THE THIRD REVENANT
Disclaimer: Of course I don't in any way own Buffy. I don't even own the computer I'm writing this on, technically - it's on HP. But sometimes the show raised such a great concept that it just didn't have the screen time to explore it fully. I thought I'd pick up some of the slack.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: I'm assuming that six months after Chosen Willow and Kennedy are still together, but the story's not about that. It's more like background stuff. In Angel we heard that they were somewhere in Brazil at this time, so that's where I've placed them.
Summary: Unable to live with the guilt of the murder she committed, Willow attempts to set it right . . . by bringing back Warren Meers from the dead. But as a killer himself, can she justify unleashing him on the world again?
Note: Okay, I'm one of those weird people that just adored the Trio, and especially Warren. I honestly don't know why, but I thought it was a pity he had to be written out for the plot, as great as those episodes were. So I thought I'd bring him back to play.
Spoilers: Hefty spoilers for Seeing Red, Villains, The Killer in Me, and Dead Things. Some minor allusions to I Was Made To Love You. Also spoilers for the Buffy novels Immortal, Ghost Roads and The Book of Fours. Also references to the Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein.
PART ONE - THE LESSER FRANKENSTEIN
It has been three days since she waved Kennedy goodbye from the airport in Sao Paulo. Three days isn't so much, maybe; three days of summer could vanish in a twist of the wind. But three days, she knows, can also be forever. It can be the divide between soul and chaos. It can mean life and death.
These three have been neither, but it would be wrong of her to say that they have been as nothing - the nothing of summer, the nothing of being the one left waiting at home. Kennedy has taken a flight to Peru in answer to a call for Slayer power there, and that, she knows, will be battle enough for one only called a six bare months ago or less; but the real battle is here. The real battle is within herself, the one left behind.
Willow waits until the clock has reached its zenith and the twelfth hard chime has rang out into the silence like the cold last note of a dying symphony, her nervous fingers clutching the small leather satchel in her lap. There is no need to wait, and with Kennedy away nobody in the house to wake by moving too soon; but still she waits. She knows her power and needs no external interference, but a mystical convergence of natural means can only help her. Midnight, of course, has its own power. Before the witching hour is done, either she will have failed . . . or, the gods help her, she would have accomplished the unthinkable.
It is unthinkable, and she knows it; in her way, she even cares. The coven in Westbury imparted wisdom of the natural magics that she has never truly relaxed her hold of, even when the darkness called in her dreams, and over time she has come to develop the respect for those magics that she should have learned in the beginning - before the harm was done. But it is not too late, she tells herself, to undo those wrongs and bring back the balance she destroyed; it is never too late to take something back.
Even this.
At two minutes past midnight she stands, fits the carry handle of the satchel over her shoulder, and leaves the darkened apartment, letting the latch click softly behind her. Again, there is nobody to wake. She almost misses the days when Slayer, sister, and lover all resided in the same place, like a true family. She misses Buffy and Dawn. She misses Tara.
The streets of Sao Paulo are a far cry from the deserted strips of shadowy macadam where she spent her childhood. In Sunnydale, only heroes and fools left home after dark. But this is Brazil, and the vampire population is low by comparison. Humans swarm every lighted corner and every bright alley where the danger might have been. It is a human's city.
Human or not, still there are those places where someone like her may procure a few supplies, without the inconvenience of Internet shipping. She needs more, this time. It is, perhaps, the most complicated spell she has attempted, without the brazen flow of black arts doing the bidding for her; even the vital piece of the puzzle, the object clutched so gingerly in that satchel, has been conjured by her own hand - the last true item was destroyed by a demon biker almost two and a half years ago.
She walks unnoticed through the busy streets, just another young woman going on her way, to meet a date, perhaps, or to work in one of the colourful clubs that fringe the edges of downtown like night lights. Nobody stops her, nobody speaks to her. Most importantly, nobody suspects that in that bag she carries not make-up and credit cards but the last existing urn of Osiris.
There are far less cemeteries in Sao Paulo than in Sunnydale - at last count, the former Hellmouth had boasted twelve, with more proposed by the city council to accommodate the overspill - but there are enough. She does not need a whole cemetery. She only needs a single grave. A single, unmarked, grave.
And she has already picked one out.
