Alternate Beauty and the Beasts.

Early October 1998

Moon phases are confusing. When dealing with werewolves, especially when used to fighting vampires, the natural assumption is that you don't have to worry about the monster until sunset on the full moon. But, in Sunnydale, the full moon tended to rise as early as 5:30 in the fall, a full hour before sunset, and the transformation wouldn't wait on your assumptions about monsters only coming out after dark. Since the moonrise time was all over the place throughout the year, it really made it difficult to keep your friend, the werewolf, safe.

On the first night of the full moon, Buffy hoped that the Scoobies had Oz under control while she patrolled with Faith. They'd been handling it in her absence, so she was trying not to micromanage. The situation with Xander hadn't been getting better, and she was worried that her friendship with Willow was a little strained. After all, Willow was spending a lot more time with Oz, and with Xander and Cordelia as couples. Buffy effectively had a new sister in Faith, and a lot of the rest of her spare time was training Cordelia. With how quiet it had been since they slayed Kakistos, she hadn't even really needed any big research sessions.

"Nice place," Faith interrupted Buffy's reverie to realize they were strolling through one of Sunnydale's dozen cemeteries. "Do you ever catch kids doing the diddy out here?"

"No. There's a smooch spot up by the woods," Buffy pointed into the distance. "That's usually where kids go."

"Yeah?"

"Looking for a place to take Scott?" Buffy asked. As far as she knew, Faith had started going out with the boy.

"Ha! No way," Faith shook her head. "That kid. First, who wants to take someone to a black and white film festival for a first date? I was so bored. So I was like, dark theater, don't have to pay attention, maybe the guy wants to make out?" She shook her head, remembering, "I pulled his hand under my shirt and he freaked out so bad he spilled his pop all over himself!"

"No!" Buffy giggled.

"He's cute though, right? So I figured it was a fluke." Faith shrugged, absently twirling and catching her stake as they walked. "The next time, though, he wanted to double date with his weird friends… Debbie and Pete, I think? Those two reminded me of my parents, when it was real bad, so I split."

"You want to talk about it?" Buffy asked. It was rare for Faith to say anything about her past before she was called.

"Not really. Lot of even worse road between now and then." Faith shook her head. Buffy's push to get her friends in therapy was no longer getting completely stonewalled, but they still hadn't actually found a therapist that was cleared to hear about demon problems, so nobody but her was getting their heads shrunk so far. "Just sayin'... that couple's gonna really run up the phone bill for the domestic violence hotline in a few years."

"You think he's hitting her? Should we do something?"

"Like what? I tried to talk to her about it later, and she denied it. Told me to stay out of her relationship. We gonna go to Snyder? The Sunnydale PD? Tell them that some weird runaway chick thinks that Pete's gonna go off the deep end someday?"

"We really ought to get you registered for school. Or at least here legally," Buffy remembered.

"I wasn't exactly on track to be valedictorian even before I spent my nights Slaying," Faith disagreed. "And unless your government pals can swing getting me fostered with Joyce or G-man, I'd rather not go back in the system." She laughed, riffing on the recent credit card commercials, "For everything else, there's fake ID."

"Fine. Just, you know, don't get arrested," Buffy told her, realizing this was another area not to push. Moving back off the tangent, she said, "I hate thinking there's a guy at school like… Pete, did you say? But I guess if he's not some kind of hell beast, and she doesn't want help, there isn't much we can do."

"I mean, and who knows what half of the rest of campus is getting up to?" Faith added. "He's just the one I clocked. All men are beasts, Buffy."

Buffy scoffed, "Okay, I was hoping to not get that cynical till I was at least forty."

"It's not cynical," the other Slayer tried to explain her point of view. "I mean, it's realistic. Every guy from Manimal down to Mr. I-Love-The-English-Patient has a beast in him. And I don't care how sensitive they act. They're all still just in it for the chase."

