As A Consequence Of Your Action (Jumpchain) (Complete)

[cliffc999]

Jonathan POV:

I looked levelly at Mr. Lindsey McDonald for a silent moment, letting his last statement sink in and yet again taking his measure. "Wolfram & Hart" was a name familiar to me; the jump-doc contained several mentions of them. In contexts like "little slice of Hell on Earth" or "unbreakable soul contracts" or its 'Senior Partners' being heavily implied to be major demon lords of some kind. So the simple answer would be to tell Lindsey to take his offer and shove it, perhaps punctuated by a certain amount of physical violence (he had, after all, conveniently deactivated the surveillance systems) to make sure they understood that I meant it.

Unfortunately, I was not in a situation that allowed for taking the simple answer.

"Pro bono?" I asked him mildly.

"Of course." Lindsey smiled again. "Not that you're a pauper, but our usual fees would be substantially in excess of your current financial resources."

"I'm curious. How exactly did I 'come to your attention' in 'several prior matters'?"

"Well, there was the case of your assisting the Slayer in apprehending the sons of several of our longtime clients as well as personally slaying the demon Machida." Lindsey said. "Or your recent visit to Los Angeles and the breaking up of that inter-dimensional slavery ring." He shrugged. "But most of all, you left a vivid impression on one of our new associates."

"So you're Mr. Trick's new employers." I said without much surprise. "Makes sense." I finished with a meaningful glance at Lindsey's lapels. "You obviously share a tailor."

"The employee discount is pretty nice, isn't it?" he smirked, before getting serious again. "At any rate, when the same name crosses our desks several different times in a little over a year, from several different places, in several different contexts? Then our firm considers that name worthy of a further background check. Can you imagine what we found?"

"I would imagine, very little." I trailed off meaningfully.

"Indeed." Lindsey nodded. "Surprisingly little. Which given our resources and access is what we call... intriguing. But we did find a few things."

I spread my hand in a wordless gesture of invitation.

"Despite being barely eighteen years old you're already one of the most highly-trained and proven effective in the field combatants on record. You've somehow caught the attention of and become the protege of another very distinguished person of interest to us, and in the process of doing so inspired him to significant changes in his own pattern of behavior in an astonishingly short time. You have a surprisingly useful variety of skills from both inside and outside the supernatural world, and an exceptionally high IQ." Lindsey recited. "In short, you'd barely need any orientation at all to be an exceptionally lethal and effective field asset in a wide variety of roles."

"Outside of that pesky conscience." I said evenly.

"You already have no objection to forcefully dealing with vampires, and demons and similar cases. And even restricting your targets to those categories alone would still be more than enough workload to justify a full-time paid position." Lindsey said reassuringly. "Admittedly, your psych profile does suggest that of your own accord you wouldn't be likely to walk into our firm and actually apply for a job." He looked meaningfully around at the walls of the secure interview room in the detention facility. "Of course, right here and now you're not likely to be walkin' anywhere."

"Unless you don't know about Trick's little side business of selling information-" I began.

"We know." Lindsey shrugged. "He doesn't know that we know, but we know. Not that we have any real objections, so long as he's smart enough not to sell anything we consider proprietary."

"Then since you do know about what he sold me recently, you also know who my current target is." I finished.

"Richard Wilkins." Lindsey acknowledged. "And no, you certainly couldn't continue to pursue that line of endeavor as an associate of ours. It would be contractually precluded."

I just held his gaze without saying anything. After about twenty seconds Lindsey nodded, acknowledging my poker face with his own.

"Of course, if you happened to delay the process of formally signing up with us for several months after your release-" Lindsey shrugged. "It's a neutrality pact, not a valued client relationship. And we understand that exceptional employees often have exceptional motivations."

"Just for the record, what are my odds of getting out of here if I don't commit to becoming one of your firm's...?" I questioned.

"I believe the current official job description is 'logistical crisis consultant'." Lindsey said mildly.

"That's a good one." I chuckled. "You could put that on a passport."

"Well, there's no law saying that a man can't enjoy his work." Lindsey chuckled along with me. "Even the HR guys have fun sometimes." And then he turned serious. "As to your odds of seeing the light of day again without our help?" He shook his head flatly. "Frankly, I just don't see it happening."

