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(This is original creative material copyright Chris Kenworthy, based on characters that he has no right to owned by someone else blah blah biddy blah...) |
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"You should not be goin' out dere," Kendra pointed out, walking silently down the last few stairs and stepping silently onto the landing. "Dis is a job for de Slayer - for Buffy."
"I know that," Xander huffed. "I wasn't planning on fighting the witch all by myself." He paused, and silence reigned for a moment. "Just, you know, uh, going out there and talking to her."
"But if you're out there, by any mischance," a new voice supplied, "when Cordelia makes her move, you could be dead. In seconds." Xander looked over his shoulder to see Amy, smiling nervously over at him. "You gotta let this thing play out by itself."
"I can't stand this!" Xander exclaimed. "I've never been good at sitting on my rear and just waiting at the best of times, and to wait and do nothing while my ex-girlfriend tries to kill my maybe-girlfriend... Aahrgh!"
"I know eet is painful," Kendra assured him. "But you must have the courage to wait now."
Xander groaned. "Okay. Rrrr." He paused, considering. "How about a game of chinese checkers while we're stuck in here? I'll move your pieces for you, Kendra." He grinned at the two of them.
* * * *
Buffy surveyed the horizon morosely. "Come on already, Cordy?" she muttered, mostly to herself. "Make your move already, so I can get this over with and get some sleep. Or a good long nap in a coffin, depending." She chuckled mirthlessly at her own morbid joke.
"It might be a better idea for you to sleep now, Buffy," Vanessa pointed out. At this point, I'd say that Cordelia's not likely to make her attack until the twenty-four hours she gave you are almost up."
"There's still nine," Jenny Calendar added. The two of them were taking a 'turn' at keeping vigil with Buffy. "You could crash up there on the porch, and get woken up at the first sign of trouble."
Buffy looked around, considering the plan, then rejected it. "And be stuck more than thirty feet away from my final defense? No thanks."
"Right here, then," Vanessa suggested. "We could get a sleeping bag out here, and you could sleep under the - " she broke off, noticing the starlessness of Limbo's sky. "Under the stripes," she finished lamely.
Buffy chuckled. "Well, maybe. I could take a few naps, at least."
"Cool." Vanessa got up and headed into the house.
Buffy looked at Jenny. Jenny looked back at Buffy. "So, Miss Calendar," Buffy started uncertainly.
"Just Jenny. Or Janna, if you prefer." She pronounced her Romani name with a Y-sound: YAH-nah.
"Jenny, then. How's death treating you?"
"You mean, how am I getting along with Rupert?" Jenny interpreted. "It's going well. Interesting, as it's ever been between the two of us. But we're letting go of all the baggage, all that stuff that kept us apart before. The different worlds we come from, the demons in his past, the lies and secrets in mine." She broke off, but Buffy couldn't think of anything to say. Soon Jenny started again.
"We indulged ourselves with all that stuff before, figuring that we had all the time in the world, to come to an understanding or find someone else. I never realized how little time I had in my life until it was taken away. Now we're together in death, and I'm not going to take that for granted. There's still an awful lot of ways that we could lose each other. Every day counts."
"I know," Buffy said, thinking of Xander, and the threats Cordelia had made.
* * * *
Willow knocked timidly at the last door on the left side of the hall.
"Who is it?" a voice rang out. Angel's voice.
"It's Willow."
"What do you want?"
"May I come in, please?"
There was only silence for a few seconds. "Oh, all right."
Willow turned the doorknob and pushed through. "Um, hi."
"Hello, Willow. What can I do for you?"
Suddenly, without warning, a flood of images poured through Willow's mind - Angel's face in a darkened Sunnydale High corridor. His hand grabbing at her throat from behind. She yelped and bolted away - right into the open door. "Ouch," Willow muttered as her head throbbed in mild pain.
"Are you okay?" Angel said, starting to dodge forward to help her and then changing his mind in mid motion, keeping off at a distance. Willow noticed that he wasn't wearing anything above the waist.
"Oh, yeah, it's okay," Willow said. "It's just, for a split second, um, well, you reminded me..."
"Of him," Angel concluded. "It's not surprising."
Somehow, something in his voice made Willow feel a sinking pit in her stomach. "No, it is. I don't normally confuse the two of you, Angel; I don't blame you for what he did."
"Maybe you should." he muttered darkly, sitting down on the small desk chair in the corner of the room.