"All humans are, basically, like any other animal," Dr. Johnson explained the next morning, echoing Faith's ideas. It was a little lame that the Sunnydale seniors were all having to retake biology, but after the debacle with the praying mantis lady that ate their real teacher, that semester had pretty much gone off the rails, so here they were, finally making it up. At least the teacher was interesting. They were able to get him off on stories about his stint in Doctors without Borders so easily. "Sure. There are millions of years of cognitive development to give us language and reasoning skills, but in some ways those just make us better killers. All of human civilization is a side effect of a bunch of apes that figured out how to use tools and cooperation to become apex predators. And when it really gets dangerous, we do the same as any other animal: fight, flight, or freeze."

"Freeze?" Buffy asked. "I've heard of fight-or-flight, but…"

He nodded, "Everyone likes to think that in a crisis they'll either fight or get away. But remember, we evolved from prey. You know about playing dead, right? A lot of animals do something less dramatic: just hold still and hope that the predator can't see you if you don't move. You know, like in Jurassic Park and the t-rex? Only, it doesn't work as well these days. Why do you think so many animals just stop in the headlights and wind up getting hit by a car?

"And, in a broader sense, sometimes humans can have a bad habit of just hoping their problems will go away rather than doing something about them or leaving a bad situation." The bell for the end of first period rang. "Anyway, that's time. No homework for tomorrow, but quiz on chapter 8 on Monday, so reread it tonight if you want your weekend free."

As Buffy was leaving class with Willow, Oz was waiting to meet them in the hall. A girl with very light blond hair and a bouquet of flowers leaving the classroom just ahead of them asked, "Oz! Hey, you're not doing jazz band this year?"

The diminutive guitarist explained, "Oh, can't take the pressure. It's not the music that's hard, it's the marching."

"We have a marching jazz band?" Buffy asked, never having once seen anything of the kind.

Oz joked, "Yeah, but, you know, since the best jazz is improvisational, we'd be going off in all directions, banging into floats... Scary."

Willow grinned, explaining to the girl and the dark-haired guy who'd showed up to meet her at the classroom door, "He's just being Oz."

"Pretty much full-time," Oz agreed.

"Those are pretty flowers," Buffy nodded at the girl's bouquet, as the five teens seemed to be wandering down the hall in the same general direction.

"Thanks. Pete brought them for me," she smiled at her apparent boyfriend.

"Don't you have that thing with the school counselor, Buffy?" Willow observed, in case her friend had lost track of time again.

"Huh?" Buffy had been distracted by wondering if this was the Pete that Faith had mentioned. "Oh, no. My regular therapist put a note on really professional stationary that I was Little Miss Stable and I got to shove it in Snyder's face. He basically did the Snidely Whiplash 'curses, foiled again' thing when another of his schemes to kick me out failed."

"You're better off," the girl who was possibly Debbie suggested. "Platt creeps me out. I would totally quit going, but I'm flunking bio, and Dr. Johnson says I have success issues." She finished with an odd, self-deprecating giggle, gesturing back at the class they'd just left.

"Senior bio?" Oz asked. "I kinda aced that final." Buffy figured Oz had needed to retake biology in his original senior year because he'd skipped too many classes, rather than his professor also getting killed.

"And how did you do that?" Willow asked, continuing her multi-year plan of convincing her boyfriend that he was a genius who shouldn't be content to just slack off and be in a band. "Oh, right. You showed up."

Oz just shrugged and told the blond girl, "If you want my notes, they're yours."

"Thanks! That'd be great!" she said, waving goodbye as the two groups finally split off, Buffy, Willow, and Oz making for the library.

As the three teens walked in, they noticed that Xander was already there, and Giles made a tortured face and insisted, "Right. It's good to see you. Um… no need to panic."

Oz deadpanned, "Just a thought… poker—not your game."

"What's the deal, Giles?" asked Willow, worried. It had been a month with no major problems, so they were probably due.

Pacing, Giles made it worse by rambling, "Now… bear in mind, most likely there… there is no deal, but if… if there was a deal, then it would… concern murder… last night." He was weirdly alternating looking at Oz and Xander, finally explaining, "A male student was found in the woods."

"Who?" Buffy asked, a moment before Willow could.

"Jeff Walken."

"Jeff? He was…" Oz looked at Xander, who avoided his gaze. "I knew him."