St. Mary's is still, and under the curtain of gloom that swoons under the trees the air is thick enough to slice, like a cake. The denseness adds to the silence and to the dark, but she is wise enough to know that those two elements do not create it. Far older forces are responsible for that. This, like so many places of the dead, is a centre for mystical energy. She is thrumming with magic squared, this location in the heart of dark coupled with the midnight hour that she has purposefully chosen, and her nerves vibrate like plucked harp strings. But they make no sound, and she almost wishes that they would; alone and with the looming headstones of generations past surrounding her in a broken-toothed fence, she feels the oppression like a live thing. The last time, she had her friends with her. Xander, Anya, and Tara. She was with friends and she endured the ordeal for a friend.
But she is alone. The wind stirs the overhanging eaves of ancient boughs stemming from ancient trunks, but this is a positive sensation, one of life, and of growth. These trees channelled the power of the earth through their gnarled old wood and crippled bark, extended life-giving energy to the leaves only now just beginning to turn crisp and golden at the edges. They have fallen in glutted flurries underfoot, like a crackling carpet over the silent earth. Life to death, from the ground and back to it. She thought that might be in the Bible somewhere. It was spoken to grieving relatives at funerals, this notion of earth to earth and ashes to ashes designed, perhaps misguidedly, to bring comfort to the ones left behind. As she was.
She had not attended Tara's funeral. And the one whose life she intended to restore this night had never had a funeral. There had been no body to find.
The church clock sounded one across St. Mary's hallowed ground in a single, crystal chime. Its echoes rode the leaves for some time after. As the hour ended, so did her spell. Successfully. Willow swept her sweat-stung hair from her eyes, exertion pulling her lungs through her chest like reverse gravity, and watched the mound of scattered earth in front of her. She had been prepared, this time. On her knees, she had scraped the dirt from the unmarked grave of the John Doe whose bones she had chosen in his stead; on her knees, she had prepared the spot in a way she never had for Buffy. Now, as she waits and one o' clock sweeps in like a tide, she sees a moon-white, long-fingered hand reach from the earth. The arm follows; clearly masculine, coated from wrist to sleeve in soft, dark hair, almost black. His rising is easy. His resurrection was not.
Willow clutches her arm across her heaving abdomen, tasting blood in her mouth and rot in her throat, sweat clinging to her flesh until her dark clothes fitted her like shrink-wrap, and waits patiently until the rest of the man appears above ground. She had expected a fresh surge of hatred, or perhaps of guilt, to rise up from within her like an earthquake at the sight of his face; instead, she feels nothing. She should have felt everything and yet she feels nothing.
The wide brown eyes sweep around the cemetery, wild, unseeing. They alight last on her. She knows what his reaction will be.
"Get away from me, you crazy witch!"
He scrambles to his feet and the fallen earth subsides like blackened snow drifts around Willow where she kneels by the grave. He does not scream, blessedly, and he doesn't run. Perhaps the shock of death revoked is too much for that.
"Welcome back," she pants, her eyes steady on his though they look up from a position of ancient subservience. "Warren."
2
She has lived with the knowledge that she carries a second soul around with her, within her, for almost a year. And this knowledge, unlike any other in her life, she has lived with alone. It has not been there since the death of the body it came from, and this leads her to wonder, for a time, where that soul has been for the months in between. Was it wandering the ghost roads, unable to move on? Lucy Hanover had told her as much. Lucy Hanover, the long-dead Slayer that had devoted her afterlife to helping the lost on their way, had told her that those torn from life by a violent death often lingered, unprepared to move on, certain that their time has not yet come. His had been not only a violent death but a mystical one, and - although this is a thought she banishes with every ounce of will she possesses - a tortured one. An untimely one. True, in some States and some eras there would have been a death penalty for what he had done . . . but still, twenty-one was too young to die. And twenty-three, conversely, is too young to carry the memory of murder within. Yet that is precisely what she has done, ever since that day when Xander reminded her of the yellow crayon. At twenty-three, Willow Rosenberg is a self-convicted killer.
But that is not as true as she would like it to be. Since Amy's Hex had transformed her, temporarily, into her victim, she has carried him inside, like a residue that refused to leave when Kennedy brought her back. That ground that had been taken from her by his disconnected soul has not been entirely returned, and for months she has heard echoes, some that tear her own thoughts from her in a breath. She has not one killer in her, but two. At last, she can't take it anymore.
She decides to take her mind back.
