but then they started to come back stronger then ever. It was like... Who ever was sending these things to me was trying to work through the mental impediments that were being put up. Finally, I realized that the only way that I was going to get out was to lie. It took me another month before I was able to convince the doctors that the visions were gone." Leonard sighed again. "I still haven't managed to convince my parents."
"I hate to get off your pain, but there's something that you haven't told us," said Giles. "When you say that you were having visions, just what exactly were you seeing? People in trouble?"
"Sometimes it was people in trouble. Occasionally, I would get bits and pieces as to where and when. But the longer that I had the visions, the more often they tended to be one of two groups. I would be in Sunnydale with Buffy's gang or Los Angeles with Angel's. "
"And what were we doing?" said Buffy.
Leonard shook his head. "You gotta understand. Despite the fact that I grew up in Sunnydale, I had never actually seen..." He trailed off, appearing to be going through some kind of internal struggle. "... demons before. So when I saw either of you fighting these... Things, I took it as a sign that I was suffering from even more advanced delusions then even the doctors thought."
"If you thought that you were that far gone, why did you fight so hard to get out of that institution? Weren't you concerned for your safety?" asked Willow.
Leonard looked up with an expression of resolve that the man had not shown before. "Spending three months in that place convinced me that if I spent too long in there, I'd be dead in a year. If I was going to be crazy, I wanted to live free as long as it was possible. I know how it sounds, but..."
"It's OK, we get it," said Buffy. Giles frowned. He didn't understand it, or why Buffy was being so emphatic with this man, but he decided to let this all go for the moment.
"What finally made you accept that what you were seeing was real?" Angel asked.
"About a year and a half ago, I started to get sound in my visions. I heard the sounds of you fighting and more importantly I heard you start yelling warnings at each other. For the first time, I knew the names of the people I was seeing." He pointed at them each in turn. "Willow, Xander, Dawn, Gunn, Fred, Wesley, Giles, Faith---" he stopped and looked around. "Anya, Spike and Cordelia, who aren't here.. And Buffy and Angel. That's what convinced me that you were real."
Giles looked blank. "I don't understand. How did knowing our names help?"
"I may have a very active imagination and I may have been delusional. But there's no way under any circumstances that I would give any hallucinated girl a name like Buffy. And giving a guy a name like Angel..." There was a smile on his face. "Only in California could people like this could exist."
The group took this in for a few moments. Xander, perhaps inevitably, was the first one to react.
"Well, I knew I wasn't the only one who thought Angel was a girly name."
"What are you saying; that our names are weird?" said Faith.
"Hey, I'm not trying to be insulting or anything. It's just... I'm a very old-fashioned kind of guy. If I were making up imaginary people, I would call them James and Susan and Robert. It's how I think," said Leonard.
Giles wasn't entirely sure how to take this. It seemed to be a relatively inane thing to make a person change his whole belief system. However, he had questioned the wisdom of the Chase and Harris families' choices when it came to their choices in first name. He decided that it would be better if they just went on.
"So now that you knew that we were real people, why didn't you go to us then?" said Giles.
"Well, be fair. I knew your names but that was it. And as distinctive as they were, it's not like I could call Sunnydale and ask for the listing of 'Buffy'. And it probably wouldn't have helped my case if I had told you that I had seen you fighting what seemed to be people with the worst skin conditions on the planet. " Leonard looked around. "I needed to do some research and I had to be very subtle."
"I can imagine," said Dawn. "It's not like you could have just called up someone and said: 'Hello, I'm looking for a girl named Buffy, hangs around cemeteries after dark, fights vampires and-- Hello?' That wouldn't have gone over well. "
For a moment the attention shifted to Dawn, who grinned self- consciously. Then everyone decided to just move on.
"Fortunately, I had managed to find some work so I could afford to pay a private investigator to find you. Frankly, if I had been making more money at the bookstore, I could have probably found someone better and faster to do the legwork. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do or say when I finally found you. So I didn't have the greatest impetus to have him hurry it." Leonard finished sheepishly.
"How long did it take for them to figure out who we were?" said Willow.
"About six months. I was still having the visions, of course, and occasionally there would come a new detail or so, but it still took some time. By September of last year, I knew who all of you were."
