Chapter Three: Visions.

In which both Xander and the apocalypse are discussed, Xander has a nightmare, Spike helps him cope, and Kel learns something more.

Giles sent Spike a frowning glance. "Spike, that's a myth."

"What's a myth?" Dawn wanted to know. "The Hellbound thing?"

"Yes, exactly," Giles said. "There've been rumors of such creatures, but no one has ever found any proof to substantiate it."

"We're not creatures," Xander said quietly, and Giles turned to look at him.

"You mean to tell me that Spike is right?"

"Now I know the world is ending," Buffy muttered. Everyone else ignored her.

"Xander, do you honestly expect me to believe that you are actually one of the people known as Hellbound? Because I can honestly say that the Council-"

"Has its head up its ass," Xander interrupted. "And you know it. The only Council member who knows about me has too much common sense to share with the class. Don't bother asking his name," he added when Giles opened his mouth again. "He's helped me out too much for me to betray him. Even to you."

"Giles?" Buffy asked. "I don't suppose that you could maybe, possibly, tell us what's going on?"

Giles shook his head. "I don't know enough about it. Until today, I believed that Hellbounds was a legend, a piece of creative fiction dreamed up by the demon community."

"It's not fiction," Spike said. "Until Xander I'd never actually met one before, but I've heard some. They're rare, but dangerous. Some of them are more demon than the ones they kill."

"We're rare because we die early and often," Xander said. "And there aren't many of us who can actually channel the power they dump into us without our bodies overloading. Those of us that survive the change die within six or seven years, though, at the outside. If we're lucky, we go out in a blaze of glory, sacrificing ourselves for the cause. If we don't, if we survive past the seven year limit, then we become overwhelmed by a berserk rage that will cause our brains to implode. It's not a pretty ending, but in the meantime, we get the job done."

"I don't understand." This was from Willow. "Giles always said that Slayers were the champions, the ones chosen to fight evil. So what's with the Hellbound?"

Xander shook his head. "You think Slayers are the only ones that fight evil? One girl, in all the world? You can't be everywhere. So do you really think that across the globe in places you can't be, everyone just sits back and let innocents be slaughtered? Not hardly. The world is filled with Champions. I'm just one of them."

"You, a Champion?" Buffy was not taking this well. "Gimme a break."

"You think you're so special because you're the Chosen one," Xander said, and his voice somehow got lower, angry, sneering. "You have it easy, Summers. You live a normal life, and then one day you're something more. You never paid any real price for all your power, no matter how much you whined about being different. You don't have a demon in you. You never have trouble sleeping at night because you can all but taste the blood of the people you have to stop yourself from killing. You're mortal. In San Francisco I met a pair of men who can literally never die. My contact in the Council is a wet works agent who's fully human, but that doesn't stop him from fighting and killing almost as many demons as you do. Even your one true love down in LA has his own price to pay for who he is. You may be a Champion, Slayer, but you're a Champion by default. The rest of us actually have to work at it."

Spike had been observing this silently from the steps, but after Xander's angry speech he figured that it would be a good time to get involved. "You still haven't told us exactly why you're here, Harris," he said, and made sure to use the old method of address rather than calling him the more affectionate "Xan" that almost slipped out. But his voice was softer than usual, since he didn't want to make Xander feel worse than he already was, and Xander, glancing up at him, let him know with a glance that he knew what Spike was doing and was grateful for it.

"Yeah," chipped in Dawn. "Why are you here?"

"Apocalypse," he said shortly.

"You've said that already," Buffy said, sounding exasperated. "Around here, you need to be a little more specific." Pause for effect. "Or have you been gone so long you've forgotten?"

Even Spike winced at the digging cut of the rusty knife in her voice. Seems Buffy was harboring some abandonment anger, even now, knowing the circumstances.

Xander ignored her anger as beneath his notice- and maybe it was. Bloke's got as many problems as Xander and maybe an angry Slayer just wasn't important anymore. "You've all been seeing phantoms, visions that talk to you. All of dead people." He gestured to the piles of books on the table. "You've been researching them, but you can't find any one entity that can manifest in so many different ways."

"You know what it is, I take it?" Buffy challenged.

"I do," Xander said. "It's the First."

Silence. Dead silence. Deader than Spike. And then Buffy, in a very small voice with no trace of her earlier combativeness, asked, "Are you sure?"

Xander nodded. "It's mobilizing. You don't have long before the Bringers descend on Sunnydale. Right now you're safe, because they're chasing down Potentials all across the world, but pretty soon they're going to be coming here because all of the Potentials are going to be sent here."

"That's impossible," Giles said. "The Council would never allow the Potentials to converge on one place like that, and they certainly wouldn't bring them here." He sent an apologetic look at Buffy. "They don't think very highly of the current Slayer."