3
At no point has she considered how she might handle him if he decided to try violence - in some part of her mind, she supposes, she has allowed that she beat him once, in a battle of magic. Even without the power of those dark gods that she had called upon before, she thought she could take him again. As to the physical kind . . . Buffy had told her, explicitly enough, that as a fighter he wasn't completely unskilled, but the majority of his power in that one battle had been the result of a spell. It was unlikely that he would attempt the same without it.
She needn't have troubled herself. That one, frightened exclamation is the first and the last that he has to say, and the brown eyes become no more or less wild for his recognising her. She has so many questions that will have to wait, but for the moment the only one that matters can only be answered by herself. Even as she settled the precious urn in the damp earth and watched its glow extend to her like siren's arms, she had been uncertain of what she hoped to achieve, and how she might feel. She has known for days that if she does this, if she brings back a human being dead for almost eighteen months, then she will be responsible for him - that, for a time at least, he may be more creature than man. Or boy. Still, she doesn't know how to think of him. He has always seemed such an unlikely, and disturbing, gestalt of both.
He still stands, if that can be considered a good thing - at least he may be capable of walking - but his slightly puppy-face is blank, and yet not. Blank, because there is no recognition of his surroundings other than his obvious fear of her. Not, because something in his eyes, in the slightly parted lips, in the furrow drawn in his forehead, is turned inward, collapsed in on itself like the heart of a cyclone. She wonders, with a dread she feels ashamed of feeling, if he is remembering his death. With Buffy, the risen had remembered everything of the after. She expects nothing less from him. But she is ashamed of that feeling because in the back of her mind where her power never truly left her, she knows that he deserved it. He deserved to die, and he deserved to do so horribly. She has not brought him back because she thinks he deserves a second chance. She has brought him back to heal herself of her guilt. The next few moments will decide everything . . . if, ultimately, she will forced to do again what she has done once before, and rid the world of him. It has always been a possibility, one that she has tried to push aside, but now the moment has come where she can't ignore it any longer. If he is willing - is capable - of coming with her without a fight, she will continue. If he doesn't . . . but she hopes, so desperately she hopes, that it won't come to that. She doesn't know if she can do it again.
She stands, not pausing to clean the drifts of earth from her legs and hands, and hesitates a moment before going any further. There is no point in concerning herself with people in the streets seeing her like this; he is grimed with earth from the matted tangle of his black hair to the slightly tattered clothes of the John Doe she chose as the vessel - dead only a few weeks, and the clothes were good, though covered in the same black filth now - and there is no hope of cleaning him up before leaving this cemetery. She doubts she will even be able to touch him, not least because he is terrified of her, but because . . . because she doesn't know if she can. Whatever may have come before or after, whatever may come now, there is one thing that not even her magic will change, that nothing will ever change. This man killed Tara. The fact that he didn't mean to meant nothing. The bullet had been intended for her best friend and hit her girlfriend instead. She doesn't see that that qualifies as an excuse.
Funny. She hadn't thought it qualified then, either.
It was an accident, he had pleaded, only moments before she tore the skin from his body with a click of her fingers.
You were trying to kill my best friend and got my girlfriend instead, she had replied then. As now.
Dear God, what has she done? Not then . . . but tonight.
She takes a step forward, her nose wanting to wrinkle at the stench of the clothes that had formerly been host to a rotting body. She mustn't let him see that - he is scared enough of her without his thinking that she felt any disgust, as well. And it was she that had chosen the vessel, after all. Maybe she should have chosen a fresher one. But this John Doe had been unknown, unmourned by a family, and from the police reports she had hacked into had been about the same size as Warren. She had been limited in her options.
She extends a hand to him, and pauses when she sees him draw back warily. He is not quite flinching - enough of his pride and arrogance have survived the process intact to prevent such a show of vulnerability - but it is going to make things harder, nevertheless. For the first time she wishes that she had brought Kennedy into her confidence and enlisted her help. A Slayer would be a useful asset right about now.
No, she tells herself. Kennedy would never have agreed. Or, she would have taken him out the second he left his coffin.
But of course, it hadn't been his coffin. She had denied him that when she disintegrated his mangled body.
She tries again. This time he lets her take his arm - the smell is much stronger up close - and doesn't pull back. She doesn't know if he can understand her yet or not - Buffy had been little more than an animal, and Angel . . . but that was different. Buffy had been in heaven, Angel in one of the Hell dimensions. Where Warren has been, she has no idea. But she has tried to find out.