"So by this time last year, you knew who we all were and what we were doing?" asked Giles. "Why didn't you come and see any of us then?"
Leonard took a long time to answer this question. "Because about one week later, I got the mother of all visions. It was a lot clearer and it showed exactly what was going to happen in L.A. " He looked at Angel. "The sky rained fire and brimstone. The sun went black. A great beast approached and slaughtered every man and woman that confronted it. And then I saw all of California under the spell of this.... Woman. When I came back from this one, I was sick to the stomach for some time."
"Well, I'd have thought that you would have been used to it by now." said Gunn.
Leonard looked up. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean four years of having visions and the killer migraines that go with them, you should have..." Gunn trailed off. Leonard looked at him as if he was speaking Tagalog.
"Gunn, I have been having visions for more than five years. The most lasting side effect that any of them gave was feeling a little queasy when it was over. I never had headaches of any kind."
Now it was the Angel's Investigation group that looked at each other. From what little Giles had managed to learn about seers was that the visions came with splitting headaches capable of stopping a demon in his tracks. If Leonard Kopell was getting these divinations with out any pain, there had to be a string attached. And there was only one that occurred.
"Um, Leonard.. You wouldn't happen... to have any... Demon blood in your family.. would you?" Fred tried to phrase the question as carefully as possible without insulting him.
She managed to offend him anyway. "I know that you don't mean to insult me with that remark, but you have no right to abuse my parents at all.." Leonard's voice, which had been level for almost his entire soliloquy, began to raise. "They've had to deal with a hard enough life and for you to call them...them..."
Angel decided to cut in before something was said that could not be recalled. "Leonard, this isn't what's bothering us. I think what we want to know is why you didn't come to us with this vision. You knew it was important."
Leonard took another deep breath. "Everything that I had seen had been very difficult. But the fact was you-- all of you--- had taken on the evil of the world and were still standing. I thought that you would probably survive without me telling you that there was going to be so much death and destruction."
"So you didn't come to us because you were confident we'd win." said Wesley. His voice had suddenly begun to rise. "Well, we certainly could have used the heads up. If we'd known what was coming we might have been able to save some of the people who died. We might have been able to figure out who was behind the attacks. You had an obligation to those people to come to us."
Leonard took all this in. For a moment, Giles thought that he was going to take this rebuke without question. Then he stood. "You're right. I did have an obligation. You want to know something? It doesn't matter to me. I and my parents were in harms way as long as we stayed here. So I decided it would be safer to get the hell out of Dodge. Maybe I could have helped you but I was more interested in staying alive."
"You're a coward," said Willow. The way she spoke, it was clear she didn't expect an answer. Leonard responded anyway
"You know something? You're right. So are ninety percent of the people that you have helped save. We can't all be heroes or champions or whatever the hell it is you are. You've been doing this for so long you probably have forgotten, but this is scary shit. Now I am not proud of my actions, but I am not ashamed of them either. I'm scared. That's why I'm here. And I don't have to defend what I did to you or anyone else."
Wesley was about to say something else when Buffy spoke up. "He's right. We're in no position to make judgments." She turned to him. "But why did you return to L.A. if you figured that it was going to be a dangerous place?"
"Two things. First of all, over the past four months, my life has been in danger. Someone --- or something--- has been trying to kill me."
"I thought that you got out of Los Angeles." said Xander.
"I did. The last two attempts on my life came in Phoenix and then in Carson City."
"You left California altogether," said Angel.
"Something big was coming down here. I figured I would be safe where it wasn't." Leonard looked up at the others, defying them to fault his logic.
"What happened exactly?" questioned Giles.
"I was on my way home from work and this car pulled up behind me. I don't know how I knew that he--- or it--- was carrying some kind of machine gun. All I remember is ducking behind some garbage can before he fired." He looked up grimly. "The only reason I didn't die right there was that a police car pulled up behind it. The car pulled out and I ran home as fast I could. Four days later, I withdrew what money I had left from my job and convinced my parents to go east while I went west."
"You wanted to get your parents out of the line of fire," said Buffy. "That's sort of brave."
"There's that, and I knew that if I was attacked again, I was probably going to have to kill whatever was chasing me," Leonard said somberly. "I didn't know if I could do that while they were in danger."
"So you went to Nevada," said Willow.