Giles finally got to the point, since it seemed Oz was picking up on it anyway, "I'm afraid he was… terribly mauled. Now, much as I hate to think it, it could be the handiwork of…"

"Me," Oz acknowledged.

"Wolf you, not you you," Willow corrected.

"But it's not," Xander insisted, walking toward the rare books cage where Oz spent his full moon nights locked up. "Not wolf you, not you you. The room was secured, the gate was locked, and the window unbreakable, and…" he looked up at the small window above a shelf, which was tilted ajar. "...open!"

Willow hugged Buffy and gasped, "Oh, God," while Oz and Giles went in to confirm that the window was open.

"Not to freak!" Xander tried to calm everyone down before admitting, "I rested my eyes now and then. That's all."

Arms wrapped around her friend who looked more betrayed than Buffy had ever seen, Giles beat her to demanding, "How long… exactly did you 'rest your eyes' for?" It was rare to hear that level of anger from the normally-mild-mannered librarian, and Buffy wondered why Xander didn't catch the Ripper tones in his voice.

Xander hedged, "A little now… a little then. But I never heard Oz leave, and he was here in the morning when I… when I…"

"Woke up!?" Giles thundered.

Somehow not realizing the depths he'd sunk to, Xander tried to joke, "You could put it that way if you want to, Mr. Technical."

Oz just trudged, defeated, over to Buffy and Willow, his girlfriend again breathing, "Oh, God," and letting go of Buffy to take Oz's hand.

Buffy just stood there for a moment, no one holding her back. It was the "Mr. Technical" crack that finally crossed a line. No apology. No responsibility. She'd been back over a month and the relationship had remained strained. And she was willing to bear it when it was just Xander being snide to her, but keeping everyone else happy. But he'd had one job: keep Oz from hurting anyone, and he'd, from all evidence, completely bailed on it.

She'd talked about it several times with Andrew. With May. Even once with Coulson. She had a whole plan she was working on. But in the moment, all the careful planning did was keep her from flipping out. There was a part of her trying to figure out how to talk to him like she'd practiced, that at least held back her first impulse to leap across the room and throttle him. Willow having needed her support at the first moments probably also gave her a crucial second to marshal her calm.

She was still in his face faster than he could blink, so fast that she seemed to teleport across the library floor. It didn't matter that he had over half a foot of height on her, pierced as he was by the eyes of the Slayer, the last sight of so many monsters. There was very little of Buffy there, just an implacable warrior who removed problems.

"Xander…" a hundred possible ways to soften the blow flashed across her brain before she simply went with the sad and succinct, "I need you to grow up."

He didn't even have a retort, stunned as he was, as everyone else left him alone in the library.

She'd insisted that Giles was on Oz-duty that night. It was, overall, weird that her Watcher got to go home and go to bed every night. Xander, she'd suggested, was welcome to help out with the werewolf-sitting; she wasn't sure whether she was hoping for him to petulantly bail or to actually show up and get berated by her Watcher all night long. Giles hadn't been any happier than she'd been about Xander just going to sleep instead of watching the werewolf.

Unfortunately, the hole in the Scooby capability graph was that Willow was the only one good at sciences, so if they wanted anyone to sneak into the morgue to look at the body of Jeff Walken it had to be her. She sent Faith to help the redhead break in and watch her back.

That left Buffy and Cordelia on patrol, hoping that they'd come across something other than Oz-the-werewolf mauling people near the school. "I don't understand why I have to be out here," the cheerleader moaned, half an hour into the patrol through the woods.

"Honestly?" Buffy asked, pushing through the trees, "I wanted to talk to you about Xander."

"I'm not his supervisor or anything," Cordelia argued.

"Is it all makeouts, or do you talk?" Buffy wondered. "Because he's not really talking to me anymore."

"Please. He's obviously so intimidated by you. You were already the Slayer and then you spent the summer becoming a secret agent. You're like… you know, the rich guy who dresses like a bat?"

Buffy scoffed, "Don't pretend you don't know who Batman is, Cordy."

"Fine. You're like Batman. Happy?" she allowed. "The inferiority complex you're giving him…"

"My therapist assumes he's doing the conflicted-alpha-male thing," Buffy explained. "Doesn't like that the girls are in charge around here."