I nodded and thought over everything I'd just been told, and how I'd been told it.

"Would you like some free information?" I finally asked.

"Always." Lindsey smiled. "What about?"

"The details of my 'exceptional motivation'." I explained. "Why I want out of here urgently, so I can go help take down Wilkins with at least equal urgency."

"I was assuming it was because you and your youthful associates had become aware of his role in Sunnydale's creation and it's construction as a cleverly disguised demonic feeding ground." Lindsey said mildly, and that's when I knew for certain. He wasn't anywhere near tense enough-

"You don't even know, do you? Your firm, I mean." I prodded.

"Know what?" Lindsey said with a hint of challenge, but also legitimate curiosity.

"Wilkins set up the town as a sacrifice engine not just to pact for long life and power, but to disguise all his preparations for an Ascension." I said, and Lindsey went bolt upright in shock. "He's already within the Hundred Days. Come late May- we still don't know the exact day-"

"You're certain of this." Lindsey pressed me.

"A messenger of the Powers That Be warned us last year." I said truthfully. Because while I'd gotten the heads-up about Wilkins and Ascension from the jump-doc, Whistler had confirmed it.

"Son of a bitch." Lindsey swore meaningfully, and then got to his feet. "I'm sure you understand that I'm going to have to cut this meeting short."

"Oh, I understand." I said agreeably. "You need to report this to your Senior Partners as soon as possible."

"That I do." Lindsey agreed firmly. "We'll be in touch." he said, and walked over to the door and knocked on it to be let out. The guard did so, and then escorted me back to my cell.

I was out of there two days later.

* * * * *​

"Hey, Jonathan. Nice car." Mr. Trick smirked at me, standing next to my car. I'd just left the back gate of the detention center, where one of the guards had told me that I'd be met. Seeing Mr. Trick was not entirely unexpected- seeing him smirking and leaning on the hood of my car was a bit of a shock. Apparently Wolfram & Hart was flexing and posing a bit- not only had they picked the 'field operative' sent to pick me up for being the guy who'd almost killed me once before, they'd snaked my car out of police impound and had him drive it here to meet me.

"Keys." I said flatly, holding up my hand. "I am not riding shotgun in my own wheels."

"Fair enough." Trick said, and tossed my car keys to me. "And now-" he began as I caught the keys in mid-air and began to walk around Mr. Trick and the car to reach the drivers' side door, and expertly used the flourish of my one hand catching and pocketing the keys as a momentary distraction to keep him from reacting in time as Mr. Pointy entered his chest and he poofed into a pile of dust.

He hadn't known I was ambidextrous, and even if they hadn't returned my personal effects to me before turning me loose the 'warranty replacement' feature of my fiat-backed stake item had it coming back to me within 24 hours of losing it. And apparently that had worked even in a prison cell. I'd had an annoying time keeping the guards from finding it during contraband searches.

I did a brief check of my car for unpleasant surprises- I noted with amusement that Wolfram & Hart had shown off even to the point of getting my weapons back out of the evidence room and stashing them back in the trunk compartment- and made a mental note to do a detailed teardown and inspection of it at the first available opportunity, and then started the engine and drove to W&H's LA headquarters building. I pulled into the first available visitor's space, locked it, and walked into the main lobby. It was about an hour after sunset, so the building was still fairly bustling- in addition to overtime workers, I imagined that with their clientele Wolfram & Hart ran a full second shift.

"Lindsey McDonald, please." I said to the receptionist in the main lobby.

"Your name, sir?" she said, not turning a hair at my youthful age and the jeans and t-shirt I'd been wearing when I was arrested.

"Jonathan Fairchild." I said. "He should be expecting me."

"I'm paging him now." she said, and I went and took a seat in the waiting area. Real leather on the couches. Very posh, just like the everything else around here.

"You're here." Lindsey said, arriving after a few minutes.

"I am." I nodded. "And Trick isn't."

"He did have that little complacency problem sometimes." was Lindsey's oddly distracted reaction. "Come on." he said urgently, nodding at the elevator.

"Before we go any further, I'd like to make plain that I have zero intent to form a contract of any type at this time." I said mildly. "And that my release from custody was an unsolicited gift, with no obligation attaching."

"You have to sign it and mean it before you're hooked by it." Lindsey conceded. "And that's what they want to talk to you about."