"They're not left with much of a choice," Xander said. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation. The First hasn't truly mobilized in millennia, as I'm sure you know. And now it's specifically targeting the Slayer line. Faith has been warned, and a Council operative has been assigned to work on getting her free and able to fight. She'll be staying in LA with Angel and Wes, and take in Potentials there. For now, though, all we can do is wait."

Up until then, Dawn, Willow, Tara, and even Anya had remained relatively silent, but at this point Anya, unable to contain herself any longer, finally burst out with the question that everyone else was wondering.

"Can someone please explain what the hell is going on?"

"I second that," Willow said firmly, and Tara nodded along with her. "We're a little in the dark here, guys."

Buffy glanced at Giles for permission. "You mind if I field this one?"

He waved one hand in permission. "Feel free."

"The First," Buffy said and took a deep breath. "It's the First Evil. It appeared back in our senior year of high school- tried to get Angel to take me and lose his soul, and failing that, to kill himself. I managed to convince him otherwise and the First withdrew, I thought permanently. I did some research- with Giles' help- and discovered that the First Evil was supposed to be just that- the First Evil. Not too much on it, but I guessed that it meant the first true demon, or something like that."

"Far worse than that," Xander said. "The First Evil isn't just the first evil thing, Buffy. It's literally the first evil. It's the darkness that spawned the first demons. The Powers that Be- the ones we serve and answer to- are the children of its twin, its light mirror. Or, to simplify things, the First Good."

"I have never heard of such a thing," Giles said.

"And you say that as if it makes it true," Xander said, not unkindly. "Though in one way, you're correct. The First Good isn't an entity the way the First Evil is; it's more of a concept. We don't worship Good the way that some worship Evil, and so the First Evil has been able to personify itself. And throughout the last several thousand years, it has been amassing its armies for a full-scale attack. And apparently, the time for that attack is now."

"Why now?" Willow asked. "If it's been waiting all this time, then why did it choose now as its moment?"

At this Xander shook his head. "I don't know," he said.

"But you know all this other stuff," Dawn objected. "How can you not know that?"

"I just don't," he said. "Source is pretty tapped dry at the moment, and I don't know why now. Sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it."

"Which brings up the thing I wanted to ask next, Xander," Giles said, taking off his glasses and starting to polish them. Spike, from his perch, saw an odd look pass briefly through Xander's eyes, and wondered if Xander wasn't feeling homesick, for lack of a better word. Or nostalgic, perhaps. If Spike had to pick one thing that reminded him of Rupert, it was glasses-cleaning. It was possible that Xander held the same association. If that look meant what Spike thought it meant, then Xander wasn't quite as uncaring about his old friends as he was pretending to be.

"I'd like to know what, exactly, your source of information is," Giles said.

Xander hesitated, then glanced down at Kel, still settled comfortably at Xander's feet in a half-kneeling, half-sprawled position. He looked almost like he was asking the wolfling for permission, which seemed odd to Spike. Then Kel nodded, and at Xander's next words Spike understood.

"Kel. He has... visions. From the Powers."

"I thought Cordy was the only one who got those," Dawn said. Everyone glanced at her. "What, I can't keep up with old friends? Jeez."

Buffy opened her mouth, clearly wanting to point out that Dawn had never been friends with Cordelia Chase, but apparently decided against it and just shook her head before listening to what Xander had to say.

"Kel's are different. Cordelia gets visions of specific events, and those usually related to one person or group of people in trouble. For me, they send information to Kel, more of a Knowing than an actual vision. Or at least that's how he's described it to me."

"And that's what you meant when you said you were sent here," Giles said, in tones of understanding. "Kel was given the knowledge of the First and its intentions toward the Slayer line, and so you came here."

"Actually, if it were just the knowledge of the First we would have gone to LA and worked from there, most likely," Xander answered bluntly. "Since The Change-" and everyone in the room could hear the capital letters there, "-Angel has been a closer ally than most, so I probably would have turned to him and his group. But we were also told of the intentions the Council has for Sunnydale and Buffy, so I'm here. I-" His voice broke a little, and he leaned against the wall, looking shaken.

"Are you quite alright?" Giles asked, concerned. Xander shook his head.

"No. Gotta get out of here. Sorry, but the shop- too close to the high school. The mansion's further away. I just gotta- go." He glanced down at Kel. "You coming?"

Kel rose to his feet with a movement too graceful to be human, but shook his head at Xander. "I'll stay here, answer all the questions I can," he said quietly. "They need to know everything we've got."