4
It has been years since she last attempted this. The first time, trapped in a crypt with Oz, Xander, and Cordelia, it had been an accident - a chance seized by spirits as trapped within their tomb as they themselves were. Those spirits had been a tormented babble made inhuman by their time lost in nothing, but one voice had transcended the melee . . . one voice had called clearly to her as she opened herself to the magic around her.
Lucy Hanover. A Slayer dead a century or more, she had chosen to remain behind on the Ghost Roads to help those lost find their way. After the Axe of Air had slaughtered her by the hand of the ancient mummy whose element she shared, she should have gone to her reward in the afterlife. But she had not.
During their first contact Lucy had mediated between the spirits of the crypt and its human occupants, at last negotiating their freedom in exchange for a favour. Willow had kept her end of the bargain, as had the spirits. Lucy had promised her help whenever it was needed.
Their second meeting had been less to Willow's liking. After a near-fatal car-accident that left her fighting for her life on an operating table, Lucy had come to her again - Lucy had come to take her on her way along the Ghost Roads. But Willow had fought for her life, and won. Lucy had vanished back into the mists of that place being living and dying.
Now she needed her help a third time.
Lucy, she calls silently, resisting the urge to close her eyes and summon up greater focus. If Lucy answers, she may appear in some visible form. Willow does not want to miss her. Lucy, can you hear me?
The silence is what she expected, but not what she hoped for, and something which may have been disappointment had she been even slightly less desperate crosses her sight. Lucy, she supposes, has other, less mortal people to attend to. Is it only people? On her brief visits to the Ghost Roads, once as a living, corporeal creature and once as a soul on the cusp of leaving earth, she saw far more than humans wandering there.
Lucy? she tries again. And this time, as faint as it is, she imagines that she hears a reply.
Little spellcaster, says a voice from inside her head. Not so little anymore, I see.
No, Willow responds, half-pleased by the compliment . . . but frightened by it. Lucy surely knows, she must know, of just how far her magic has progressed since they last met. Of how she turned it to such wrong uses. Her physical growth into womanhood is not the only way in which she has changed. Are you angry with me?
That is not my place, Lucy replies. That is for your friends to decide. I know they have forgiven you.
I haven't forgiven myself.
In time. What can I do for you, Willow?
Here Willow hesitates for the first time. So many of her preparations have been made before it has even occurred to her to ask after its purpose. Its intended. The urn is conjured, the grave chosen. Kennedy has been enlisted in the hunt for a once-mythical beast deep in the Peruvian jungle. Everything is perfectly accounted for. Except for this.
I'm looking for someone, she says, even her inner voice faltering without the vocal chords to interrupt it.
The witch, Lucy pre-empts her. The one called Tara Maclay. She is safe, little Willow. She only passed through here briefly, and no doubt only stopped to speak to me on your behalf. She moved on a long time ago.
Willow feels tears well in her half-closed eyes and almost wishes that Lucy would become visible, that she would be able to see the effect her words have had on her. Tara was safe, wherever she was. Happy.
She's happy without me, she thinks, for a moment unaware that Lucy can hear her every word.
No, little witch. But she is waiting for you. She has friends here to pass the time until then. And she likes Kennedy.
That's . . . thank you. Willow hesitates again, for a moment struggling against the frenetic block in her throat and the mist that obscures the front room of her apartment from view. She blinks it away with a fierceness she has not felt in a long time. But that's not who I was looking for, this time.
Oh? Lucy sounds surprised. In that moment, even before the question has been asked, Willow knows that Lucy won't be able to help her. Whom do you seek, little witch?
Um . . . I . . . I'm looking for a man. A Warren Meers. Have you seen him?
I don't think so, Lucy responds gently. But I speak to many that never give me their names.
"Oh," Willow says aloud. Disappointed, but relieved, a mix as unpleasant as any of light and dark. It makes the emotions muddy, like too many colours blended on an artist's palette.
I'm sorry I can't help you, Lucy says. If I see him, I'll contact you.
Thank you.
Why do you want to find this . . . Warren Meers? The name is faltering in Lucy's unspoken voice - it is a rare name, and perhaps even unheard of in Lucy's time.
Because I killed him, Willow whispers. He's there because of me.