"I was just coming here to clear the air." I said, starting to wonder at Lindsey's new- I wouldn't call it nervousness, but he was definitely much less self-assured and cocky than he had been during our first meeting. "And having cleared it, I'm getting back to where I'm supposed to be."

"Is there a problem, Mr. McDonald?" came a new voice, one that for all it's mild affability sounded far more dangerous than any lawyer should be. I turned to see a new man facing me; a large man in a suit that somehow managed to simultaneously be more modest in appearance and cut than Lindsey's yet still look more expensive. I was a very athletic guy and not short at all, but this guy was a straight-up bruiser. He made Angel look small, and yet was still well-proportioned and agile with it. And for all the gentleness of his voice and mannerisms, for all the lack of any overt aura of power, my every instinct still told me that the deadliest being in this entire building if not all of Los Angeles was standing right next to me.

"No problem, sir." Lindsey said nervously. "I was just explaining to Mister Fairchild that he had an urgent meeting."

"I'll escort him from here." the man said agreeably. "You get back to your office and finish up that paperwork we mentioned."

"Yes sir!" Lindsey said promptly, and leaned in close to whisper "Free word of advice; do not fuck around with this guy." to me as he brushed past on the way to the elevator.

"Jonathan Fairchild." I introduced myself to the newcomer after a moment of consideration. I didn't offer to shake hands.

"Marcus Hamilton." he replied amiably. "I'm the Liason to the Senior Partners." And then the amiability fell away, to be replaced by a purely quiet menace. "And they want to speak to you. Right now."

"What if I say no?" I asked.

"I was given an order just before I came in here. If you do not comply, I will have no choice but to obey that order. Of course, I will do so with the greatest reluctance." Hamilton said menacingly.

"You're quoting Terry Pratchett." I smiled back, recognizing Carrot's famous bluff from Man at Arms. The contingency order he'd been given, the one he didn't want to obey if the suspect had proved uncooperative, had been to allow the suspect to go free. "This meeting is optional, isn't it?"

"Technically, it is." he grinned. "But trust me; you really, really want to exercise the option."

I made an inward nod to the amount of subtlety they were displaying here; sure, this guy could probably knock me on the head and drag me to wherever he wanted me to go, but instead they were appealing to my curiosity. And they were right; given the strategic situation, I couldn't turn down a chance to find out what the fuck was such a huge factor that the Senior Partners of this creepy-ass place were personally sticking an oar in.

Besides, I only had his word that he wasn't allowed to use force. And anyone in this building was presumed guilty until proven innocent.

"All right." I said, and Hamilton led out of the lobby and down several hallways until we reached a lone elevator at the end of a nondescript row of office doors in a nondescript corridor in the back of the building. Although there were normal buttons and controls, the door opened at our approach without Hamilton pressing any buttons.

"In you go." he said, waving me towards the open elevator door.

"You're not coming?" I asked him.

"They wanted a closed session." Hamilton said.

"What floor?" I asked him, stepping into the elevator as he remained outside and looking at the perfectly-ordinary appearing panel of buttons.

"Enjoy your visit." he non-replied as the elevator doors closed between us, and before I could touch any controls the elevator suddenly shot upward at speeds far in excess of a normal elevator. And then the ceiling lights flared and everything went white, and when the light faded everything was... still white.

I stood in a large echoing space. Not a void, but an actual physical room with pure-white walls, floor, and ceiling. It was large- the white everything made it hard to tell exactly how large, but from the echos it was at least the size of a warehouse.

"Jonathan Fairchild." I heard my own voice say, and I turned to see a duplicate of myself- although dressed in a formal suit like all the other high-end lawyer-wear around here rather than the clothes I was wearing- standing in the middle of the floor where I'd just looked and seen nothing. "We are the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart."

"You wouldn't be speaking to me just about Wilkins." I led off.

"We would not." they replied. "That is a matter of concern, but is fit for servants to deal with. We would speak to you of a greater matter."

"I owe you nothing; I commit to nothing." I emphasized. "And you can just put me back in my cell if you disagree."

"We would not see you bound." the Senior Partners replied. "We would see you free."

"... I don't believe you." I shrugged.