"Three weeks after I moved there, I was in my apartment when I heard the sound of a window breaking." He sighed. "I went for the gun that I had bought before I left Phoenix. I never hoped that I would run into a burglar before, but you have no idea how hard that I was praying that was all it would be."
"But it wasn't," prompted Fred.
"The second that I entered the room, it ran at me. I never did get a good look at it. But its face was green and it had a red jewel in its forehead. I fired five shots before it reached me; I don't even think that it slowed down. It was almost on top of me before--- I don't know why I did it--- I fired at the jewel. The thing collapsed in this puddle."
For some reason Angel had gone very still. "Sounds like a Mohra demon. But they only attack champions."
"Well, I'll take your word for it. After the thing died, I found this on it." Leonard took out a ring. "I kept it out of the hands of the police because I knew that I had seen it somewhere before." He handed the ring to Buffy and Angel. Buffy glanced at it for a moment before handing it off. Angel, on the other hand, visibly stiffened when he saw it.
"Where did you see it?" asked Xander.
"I had a vision the day before this attack. A group of men were standing around with a group of demons. They were discussing something of importance, but I couldn't tell what. But several of them were wearing rings like this."
Angel walked over to Giles and handed him the ring. It had a unique design on it."He's not the only one who's seen it before, " he said grimly.
Giles looked at it for a minute then realized he had seen it before too. And that though he couldn't figure out why they would target this man, he knew that Leonard was in a great deal of danger.
"Good lord."
"Hey English, want to fill us in?" said Gunn.
Giles looked up. "The demon who came to kill him was a member of the Order of Taraka."
Most of the room went still when Giles gave the name. The few who were not quiet were Fred, Gunn and Faith, the only ones who did not have the experience to know what the order represented.
"I'm guessing that they aren't the Rotary Club," said Fred.
"They're an order of assassins. Some are human, some are not," said Wesley. "They're renowned for being the most ruthless and patient of all killers. Once they make you a target, they don't stop hunting you until you're dead."
"Don't remind me, " said Buffy with a sigh.
"You've dealt with them before," said Gunn.
"Five years ago, Spike got so tired of me constantly foiling his plans that he sent the Order after me," replied Buffy. "I managed to beat back three of their assassins but it was not pleasant."
"Tell me about it. I still can't look at a worm without grimacing," said Xander.
"But you managed to defeat them," said Wesley.
"No, we'd still be dealing with them if Spike hadn't called off the hit," said Giles. "One has to make the assumption that they won't be so easily dissuaded this time."
"If that's the case, then Leonard definitely needs our protection," said Angel. He turned back to the man. "We will do everything in our power to make sure that you're safe."
"Wait a minute." Everybody turned to Fred. "I don't mean to say that your life isn't important or nothing, but you said that there were two reasons that you came back here."
"Right." Leonard sighed. "Three weeks ago, I had a humdinger of a vision. This one was a lot clearer and more precise than anything else that I have seen. For one thing, all of you were fighting together. Before I had only seen you divided into two groups. This was the first time I had seen all of you united against a common foe."
"Could you tell what the enemy was?" asked Willow.
Leonard shook his head. "No, but there was something clearer than that." He had a grim expression on his face. "You were being badly beaten. Several of you had fallen and it was clear that they were dead. The rest of you all had these grim expressions. It was like you knew that whatever you were facing was serious. And that... when the last of you died, there would be no stopping the end from coming."
"I was always good with numbers" As he told his story to the others that Buffy and Angel had brought in, Leonard's voice became more certain and sure as he warmed to his story. "So just before I graduated; I checked on how many freshmen had been in the class of 1994. It was buried pretty deep--- I guess it's not good for business to have such a high mortality rate--- but I found it. One hundred and eighty seven brave souls went to freshman orientation in 1990."
He paused. The others--- particularly Buffy, Xander, and Willow--- were hanging on his every word. Giles knew why they were paying such close attention. It was like talking to someone who had survived the Battle of Antietam or the Battle of the Bulge. This man had survived a struggle greater than most people could ever imagine: a pre-Buffy Sunnydale.
"Seventy nine of us graduated." He laughed without much humor. "Commendatory speaker gave us the usual line of how the future was ours. One hundred and eight of us never got a chance of any kind of future. And those of us who survived we could never even figure out why."