5
The apartment is dark, the drapes closed, the rooms silent. She purposefully left it this way when she went out, knowing that he would be disoriented, that bright lights and loud noises will be, if not painful, then unpredictable. The last thing she wants is to startle him into some kind of violence when they are alone. Without a Slayer. Without a plan.
Can she do this? For the hundredth time, she can't help but worry that the answer will be no.
She has not had to touch him since that one brief contact in the cemetery, and for that, she is wordlessly grateful. For her it is like an arachnophobic willingly harbouring a nest of tarantulas in her lap. Like touching death. Her own, in time, but first his, first Tara's.
He has followed her in a waking daze, not speaking again, and stumbling in shoes a little too big for him as they pass like ghosts through the clutter of the streets in the morning hours. Sao Paulo never sleeps. She doubts if she herself will sleep again for a very long time. But she has only days until Kennedy's return, and if the conundrum remains unsolved by then, she will have to think of something else.
I don't want to have to kill him again. But still, it is a possibility. It is a likelihood.
She closes the front door behind them with a click too soft to disturb the neighbours and ushers him in. This may be Warren's body, but something in him is missing; it is as if the mind took longer to awake after death, and this was little more than a template of a man, a vessel waiting to be filled. Almost a child, in emptiness if not in form. That makes her life easier, for now. She can imagine this is his twin, or his robot - and his memories of her seem incomplete, as do his powers of speech, his motor control. His movements are gawky and lumbering, reminding her of Frankenstein's monster. The original in Mary Shelley's vision, not the hack horror movies made ever since. Does that make her Viktor Frankenstein, and Kennedy Elizabeth?
She closes her eyes, and swallows down deep. At least, there is no Clerval to muddy the proceedings. No brothers and sisters for him to kill.
Remember the German family in exile to France, she tells herself, although the family's name in the classic novel has momentarily left her. If that family had only accepted the monster . . .
But what, exactly, is she trying to tell herself? That Warren was misunderstood? That if one thing in his past had been different, he may not have taken the road he had?
If one thing in my past had been different, she thinks, and shivers. If Tara and I had stayed in bed a few minutes more . . .
But that way lies madness, and so she stops before she can begin.
He is standing near inanimately in the centre of her living room, and in the faint glow of the streetlight glancing through the drapes she can make out very little of his face. Even if she had, the mud streaking his cheeks and the growth of stubble that had been absent at his death but probably present on the John Doe masks all but the staring, vacant eyes. She doubts he even remembers who he is yet. Buffy had not.
"Why don't you, you know, sit down?" she says patiently, and with a ginger hand nudges his elbow in the direction of the sofa. She tries not to think about the dirt, or the cleaning bill she will have when this is over. There are more important things. Like containment.
Yes, containment. She has known and planned for this all along. She can't allow a killer, a master criminal, or a speechless zombie free rein, even within the house. She has cleared the valuable items from this room, made the sofa into a bed, set bottles of water and the like under the coffee table, and she intends to make other arrangements for everything else. But for now, he is an animal. She has to treat him like one.
She takes herself clear of the area and stands, her chin turned down to her chest, her hands slightly extended before her, palms up. She begins to mutter a shielding spell softly under the breath, and around the living room a crackling globe of bluish light begins to build. She can release it for her own passage at will, but he will effectually be trapped inside. At least for the moment.
He starts at the lights around them, and dumbly reaches a hand out to touch it. It hums like a laser globe; the sparks and tendrils of light shoot to his fingertips like electric eels attracted by warm flesh. But the barrier is complete, and he goes no further. He can't.
"You should get some sleep," Willow says, cautiously. "Let the cobwebs clear out, yeah?"
But it is hours before he does. She is loth to disappear to her own bed, or even for water to mend her parched throat, until she is certain he's asleep. She sits, indian-style, on the narrow strip of carpet excluded from her spell like a walkway, and watches, and waits. He spends a long time examining the furniture left in the cell; even longer running his grimy fingers obsessively through his even grimier hair, as if to soften the mud-stiffed spines by willpower alone. For a little while he only sits and stares into space. And then, as her watch reads four a.m., he starts screaming. It is only after a confusion of minutes that she deciphers the words in those screams: his skin. His skin is gone.
By five a.m., he is asleep, an untidy sprawl above the spare bedclothes, one arm slung over the side, his face turned in to the pillow.
Willow stands, slips away, and cries in her bed until dawn.
To Be Continued . . .