"We are of the same tier of existence as the Powers That Be." they replied, and my blood began to chill as I began to suspect, however faintly, what they were really meaning. "Hamilton stands to us as Whistler does to them. And we are generous to those we favor, far more than they. So we would offer you what the Powers would not."

"Spit it out." I said, bristling.

"We would free you of your obligation to your Benefactor." the Senior Partners replied.

"And replace it with a similar obligation to you." I stated.

"Would that be so intolerable?" 'I' asked myself back, with my own ironically inquiring head-tilt. "Unlike others whom we have approached, you are already in thrall to an entity whose ethics you entirely reject and whose service you utterly despise." they said with perfect reasonableness. "At one point you chose death as a preferable alternative to remaining bound to him, only to discover that even death would not be a release. You are in a unique position; by choosing to serve us, you would lose nothing that you have not already lost. And we would be far kinder to you than he would."

"As you turned the world into Hell, with my help." I said.

"It's a perfectly rational compromise." they replied, still in my voice and likeness. "You are already aware that your Benefactor could outright force you to be a soulless monster, or a slave to the powers of hell, or anything else his whims see fit, simply by picking 'interesting' Drawbacks for you in the future. While we would offer you an employment contract spelling out precisely who is obligated to what, with no take-backs. And instead of an endless succession of worlds, never knowing when you would arrive or leave-" 'I' shrugged. "You would have stability. Predictability. A new home."

"I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure Willow Rosenberg's already heard this speech from Wilkins." I shot back. "And that little bitch is not a role model."

"Unlike him we would not require you to kill your friends." 'I' replied. "We are so very much older than him, and have learned much wisdom and practicality in that time. Bond with whom you wish; cherish whom you wish; protect whom you wish. We would be as generous as you could possibly ask for. You could even be director of this branch; take control of its policy guidelines as you see fit."

I shook my head. "No."

"You have not heard-"

"Your first offer was too generous." I cut them off. "You did not build all this, maintain all this, without knowing how to play the long game. You would never give me anything you didn't expect to profit from overall." I shrugged. "If you take a man up to a high place and offer him all the kingdoms of the Earth, then who is that man?" I smiled.

"Explain your thought." the Senior Partners said flatly.

"If you'd known I existed earlier then you've have shown up earlier." I said. "But the Powers That Be didn't approach me until after I entwined my fate hugely with both Angel and Wilkins' Ascension, both of which were things they were already watching. Likewise, you didn't approach me until my name was already brought to your attention when Lindsey shot you a message about his discovery of Wilkins' upcoming Ascension. You focused your attention on me particularly because I'd told him that the Powers That Be had already contacted me, which drew your curiosity." I analyzed. "Although I didn't remotely expect to draw this level of attention, anymore than you presumably expected to find what you found once you finally looked at me directly."

"Correct." the Senior Partners acknowledged.

"And I combine the possibility of one day becoming a Second-Breakthrough Spark with a fiat-backed immunity to fate and prophecy." I replied, and saw 'my' lip curl with anger. "I'm a game-breaker. You'd let me have as many decades as I wanted of playing with my toys, gifting shiny things to my friends, maybe even sharing extended lifespans with them. But eventually it would all crumble away beneath me- if it didn't do that on its own, you'd apply millenia if not eons' worth of subtlety and experience to the task- and then, when I was left with nothing but bitterness and power to cling to..." I spread my hands. "Your detente with the Powers That Be ends, in a way they can't change because you legitimately hacked the rules. Technically a mortal soul born of Earth, so free to act as I will. You're Extraordinary making me immune to the bindings of fate, so that particular safety restriction doesn't keep me from upsetting the applecart." I spread my hands in invitation.

"All that, and your Spark, and your incipient pair-bond with perhaps the most powerful practitioner of magic born to your world in over a millenium. A combination that could lead you to Immortality, wealth, and power beyond that which even an Ascended pure demon could hope for." the Senior Partners acknowledged. "Merely for accepting our offer, we would here and now raise you both to rank equal with our highest servants upon your Earth. And by eventually fulfilling your full potential under our banner you would raise yourself immeasurably higher than that, and raise your beloved along with you."