"Maybe?" Cordelia allowed. "I told you I'm not his supervisor, right?"

"But you're his girlfriend?"

"No? I don't know," Cordelia waffled. "I don't know why I hang out with you losers. I don't know why I let Xander Harris make out with me."

"God! Cordelia!" Buffy spun on the girl. "You hang out with us because you know what we're doing is important and you want to help. You are helping! We wouldn't be training you if you weren't." Cordelia had been gradually getting into the martial arts lessons the last month, and was learning a lot. "You're smart, and you're pretty, and you're talented, okay? But I need you to buy in. And I need you to either break up with Xander or admit that you're his supervisor! He doesn't talk to me anymore."

"How pretty?" Cordelia asked, possibly only having heard part of the rant. Buffy was about to reiterate her point when Cordelia suddenly yelled, "Look out!"

With a roar, an immense figure leapt out of the trees along the path they'd been walking down, and Buffy just managed to dodge out of the way of the tackle. Her quick impressions were: white guy, ripped, shirtless, vampire. Slayer reflexes kicked in and she turned the dodge into a spinning backfist, nailing the vamp in the face as it tried to turn toward her.

With a grunt of pain, it rolled across the clearing but was up again almost immediately, now closer to Cordelia and leaping in her direction. "Buffy!" the cheerleader shrieked in panic, but had at least been paying attention in training. She managed a surprisingly-composed backwards cartwheel away from the attack while the Slayer moved to interpose.

Snarling like a tiger, the dark-haired man-thing swiped and clawed at Buffy. Stronger than a normal vampire, it barely seemed to have any coherent combat skills, more like a startled animal than a hungry fiend. Both wrists came up to block the strikes, and a front-kick to the chest shoved the creature into a tree where it was momentarily stunned.

And that's when there was enough moonlight to get a good look at the creature's face, seized in vampiric transformation as it was, and Buffy herself was stunned.

"Buffy! What the hell?" Cordelia demanded, having fished out a stake while charging at the vampire, ready to finish it off while it was momentarily incapacitated (the Scoobies' summer vampire hunting involved a lot of capitalizing on the rare moments they got one open and discombobulated). The arc of the stake was textbook, and nearly went into the vampire's chest before a small hand snapped out and caught Cordelia's wrist.

"No!" insisted Buffy, left hand halting the staking while her right hand balled into a fist and smashed the vampire in the head, knocking him unconscious. "It's Angel!"

"Angel?" Cordelia asked, cocking her head to the side and finally getting a good look in the moonlight. "Huh. I guess so. Isn't he supposed to be in hell?"

"Yeah," Buffy acknowledged, her face a mask of shock and confusion. "I sent him to hell…"

"Nope!" the cheerleader decided, stepping in between the two star-crossed lovers to break Buffy's line of sight and briefly thinking of slapping her before realizing that would be dangerous. "Let's not do that. We had a year of sappy Buffy, and then half a year of whiny Buffy, and most of it was because of him. I'm finally starting to like single Buffy. Can't we just stake him?"

"He… he has his soul," Buffy tried to explain. "Willow did the spell. It worked… before he went to hell, he got his soul back. I don't know how he's back. Or why he attacked us…"

"I mean, I like Angel with a soul fine… more than Xander likes him at least… but even with a soul he was kind of lame? Maybe he went crazy in hell. Lots of people with souls go crazy."

"I have to… I have to hide him…" Buffy thought out loud. "Xander and Giles would want to kill him. They wouldn't understand."

"Buffy! Earth to Buffy!" Cordelia insisted, stooping slightly to catch the shorter girl's eyes. "He might have killed Jeff Walken. And he tried to kill us!"

"I can't…"

The brunette socialite took a deep breath and a rare moment of planning before opening her mouth. She thought about all the things she could suggest. If she tried to stake the vampire, Buffy would just freak out and stop her again. If they left him, he'd run off and might kill somebody. If they hid him, it would be months of mopey Buffy trying to keep the secret of her tragic, creature-of-the-night boyfriend locked in a basement somewhere. That would be so annoying for Cordelia. "Fine. Let's take him to the library. I'll keep Giles and Xander from staking him unless he's evil again. Okay?"