"Did anyone ever attempt an explanation?" asked Willow.
Leonard shook his head. "Every once
in a while would they find a
body dead of severe neck wounds. A lot of
times it would disappear before the
funeral and they would say there were a
bunch of sick people out there. The rest,
they just disappeared and no one ever
heard from them again. Their parents
thought that they had run away from home.
Maybe some of them did."
Leonard looked up. "By my junior
year, I had stopped making friends. I
couldn't take having someone I know just
disappear."
"And nobody ever asked why this was happening, " said Xander. It was not a question.
"No one ever talked about it. We all just went about not going out at night and pretending that there were a lot of gangs on drugs. I wanted to tell my parents what was wrong, but..." There were tears in his eyes. "How do you say that the things that go bump in the night really do exist?"
Buffy put her hand on the man's shoulder. "We know. It was really tough for all of us. But you got through it. You made it."
Leonard looked up. "Yeah. Hurray. I spent the better parts of my teenage years hiding in my room with the windows locked and talking to no one. After I graduated, I came back as little as I possibly could. I begged, wheedled and harassed my parents into moving to L.A."
"You got them out of there; you probably saved their lives." Angel said. "There's no shame in that."
"Then why do I feel that all I did was run away?" Leonard held his head in his hands. "All I wanted was to get away from the strangeness, live a normal life." He sighed.
"And it was then that your visions started," Giles said.
"No." The others looked at him in surprise. "For three years, I had as close to a normal life as possible. I went to USC, I started making friends, everything was OK." He took a deep breath. "Then, about a week after my twenty-first birthday, I had a dream."
Wesley and Giles exchanged glances and a wave of uncertainty went through everyone. They all understood the power of dreams--- Buffy had had several prophetic ones since she had become the Slayer--- but dreams somehow lacked the potency of visions. He was beginning to wonder if this man's story was actually valid.
"I saw my English professor walking down the street to his apartment. Then I saw two men in masks walk up to him. They asked for his wallet and after he gave it to him, they shot him seven times." Leonard's tone and demeanor did little to betray his emotions, but Giles could tell that this had rocked him. "They stood over him and watched him die. Then I woke up."
"And later you found that it had happened." finished Xander.
"No." Everyone looked up in surprise. "But three days later, he was dead. They never found who the shooters were so I never found out if it was completely true. I tried to tell myself that it was a coincidence. And when the dreams kept coming, the people who were involved were strangers so I never knew if they were true."
"But you kept seeing people in trouble," said Wesley.
"That was the general theme, yes. For a year, I tried to pretend that this was just the result of a very vivid imagination; some kind of carryover from Sunnydale. I graduated college afraid to go to sleep for what I might end up seeing." He paused. "Then I reached a point where I could no longer pretend that this was all in my head."
"You had a vision." said Fred.
Leonard nodded. "June 5, 1999. I was in a bookstore looking through the latest Jonathan Kellerman novel. Suddenly, the world around me just went fuzzy. I didn't black out or see stars; it was just like this wipe cut in a film. All of a sudden I was in this fancy apartment. And I knew---" he shook his head-- "somehow I knew that I was back in Sunnydale."
"What did you see?" asked Gunn. Leonard pointed to Buffy. "Figures."
"I saw her go flying against one of the walls. There was a TV screen in it, she broke that. She got up and ran towards her." He pointed at Faith.
There was a nasty jolt in the room, particularly from the Sunnydale contingent. They all had a very good idea what Leonard was describing even though none of them had talked about it in four years.
"For a couple of minutes, it was like a John Woo film. I had never seen anything like it and I wasn't sure why I was seeing it but I had this terrible sense that one of you was going to be dead."
Suddenly Buffy had a strange look on her face. It was a strange combination of memory, pain and sorrow. Faith had a similar look on her face. The two of them seemed to be undergoing some kind of mental struggle. Finally Faith spoke with a hesitancy that she rarely showed. "Did you see me... Get killed?"
Leonard shook his head. "I saw the two of you smash through a glass window onto the balcony. Then I saw her---" He looked at Buffy. "At that point I didn't know who you were." Buffy nodded--- "take out this nasty looking dagger. Then my vision kind of swam again. When I could see again, I was back in the bookstore, scared shitless."
"I can imagine," said Buffy.