Xander cupped his cheek in one hand. "Yeah, I know." It was such an intimate pose that for a second everyone held their collective breath, thinking that Xander was going to kiss him, but Xander just smiled at him and turned, his hand dropping away as he disappeared through the back door.

Everyone turned to Kel, and in the rapid-fire questions that followed, no one noticed Spike slipping out the door after Xander.

Xander sat in front of the fireplace, staring into the flames, uncaring of the fact that any mortal human would have been feverish from the heat of the fire in the heat of California's early fall weather. He was stripped down to jeans, the silver of his nipple rings glinting against the fire-lit glow of his pale skin. He sat in a simple cross-legged pose, hands palm-upwards on his knees, and he stared into the fire, letting the dancing light sink into him and calm the roiling upset in his body that being this near the Hellmouth caused.

Flames were his preferred method of meditation, though he had learned to use others. A fragmented crystal would work if he was desperate, or a pool of water if it was moving, stirred by a fountain usually. Flames, however, were inherently soothing to him, perhaps because of their very nature- light and shadow always intertwined together in an endless dance.

He heard the footsteps approaching the mansion long before they reached the front door, and he listened with an almost-smile on his face as Spike hesitated, then came right in without knocking.

"In some ways, you've changed less than I expected," he said, never looking away from the fire. He heard Spike react behind him, a hiss of indrawn breath, and continued. "And in others, you've changed more than I could possibly imagine."

"How'd you know? About the changes. You said that you expected some, which means that you know some of what's happened to me in the past few years. So how'd you know? Did the wolfling get a vision of me, or somesuch?"

Xander shook his head and finally twisted his body away from the fire to face Spike, who looked, as always, so much larger than life, pale skin and hair dramatic against the black and red of his clothing and pacing and filled with that impatient intensity that Xander remembered well.

"Nothing so complicated. I told you that I'm fairly close to Angel. I got my news about you the old-fashioned way: word of mouth."

Spike stilled and stared at him. "You're closer to more people than you let on."

Xander shook his head, reading something turbulent in Spike's expression and guessing fairly accurately at what it was. "It's not quite the way you think," he said. "Angel and the rest in LA are more like comrades, or brothers-in-arms, something like that. Kel's the only one I'm really close to, and it's more because I trust him than anything else." Like love, he wanted to add, but didn't. That was not a word he planned to use lightly in Spike's presence.

"Trust," Spike said musingly. "Trust him for what? I know you mean something other than just as your little partner in anti-crime."

Another thing that Xander had forgotten- how fucking insightful Spike could be, when he wanted to. "You heard what I said, earlier tonight, about how all Hellbound end up?" Spike nodded. "I trust him to kill me before it comes to that."

Spike stared at him, taking a couple steps closer as if not quite under his own will. "You live a hell of a life, don't you?" he said, almost wonderingly. "And I don't mean that as a figure of speech."

"Yeah, Spike," Xander said. "We're called Hellbound for a reason."

"What happens?" Spike said. "You said a little, back there, about what it was like. What happens to you, that makes it so hard?"

"Anger," Xander said promptly. "That's the worst part. Anger and bloodlust. Every time I fight there's the temptation to just let go and keep killing until I'm gone. And then there's-" He hesitated, searched Spike's face, but saw nothing but curiosity and something he didn't dare put a name to. "Nightmares," he finished in a rush. "When I sleep alone. Sometimes even when there's someone there."

"You've had nightmares before," Spike said, and they both knew that he was referring to the days that Spike had stayed in Xander's basement, and Spike had watched silently from his chair while Xander had thrashed and cried out in his sleep from some unnamed horror. "They worse now?"

"More frequent," Xander said. "More real. And that's the problem. Sometimes, they are real. Only, I can never tell which ones are true dreams until it's too late." He rubbed his hands across his eyes, knowing that the gesture was childish and not caring. He was so damned tired.

Spike hesitated, then closed the distance between them and laid a cool, comforting hand on his shoulder. "I came here to tell you that Kel's out with the Bit," he said softly. "He's going hunting after that. Said he wouldn't be back till dawn."

Xander had leaned into Spike's touch, couldn't help himself, but at Spike's words he had to fight the urge to curl up in a little ball. What was he supposed to do now? He couldn't sleep alone, not tonight, not in Sunnydale. And he was so tired.

"I can see you're worn thin," Spike said, still softly. "If you want, I'll stay the night with you."

Xander looked up at him, searching for any trace of mockery, and found only sincerity. If he said yes, then Spike would crawl into bed with him and hold him while he slept. It was staggering, and more than Xander was sure that he could quite handle. Spike made him feel too much.

He licked his lips nervously, opened his mouth to say no, and-

"Okay."