Buffy thought about her options, realized her first panicked instinct wasn't great and that Cordelia was probably right to take charge, and grudgingly nodded.

Cordelia insisted, "You have to carry him."

"Oh dear lord," Giles moaned, seeing who Buffy was carrying on her back as she and Cordelia entered the library. The sight of a girl easily managing a body likely twice her weight was old hat by this point for him, though had momentarily frazzled the janitor (who wasn't paid to ask questions).

"Get the chains," the Slayer managed. She'd had to knock him out again once on the walk to Cordelia's car, and twice during the drive over. Fortunately, vampires didn't seem to be able to get concussions or long-term brain damage.

In the book cage across from Giles' office, werewolf Oz went nuts at the introduction of another predator, and that jolted Xander from his nap in a nearby chair. He hadn't meant to nod off this time, but werewolf-sitting was boring.

Buffy dropped Angel's unconscious body on the ground by Giles' office door, and Xander had figured out what he was seeing by the time Buffy and Giles had the vampire wrapped in chains. "So first, 'what,' and second, 'the hey?'" Xander asked.

"He attacked us in the woods," Cordelia explained, as Buffy slumped next to Angel's shoulder and leaned against the wall, overwhelmed but guarding Angel. "He was all, 'Grr, argh!' Like an animal, not like Angelus."

"You're certain the ensouling ritual worked?" Giles asked. Buffy managed a nod. "Then… then he may have been trapped in Acathla's hell dimension for the last five months. Time can move much differently in alternate dimensions. From his point of view it could have been much longer."

"I remember," Buffy said, thinking back to her recent mission in LA.

"So am I going to have to be the one to say, 'Good,' and, 'What a great time to stake him?'" Xander asked.

Giles didn't seem poised to offer an objection, but Cordelia remembered what she'd promised Buffy. "Hey! If I went evil and then good again and then all crazy, would you like it if someone wanted to stake me?"

Xander worked out what she was saying and quipped, "Out of curiosity, are you also missing your shirt in this scenario?"

Finally seeing past his own memories of being tortured by Angelus, Giles noticed Buffy, who'd been doing so well since coming back. "I'll… I'll look into situations where individuals have been released from hell dimensions, shall I?" he offered.

Buffy nodded, dredging up, "Whistler. He was this immortal demon—looked human, bad dresser—told me what to do to stop Acathla. He said Angel was supposed to stop Acathla. Maybe… I don't know. Could he have gotten Angel out?"

"Possibly," Giles agreed, "I'll add him to the list."

"What's got the furball all riled up?" Faith asked, some time later, as she and Willow entered the library. She quickly noticed the chained up, shirtless man. "Woah! Kinky! Is that a party favor for everyone, or do we need to bring our own?"

"Angel!" Willow realized. "That's Angel!"

"Suddenly the chains are making sense," the dark Slayer acknowledged. "Isn't he supposed to be…"

"In hell?" Giles finished, walking out from the stacks. Cordelia and Xander had slumped back into a nap at the far side of the library, and Buffy was still of limited responsiveness. "Yes. He apparently attacked Buffy and Cordelia in the woods and is acting very feral. I'm researching how someone might escape Acathla's hell dimension." He remembered what the two had been doing, "Did you manage to examine the body of Mr. Walken?"

"I took samples," Willow explained. "But… but I can't rule out Oz yet."

"I don't think it was him, though," Faith added. "Guy didn't look chewed on at all." She wandered over to the book cage, and didn't flinch as Oz slammed against the gate as she approached. Instead, she looked at his claws and explained, "And Oz's claws are kind of short. This guy was like Lo Pan or something."

"You're right!" Willow perked up. "No teeth marks, just really long claws."

Buffy finally spoke up, "So not Angel, either?"

Willow shook her head, glancing at Angel and blushing slightly at his shirtlessness. "He needs his nails clipped, but nowhere near right. And Jeff wasn't drained of blood. Well, he probably bled a lot from all those cuts, but he was still… juicy."

"So we have a third beast roaming the nearby woods," Giles concluded. "Bloody Hellmouth."