"I spent the next three days trying to convince myself that I was not going crazy. I thought it was some kind of hallucination or mental breakdown; the idea that it might really be happening was pushed to the backburner. "
"When did the next vision come?" asked Wesley.
"Five days after the first one." Leonard sighed. "I won't bore you with a vision by vision rundown. Suffice to say, I spent the better part of nine months trying to hold on to my sanity. I tried to convince my parents that I was fine but about three months in I told them. I just..." He shook his head.
"You needed to tell someone," said Angel.
"There's a history of mental illness in my family. My Uncle Samuel had the equivalent of a psychotic breakdown when he was twenty six. I thought the same thing was happening to me."
"So you tried to get rid of them," said Willow.
"And nothing worked. When my parents suggested that I be hospitalized, I was desperate so I said yes. They tried anti-psychotic drugs, hypnosis, and even electroshock therapy. At first the visions went away, but then they started to come back stronger then ever. It was like... Who ever was sending these things to me was trying to work through the mental impediments that were being put up. Finally, I realized that the only way that I was going to get out was to lie. It took me another month before I was able to convince the doctors that the visions were gone." Leonard sighed again. "I still haven't managed to convince my parents."
"I hate to get off your pain, but there's something that you haven't told us," said Giles. "When you say that you were having visions, just what exactly were you seeing? People in trouble?"
"Sometimes it was people in trouble. Occasionally, I would get bits and pieces as to where and when. But the longer that I had the visions, the more often they tended to be one of two groups. I would be in Sunnydale with Buffy's gang or Los Angeles with Angel's. "
"And what were we doing?" said Buffy.
Leonard shook his head. "You gotta understand. Despite the fact that I grew up in Sunnydale, I had never actually seen..." He trailed off, appearing to be going through some kind of internal struggle. "... demons before. So when I saw either of you fighting these... Things, I took it as a sign that I was suffering from even more advanced delusions then even the doctors thought."
"If you thought that you were that far gone, why did you fight so hard to get out of that institution? Weren't you concerned for your safety?" asked Willow.
Leonard looked up with an expression of resolve that the man had not shown before. "Spending three months in that place convinced me that if I spent too long in there, I'd be dead in a year. If I was going to be crazy, I wanted to live free as long as it was possible. I know how it sounds, but..."
"It's OK, we get it," said Buffy. Giles frowned. He didn't understand it, or why Buffy was being so emphatic with this man, but he decided to let this all go for the moment.
"What finally made you accept that what you were seeing was real?" Angel asked.
"About a year and a half ago, I started to get sound in my visions. I heard the sounds of you fighting and more importantly I heard you start yelling warnings at each other. For the first time, I knew the names of the people I was seeing." He pointed at them each in turn. "Willow, Xander, Dawn, Gunn, Fred, Wesley, Giles, Faith---" he stopped and looked around. "Anya, Spike and Cordelia, who aren't here.. And Buffy and Angel. That's what convinced me that you were real."
Giles looked blank. "I don't understand. How did knowing our names help?"
"I may have a very active imagination and I may have been delusional. But there's no way under any circumstances that I would give any hallucinated girl a name like Buffy. And giving a guy a name like Angel..." There was a smile on his face. "Only in California could people like this could exist."
The group took this in for a few moments. Xander, perhaps inevitably, was the first one to react.
"Well, I knew I wasn't the only one who thought Angel was a girly name."
"What are you saying; that our names are weird?" said Faith.
"Hey, I'm not trying to be insulting or anything. It's just... I'm a very old-fashioned kind of guy. If I were making up imaginary people, I would call them James and Susan and Robert. It's how I think," said Leonard.
Giles wasn't entirely sure how to take this. It seemed to be a relatively inane thing to make a person change his whole belief system. However, he had questioned the wisdom of the Chase and Harris families' choices when it came to their choices in first name. He decided that it would be better if they just went on.
"So now that you knew that we were real people, why didn't you go to us then?" said Giles.
"Well, be fair. I knew your names but that was it. And as distinctive as they were, it's not like I could call Sunnydale and ask for the listing of 'Buffy'. And it probably wouldn't have helped my case if I had told you that I had seen you fighting what seemed to be people with the worst skin conditions on the planet. " Leonard looked around. "I needed to do some research and I had to be very subtle."