"What! What do you mean by that?" Willow said, outraged.
"This him/me distinction - it's very flattering that you want to exonerate me for his crimes, but I'm not sure it's justified. Angelus is my dark side. He only does all the things that I wanted to do, but never could because social conscience and morals held me back. He was created because of my carelessness, and after I'd been given a chance to control him, a second chance that few people get, he got loose again because I couldn't keep my pants on. I deserve to be blamed for everything he did."
Willow stared at him, passively, for a long time, her thoughts whirling. "Do you really believe all that? Do you really think that all that hatred, all that rage, was inside you before you became a vampire?"
"They had to be."
"No!" Willow's voice rang across the room. "That's not the only way it works, Angel. I've read the books Mister Tojo brought on vampire psychology. Just because Angelus took parts of your personality, that doesn't mean that everything that he was was a part of you too. There's a lot of cruelty, and predator-ness, that comes automatically with the demon. And, it could have learned a lot from Darla. You aren't responsible for that."
"And my responsibility for Angelus' creation? And letting the curse slip?"
Willow pondered that. "Yeah, you've got some there. You're human, in your soul, Angel, and you've made mistakes. But even though some mistakes have worse consequences than others, that doesn't mean that they can't be forgiven. We're not going to write you off for a few errors in judgement, and you shouldn't either."
"I..." Angel had started to get back up from the chair, but he broke off, groaned, and fell weakly back into the chair.
"Are you alright?" Willow said, running forward.
"Pretty much," Angel said.
"Was there pain?" Willow pressed, looking around at what she could see of Angel's midsection and running her hands over his skin. "Well?"
"Some. Soreness, back pain, tenderness."
"Hmm," Willow said, remembering her years of wanting to be a doctor, and she quickly examined Angel. Despite the fact that he wasn't even human, the symptoms he had described and the observations that she made pointed to one inescapable conclusion.
"Well, I have no idea in the world how to tell you this, so I suppose that I should say it straight out..."
"Say what?" Angel replied, baffled.
"Impossible as it may be on at least two counts, maybe more, it seems to me that you might be... uh... pregnant."
* * * *
"Buffy!" Hank Summers shook his daughter by the shoulder. "Something's coming."
"Yah," Buffy mumbled as she tried to rouse herself to full alertness. She looked at her wristwatch. "Why did you let me sleep so close to zero hour? Never mind, you don't have to answer that. Just get back." She struggled to her feet and picked up her weaponry as Hank left the immediate area.
The shape coming over the houses across the street was now definitely Cordelia. She scanned the area, then called out gleefully "Summers first!"
"You betcha," Buffy yelled back. "Show me what you got!"
Cordelia waved, and a bolt of lightning came down near where Buffy was, but she dodged it easily. Cordelia flew down, and landed not to far away from the spike. She raised her hand towards Buffy again and concentrated.
But Buffy had already launched a counterattack. The handful of powder Vanessa had given her was flying through the air towards Cordelia's face. A blink of Cordelia's eyes summoned up a stiff crosswise breeze, though, and the cloud of dust was carried swiftly away from both of them. Buffy dodged away from Cordelia's returning shot, a beam of scathing fire.
"You're gonna have to get closer than that to tag me," Buffy taunted. Cordelia was already moving into closer range, and as she prepared a new attack Buffy jumped forward, the whitestick leading. "Peace of the..." she gasped as it touched Cordelia's bare arm.
But then the shocking jolt of Cordelia's new attack coursed through Buffy's body, and the two girls recoiled away from each other. "Innocent," Buffy muttered, but the stick wasn't touching Cordelia anymore. The witch glanced darkly at the offending wand, and it snapped in half of its own accord.
"Enough games, Slayer," Cordelia called out in an unearthly voice. But Buffy was already dodging back towards the spike. "I shall look upon my enemy. I shall look upon her and the dark place will have her soul!"
This spell, Buffy remembered. It was the one that Catherine Madison had tried to cast on her, that she had reflected back using a mirror. She didn't have a mirror this time. If the spike would protect her, she had a chance - anything could happen if they relied upon the final defense. If it didn't work, she was done for.
The stream of living redness poured forth from Cordelia's face and body, striking the spike. It spread into a red glow, encompassing the spike and both girls. Cordelia groaned with sudden exertion as the energy focused on her, doing something not easily identifiable. Buffy moaned too, and the glow slowly began to fade away...
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