They wound up locking up Angel in an empty crypt in one of the nearest cemeteries before sunrise. It would have been easier to check on him chained in the school boiler room, but really hard to explain if an employee actually went down there. There at least didn't seem to currently be anything demonic going on in town, Jeff's murder notwithstanding, so there probably wasn't anyone that might break Angel out that could walk in the sun.

Buffy managed to drag her way through her morning classes, but she basically retained nothing. Her first actual memory past sealing Angel in the crypt was Willow asking her at lunch, "Did you hear about Mr. Platt?"

"No?" Buffy asked, wondering why that name sounded familiar.

"He was killed this morning. So fast he didn't even put down his cigarette!" Willow boggled. She was too excited about it, and realized it, hedging, "Which is terrible!"

"So definitely not Oz or Angel," Buffy managed to put together.

"It has to be a student or a teacher, right?" Willow wondered. "You know, someone that could walk into his office and then back out and nobody notice? Maybe it's a demon, like at the talent show."

"What do Jeff Walken and Mr. Platt have in common? And who is Mr. Platt?"

"You know, the school psychiatrist that you didn't have to go to because you're Miss Stable?" Willow reminded her.

"Who would want to kill a band nerd and the school psychiatrist?" Buffy wondered.

Across the school, in the supply closet behind the biology lab, there was a furious shoving of boxes. "No! No no no!" a man's voice said on the verge of panic. "I'd remember if I'd used this much!" he tried to convince himself. "This case should be full!"

Dr. Calvin Johnson knelt before a lockbox on a low shelf, cradling two bottles of glowing green liquid. The box, clearly hidden among the rest of the science materials, had space for several more of the bottles, all missing.

Buffy kept it together through school, but immediately took over Giles' office to wait for her afternoon call with Andrew. The quiet helped.

"Angel's back," she told her therapist, without preamble, as soon as their session started.

"Back?" Andrew worried.

"I don't know how. He just showed up. He's like an animal. Attacked me and Cordelia last night."

"What did you do?" he asked.

She sighed, "I almost made a bad decision. I was going to hide him somewhere and not tell anyone. Cordelia talked me out of it. And kept Xander and Giles from staking him. He's locked up for now."

"But you don't know what to do."

"I just… he's been in hell. Maybe in a dimension where time moves faster so he's been there for years. It shouldn't be surprising that he came back broken."

Andrew filled in, "Shouldn't be, but that wasn't a scenario you prepared yourself for."

"Do I try to fix him? Let Xander put him out of his misery? What does it mean that he somehow got out of hell? He doesn't even seem to recognize me."

"I've never talked to someone who came back from hell," Andrew prefaced, explaining, "but I have counseled people that have been tortured for extended periods. POWs. Agents that got caught. Even a little torture can affect you. Long-term torture can make a profound difference. I don't want to get your hopes up. Everyone is different. But nobody I've met has come out of it without deep psychological scars. And that's just human torture."

"Is it wrong that I feel like I'm being punished?"

"No, it's natural. Everything else going on in your life, and then this."

Buffy nodded, even though he couldn't see her, and elaborated, "Part of me thinks that trying to fix him is my job. Because I sent him to hell. But… that's not my fault. And I don't know if I have the strength to fix him."

"Emotional labor," Andrew acknowledged. "Is anyone else willing to help you with it?"

"I feel bad enough letting him be in the same room as Giles," Buffy said. "Angelus tortured him. And Xander hates him. Willow and Faith, maybe."

"What about Oz?" Andrew suggested. "He doesn't have much of a background with Angel, right? And he could know more than anyone what it's like to have a beast inside him."

"That's not a bad idea…" Buffy mused.

Buffy was on the phone long enough that she missed Oz's return to the library, putting together the pieces of Debbie's new black eye and her connections to both of the murder victims. The rest of the Scoobies, knowing that their friend needed to get through her therapy uninterrupted with a night like she'd had, left her a note and then set out across the school to seek out the girl, and her boyfriend, Pete, while Oz locked himself up in preparation for moonrise.

The first thing Buffy knew about all of this was, decompressing after the call with Andrew, the sound of the book cage rattling angrily and a male voice demanding, "Since when do you touch my girl?"