"I can imagine," said Dawn. "It's not like you could have just called up someone and said: 'Hello, I'm looking for a girl named Buffy, hangs around cemeteries after dark, fights vampires and-- Hello?' That wouldn't have gone over well. "
For a moment the attention shifted to Dawn, who grinned self- consciously. Then everyone decided to just move on.
"Fortunately, I had managed to find some work so I could afford to pay a private investigator to find you. Frankly, if I had been making more money at the bookstore, I could have probably found someone better and faster to do the legwork. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do or say when I finally found you. So I didn't have the greatest impetus to have him hurry it." Leonard finished sheepishly.
"How long did it take for them to figure out who we were?" said Willow.
"About six months. I was still having the visions, of course, and occasionally there would come a new detail or so, but it still took some time. By September of last year, I knew who all of you were."
"So by this time last year, you knew who we all were and what we were doing?" asked Giles. "Why didn't you come and see any of us then?"
Leonard took a long time to answer this question. "Because about one week later, I got the mother of all visions. It was a lot clearer and it showed exactly what was going to happen in L.A. " He looked at Angel. "The sky rained fire and brimstone. The sun went black. A great beast approached and slaughtered every man and woman that confronted it. And then I saw all of California under the spell of this.... Woman. When I came back from this one, I was sick to the stomach for some time."
"Well, I'd have thought that you would have been used to it by now." said Gunn.
Leonard looked up. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean four years of having visions and the killer migraines that go with them, you should have..." Gunn trailed off. Leonard looked at him as if he was speaking Tagalog.
"Gunn, I have been having visions for more than five years. The most lasting side effect that any of them gave was feeling a little queasy when it was over. I never had headaches of any kind."
Now it was the Angel's Investigation group that looked at each other. From what little Giles had managed to learn about seers was that the visions came with splitting headaches capable of stopping a demon in his tracks. If Leonard Kopell was getting these divinations with out any pain, there had to be a string attached. And there was only one that occurred.
"Um, Leonard.. You wouldn't happen... to have any... Demon blood in your family.. would you?" Fred tried to phrase the question as carefully as possible without insulting him.
She managed to offend him anyway. "I know that you don't mean to insult me with that remark, but you have no right to abuse my parents at all.." Leonard's voice, which had been level for almost his entire soliloquy, began to raise. "They've had to deal with a hard enough life and for you to call them...them..."
Angel decided to cut in before something was said that could not be recalled. "Leonard, this isn't what's bothering us. I think what we want to know is why you didn't come to us with this vision. You knew it was important."
Leonard took another deep breath. "Everything that I had seen had been very difficult. But the fact was you-- all of you--- had taken on the evil of the world and were still standing. I thought that you would probably survive without me telling you that there was going to be so much death and destruction."
"So you didn't come to us because you were confident we'd win." said Wesley. His voice had suddenly begun to rise. "Well, we certainly could have used the heads up. If we'd known what was coming we might have been able to save some of the people who died. We might have been able to figure out who was behind the attacks. You had an obligation to those people to come to us."
Leonard took all this in. For a moment, Giles thought that he was going to take this rebuke without question. Then he stood. "You're right. I did have an obligation. You want to know something? It doesn't matter to me. I and my parents were in harms way as long as we stayed here. So I decided it would be safer to get the hell out of Dodge. Maybe I could have helped you but I was more interested in staying alive."
"You're a coward," said Willow. The way she spoke, it was clear she didn't expect an answer. Leonard responded anyway
"You know something? You're right. So are ninety percent of the people that you have helped save. We can't all be heroes or champions or whatever the hell it is you are. You've been doing this for so long you probably have forgotten, but this is scary shit. Now I am not proud of my actions, but I am not ashamed of them either. I'm scared. That's why I'm here. And I don't have to defend what I did to you or anyone else."
Wesley was about to say something else when Buffy spoke up. "He's right. We're in no position to make judgments." She turned to him. "But why did you return to L.A. if you figured that it was going to be a dangerous place?"
"Two things. First of all, over the past four months, my life has been in danger. Someone --- or something--- has been trying to kill me."
"I thought that you got out of Los Angeles." said Xander.
"I did. The last two attempts on my life came in Phoenix and then in Carson City."