I gritted my teeth at them dragging Amy into it- I'd never remotely wanted to bring this kind of attention down on her- as I simultaneously acknowledged the legitimacy of the shot they'd scored. Because they were right, damn them. Logically speaking, I didn't lose anything by signing on with them. There was nothing they could fuck me over with, no depravity that they could potentially force or tempt me into, that my 'Benefactor' couldn't potentially do the same to me- and it's not like I could count on his forbearance in the future. The only reason I hadn't spent this jump rampaging worse than Angelus in his prime is because it hadn't suited my 'Benefactor's' current whim.

And oh God, the idea of being able to get off this chain- and given that Whistler had conceded the PTB were of a high enough tier that the 'Benefactor' had chosen to come to terms with them rather than simply dominate them, it was just faintly possible that they could mean it- what more could I want than that?

I shook my head. Dear God, what a perfect trap. It was everything I desperately needed, and everything the baser side of me could possibly want. Even No Weapons, No Hope still required me to choose to resist. All of my infinite resolve to resist temptation still had that limitation; I could not be tempted in a moment of weakness or against my will, but I could still choose to succumb with my eyes wide open and in full knowledge of what I chose. And even with that knowledge, I- I would still have chosen this. It was perhaps the only chance I would have. Perhaps the only one I would ever have.

Except for that one thing. That one fatal little moment of overreach that the Senior Partners had done. Ironically, they'd ensured the failure of their effort here by being too generous. They were aware enough of my human feelings and failings to know about who I loved and why, but not enough to understand the things that love could drive a man to sacrifice.

If it had just been my own eternal damnation at play here, I'd never have known for sure if I could have found it in me to say no. But the Senior Partners had chosen to make it a package deal- both as imagined greater leverage on me, and because while she was hardly the Outside Context Superweapon I could potentially become then as what was apparently the future Sorceress Supreme of Earth she was a legitimate recruitment target in her own right.

So if I fell here, then Amy would fall into the pit with me. Because if I was weak enough to take this offer, then I could never be strong enough to not try and pull her down.

And that I would not allow.

"Never!" I screamed at the Senior Partners, allowing the full reverb of the Madness Place loose to emphasize my words for the first time since I had entered this jump. "You will not have her. You will not have any of them! Any more than you will ever have me!"

'Myself' gazed at me for a moment that felt like an eternity.

"Very well." the Senior Partners acknowledged emotionlessly, and the white light flared again.

* * * * *​

"And this is your new identity." Lindsey said, shoving the manila folder across his desk to me. "Birth certificate, credit history, transcripts, it's all there. Our Special Projects division offers only the highest-quality documentation, and we're tossing this in gratis."

I expertly flipped through all the documentation. "These are the best fakes I've ever seen." I acknowledged. "But they're still fakes, aren't they?"

"The circumstances of your insertion into our dimension-" Lindsey began.

"I'm sure that you could do better work than this if you tried." I said. "With magic and everything? Making a real backstory out of nothing would not be impossible." I shrugged. "Sure, you've entirely voided the case that was pending against me currently. It's like I was never even arrested in the first place." I waved the folder. "But even if this new paperwork could survive normal background checks you could still drop a dime on this file at any point in the future. And I go right back to where I started."

"That's our insurance policy." Lindsey grinned like a shark. "In cases like yours, when our job offers are rejected-" He shrugged. "We like to minimize the potential for blowback."

"Don't bother us and we won't bother you." I said flatly.

"I don't know what the Senior Partners tried to get out of you, and I don't want to know." Lindsay said emphatically. "But Mr. Hamilton made it plain that whatever they'd wanted, you'd chosen not to give it to them. So that's the new Wolfram & Hart policy as far as your case is concerned." he spread his hands. "We made the charges against you vanish, we took care of your little paperwork problem- for the moment- and we wash our hands of you from that point, so long as you wash your hands of us." He stopped and then continued on, much more menacingly. "But if you make any inconvenience for us in the future, then you go right back to ducking the INS and the FBI in addition to what we'll collect, with interest, out of your hide."

"Duly noted." I acknowledged. I didn't like it but it was hardly unexpected- and I'd have done the exact same thing if I'd been in Lindsey's position. And right now I had bigger fish to fry.

"And I've also been instructed to say that if you do change your mind, their offer remains open." he added, less frostily.

"I won't." I said flatly.

"You hero types." Lindsey said disapprovingly. "I will never understand what goes on in your brains."