He was running. He was always running. Something pursued him, something dark and angry and powerful, and he knew that it wanted to consume him. It wanted to obliterate him, and if he didn't run, didn't get away, he wouldn't exist anymore.

He raced up the stairway, feeling hot, sulfurous breath singing the heels of his bare feet. The doorway was right in front of him, and he knew that if he could just reach it, he'd be free.

He burst through the open doorway, coming out onto the roof. But still the creature pursued.

He ran across the roof, silent on the hot, melting tar that burned the bottoms of his feet, but he was oblivious to agony. Nothing mattered but the thing behind him.

After moments that seemed like an eternity, he reached the edge of the roof and stopped. It was a long, long way down. There was no way out but back the way he came.

It took everything he had, but he turned to face the thing behind him.

Faced himself.

The other Xander grinned at him and tucked his hands into the pocket of his black jeans. "It's not so bad, you know. Giving in, I mean. It's a lot easier from this side. You should try it."

The soles of Xander's feet started to melt, and through the agony he realized that the building was burning, and the roof along with it. Flames were starting to lick up around the other Xander, who just stood there, casually grinning, rocking back and forth on his heels, waiting for an answer. Xander tried to open his mouth, tried to give him one, but nothing came out. He had no voice.

"C'mon," the other Xander coaxed, and his voice was cool like lemonade on a hot day, tempting like original sin. Sweet and carnal and Xander leaned towards him unconsciously, wanting to do what the other him asked. Wanting to give in. It had to be easier than this. Anything had to be easier than this.

"I promise you, the pain will stop," the other Xander said, and almost against his will Xander took a step towards him, the pain falling away at the action. There was a flash of triumph in the other Xander's eyes, and it looked like the fires of hell itself in those dark eyes.

Abruptly, Xander turned away from him, took a step up onto the cement wall that edged the roof. There was a roar of fury behind him, but Xander paid it no heed- just smiled a sweet smile at the night sky above him, and stepped off into space.

Xander woke to Spike's cool hands on his bare shoulders, shaking him back into consciousness. Spike halted the motion when he saw Xander was awake, but didn't take his intent gaze off of Xander's face.

"Xan? You okay?"

Xander was perhaps too dazed to notice Spike calling him by the nickname, but Spike was sure he'd remember it in the morning. Spike didn't care.

"Bad one," Xander said, still a little dazed. "Monster at my heels. Flames. Almost gave in, but I didn't. Took the leap. Leap of faith." He giggled, almost drunkenly, and there was a flash of very real fear at the nightmare that had clearly not lost its hold that caused a pang in Spike's heart.

Spike pulled Xander close against his chest, holding him tightly against his slightly smaller frame. "Spike's got you now, love. Go to sleep. I've got you."

"I trust you," was Xander's sleepy response, and he was asleep in moments, leaving Spike fighting off the urge to actually cry from the gift he had been given.

Holding Xander tightly, he swore to himself that he wouldn't waste it.

Kel smiled at Dawn, who was walking beside him, thumbs hooked comfortably through her belt loops. He noticed with approval the stake tucked into her back pocket, and thought ruefully that he was dealing with a whole new breed of girl- a child of the Hellmouth.

They'd both wanted to see the same movie, and Buffy, distracted by the pending apocalypse, had given her permission to go as long as she had someone with her. The movie was over now, and they were walking back towards the Summers house, talking every now and then when the whim took them.

"So what's up with you and Xander, anyway?" she asked, and he could tell that she'd been dying to know since she'd heard about them. "One moment it seems like you're lovers, and then the next it's like you're just good friends."

"That's because we're both," he said. "Friends mostly. There is no one on this earth I respect more than him, and he needs me. It's a rare thing to be truly needed."

He paused, tucked his hands into his pockets. "As to the physical side of things, well..." He trailed off, then turned to look at her. "Solace isn't just a word."

With so many people, he would have had to explain himself, but Dawn just nodded as if she understood it perfectly well. "I get it," she said, and even though it was astonishing to Kel, she did. Hell, if he'd known that they raised girls like this on the Hellmouth, he would have figured out some way to get Xander back here years ago.

"It's-" he started, and was interrupted by a rush of knowledge into his brain. He stopped walking, suddenly deaf and blind, and had to lean against a wall that his skin did not register the texture of.

Gradually it faded, and he became aware of Dawn standing next to him, anxiously asking, "What is it? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," he managed. "But I've got to tell Xander."

"Tell Xander what?" Understanding hit. "You had a vision, didn't you?"

"Something just happened," he said. "The Council. Things are moving faster now. But I know the answer."

"Answer?" she prompted, when he didn't continue.

"The answer to the question, Why now? I know the answer."

"What is it?" she demanded, and he looked at the wall he was leaning on rather than her face as he told her.

"Buffy."