"You left California altogether," said Angel.
"Something big was coming down here. I figured I would be safe where it wasn't." Leonard looked up at the others, defying them to fault his logic.
"What happened exactly?" questioned Giles.
"I was on my way home from work and this car pulled up behind me. I don't know how I knew that he--- or it--- was carrying some kind of machine gun. All I remember is ducking behind some garbage can before he fired." He looked up grimly. "The only reason I didn't die right there was that a police car pulled up behind it. The car pulled out and I ran home as fast I could. Four days later, I withdrew what money I had left from my job and convinced my parents to go east while I went west."
"You wanted to get your parents out of the line of fire," said Buffy. "That's sort of brave."
"There's that, and I knew that if I was attacked again, I was probably going to have to kill whatever was chasing me," Leonard said somberly. "I didn't know if I could do that while they were in danger."
"So you went to Nevada," said Willow.
"Three weeks after I moved there, I was in my apartment when I heard the sound of a window breaking." He sighed. "I went for the gun that I had bought before I left Phoenix. I never hoped that I would run into a burglar before, but you have no idea how hard that I was praying that was all it would be."
"But it wasn't," prompted Fred.
"The second that I entered the room, it ran at me. I never did get a good look at it. But its face was green and it had a red jewel in its forehead. I fired five shots before it reached me; I don't even think that it slowed down. It was almost on top of me before--- I don't know why I did it--- I fired at the jewel. The thing collapsed in this puddle."
For some reason Angel had gone very still. "Sounds like a Mohra demon. But they only attack champions."
"Well, I'll take your word for it. After the thing died, I found this on it." Leonard took out a ring. "I kept it out of the hands of the police because I knew that I had seen it somewhere before." He handed the ring to Buffy and Angel. Buffy glanced at it for a moment before handing it off. Angel, on the other hand, visibly stiffened when he saw it.
"Where did you see it?" asked Xander.
"I had a vision the day before this attack. A group of men were standing around with a group of demons. They were discussing something of importance, but I couldn't tell what. But several of them were wearing rings like this."
Angel walked over to Giles and handed him the ring. It had a unique design on it."He's not the only one who's seen it before, " he said grimly.
Giles looked at it for a minute then realized he had seen it before too. And that though he couldn't figure out why they would target this man, he knew that Leonard was in a great deal of danger.
"Good lord."
"Hey English, want to fill us in?" said Gunn.
Giles looked up. "The demon who came to kill him was a member of the Order of Taraka."
Most of the room went still when Giles gave the name. The few who were not quiet were Fred, Gunn and Faith, the only ones who did not have the experience to know what the order represented.
"I'm guessing that they aren't the Rotary Club," said Fred.
"They're an order of assassins. Some are human, some are not," said Wesley. "They're renowned for being the most ruthless and patient of all killers. Once they make you a target, they don't stop hunting you until you're dead."
"Don't remind me, " said Buffy with a sigh.
"You've dealt with them before," said Gunn.
"Five years ago, Spike got so tired of me constantly foiling his plans that he sent the Order after me," replied Buffy. "I managed to beat back three of their assassins but it was not pleasant."
"Tell me about it. I still can't look at a worm without grimacing," said Xander.
"But you managed to defeat them," said Wesley.
"No, we'd still be dealing with them if Spike hadn't called off the hit," said Giles. "One has to make the assumption that they won't be so easily dissuaded this time."
"If that's the case, then Leonard definitely needs our protection," said Angel. He turned back to the man. "We will do everything in our power to make sure that you're safe."
"Wait a minute." Everybody turned to Fred. "I don't mean to say that your life isn't important or nothing, but you said that there were two reasons that you came back here."
"Right." Leonard sighed. "Three weeks ago, I had a humdinger of a vision. This one was a lot clearer and more precise than anything else that I have seen. For one thing, all of you were fighting together. Before I had only seen you divided into two groups. This was the first time I had seen all of you united against a common foe."
"Could you tell what the enemy was?" asked Willow.
Leonard shook his head. "No, but there was something clearer than that." He had a grim expression on his face. "You were being badly beaten. Several of you had fallen and it was clear that they were dead. The rest of you all had these grim expressions. It was like you knew that whatever you were facing was serious. And that... when the last of you died, there would be no stopping the end from coming."