As she quietly opened the office door to stare across the library, she saw Oz, locked in the cage, trying to explain, "Hey, Pete. This is kind of a bad time."

Pete rattled the door again, insisting, "Well, I guess you didn't think about that when you put the moves on Debbie!"

"We talked, yeah, but it was move-free," Oz demurred, glancing up at the now-locked window to gauge the time. "About this cage? When that sun sets…"

Buffy had quietly made her way across the floor as Pete, unhinged, hissed, "You won't be alive to see it!" With one final threatening rattle of the cage, he stepped back.

Oz didn't even seem to see Buffy, as focused as he was on Pete, and said, "I'm serious. Something's gonna happen that you… probably won't believe." But as Pete suddenly screamed and shook, face sprouting veins, body warping with muscle, and long claws growing from his fingers. "Or you might."

Oz finally saw Buffy, and nodded at her, falling back and starting to take his clothes off as he felt the change coming on. Pete, moving forward to try to rip open the cage with chemically-augmented strength, completely missed Buffy's attack. Her roundhouse kick landed right under his raised arm, eliciting a grunt of pain as he flew across the room.

From inside the cage Oz grinned to himself explaining, "Time's up. Rules change."

"Another whore!" Pete growled as he stood, far too quickly for a normal human kicked by the Slayer. "You're that one that Scott was crushing on! Get out of the way!"

Buffy rolled her eyes, dropping into a fighting stance. "Well, any points you gained for that friendly offer, you lost for the very inappropriate name. This school is just full of misogynists!"

"You had your chance, bitch!" he yelled, charging.

As she dodged, Buffy was slightly impressed. Pete seemed stronger than a vampire fledgling, and he had long arms and wasn't afraid to swing them with the claws. But, if she was honest, she only let the fight draw out because she was enjoying the opportunity to blow off some steam.

Turned out that punching a murderer and abuser was almost as good therapy as talking to Andrew.

While he was rage-powered, Pete wasn't completely devoid of intellect. Though it hurt him to admit, the tiny blonde was kicking his ass, and something had happened to Oz in that cage. When the werewolf suddenly threw himself at the cage in excitement at the fight, dividing Buffy's attention for a moment, Pete took the opportunity to bolt.

He wasn't running away, he consoled himself, he was going for more augmentation.

Buffy gave chase, but Pete managed to dump a bookcase in her way long enough to hit the hallway and get away. And with the way the book cage door was squealing under the strain of impacts from Oz, she realized that she needed to stay put for the moment. They were going to have to find a better place to contain the werewolf.

Pete was already in the biology lab. A single kick was enough to force the supply closet door, and he ripped the case of chemicals he'd been stealing from for weeks out of its hiding place on the lower shelf. "Round two in a minute, bitch," he told himself, popping open a bottle and chugging it back.

In his haste, he didn't realize that it was glowing a very different shade of green than the bottles he'd stolen before.

"Ah. Pete Clarner," Dr. Johnson observed, stepping out of the shadows in the room. "I'm sure my first rule of labs was to not drink or breathe any of the chemicals."

"Out of the way, doc," the bestial teen ordered, standing up in the closet and preparing himself to go back after the girl that had bested him.

With a faint smirk, the teacher did so, gesturing for Pete to go. After all, it was better that bodies didn't show up anywhere near him.

Pete made it halfway back to the library before his heart gave out under the effects of the toxic chemicals the doctor had placed as bait.

"I guess his system just couldn't take it anymore," Willow explained the next day, as she, Buffy, and Oz were walking toward Angel's crypt. "Worked it way harder to fight the Buff-ster than to do surprise-murders."

"Debbie's still refusing to admit he was abusive," Oz added.

"I feel bad for her," Willow nodded. "None of us wanted to think that our man was a killer. She was just the one who was wrong."

"Angel's not really my man," the Slayer corrected, as she moved the boulder they'd placed in front of the door to keep it sealed.

But when she opened the crypt, backlit by the mid-day sun, she was surprised that the crouching figure in the shadow of the crypt, instead of snarling, quietly asked, "Buffy?"

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