"If you did, you wouldn't be here." I acknowledged.

"Or last very long if I did." he agreed. "Well... good luck in Sunnydale, at least." he finished.

"We'll see." I acknowledged, and I stood up and left.

And when I got to my car and started driving away, I wasn't really surprised by who I suddenly found riding shotgun.

"Good show, kid." Whistler said from my front passenger seat.

"How much of this did you set up?" I asked him after a pause.

"With her?" he asked me. "None of it. Love is the purest expression of free will."

"And yet it just happens to be what saved me from an offer that you had to know you they were going to make me eventually, and that would have entirely hosed the Powers if it did." I replied back.

"You saved you from that offer, kid." Whistler shot back. "You already knew what was right; you just had to know why you knew it."

"If it hadn't been her, it'd just have been something else?" I probed.

"I'm not sayin' that either." Whistler said. "I am sayin' that-" he shrugged. "Sometimes even the Powers That Be forget that while they are among the highest tier of this existence, they're not the be-all and end-all of existence." he waved his hands. "That's a job for everyone and everything, from the highest to the lowest. The meaning of life is being alive. Everything else is what people make of it for themselves."

"And what comes after?"

"Spoilers." he chided me.

"Figured you'd say that." I chuckled. "So... Wilkins." I finished.

"You still gotta let him start the transformation before you ice him." Whistler confirmed. "You don't do that, then the whole charge that he's built up for a century will randomly discharge to ground instead of being used up kickstarting the change. And that won't just take out the town, it'll dump enough malevolent magical energy at random to taint and curse more crap than you can imagine for hundreds of miles around. And given how close you are to some things that are buried in LA..." Whistler shuddered. "Whoo boy! Nobody wants any of those fault lines to bust open!"

"Given that I'm pretty sure that at least one of those 'fault lines' is tied to the building I just left, I'm amazed the Senior Partners haven't already sent that Hamilton guy or similar to go push Wilkins' face in- contract or no contract." I said.

"That's their weakness." he said. "They were dumb enough to let their lawyers sign that particular deal for them, and now they're stuck with it. They've survived this long by being the past grandmasters of the loophole, but they still need a loophole to work through. They can't just up and break a contract, or else their authority to contract becomes not worth the paper you'd wipe your ass with."

"And Wilkins' contract didn't leave them a sufficiently big loophole to attack him through?" I asked.

"Nope." Whistler said. "Word of advice; never, ever play let's make a deal with the Mayor. He's good at it. And if you guys strike out on Graduation Day then he'll be in a position to wheel and deal on a whole other level." Whistler sighed. "And that would just suck like you wouldn't imagine."

I smiled to myself at how Whistler had 'accidentally' dropped another clue he probably hadn't been technically supposed to reveal into the conversation, and thanked him with a wordless nod. "Can we still ice him? Or did we miss our window?"

"You've still got a shot." Whistler nodded. "Maybe not a great shot, but a shot."

"Thanks." I acknowledged.

"I notice you're not askin' how." he probed.

"I doubt you'd be allowed to tell me." I replied.

"You're right, I'm not." Whistler said. "I wish I was."

"I know." I agreed. "Thanks for everything, Whistler."

"You too. Good luck to all of you." he encouraged me, and in-between one blink and the next he was gone.

I nodded to myself and looked out at the mile markers as they flashed by outside my car window.

It was time to get back to Sunnydale.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Okay, who expected the W&H arc to go there? I liked that it started out as a routine 'Let's recruit a new killer, this guy's got talent and is sufficiently in a bind he might go for bargaining his way out'... and then the case file rapidly escalates well beyond a junior partner's desk the instant shit comes to certain parties 'attention.

Because, yes, look at it from the point of view of the Senior Partners. If they can get Jonathan permanently onside, they win- between everything he can potentially evolve into, everything they can potentially jam up his ass, the fact that he has a get out of fatebinding free card, and the fact that he's technically an Earth-born mortal so he's allowed to do anything he can in the Earth-realm... between that and his backup of Amy Madison, Sorceress Supreme, the Wolf, Ram, and Hart would score a larger victory and a better set of viceroys to spread evil all over the Earth than they've ever seen since the Demon Age.

And I meant this temptation of Jonathan to be that close- he was legitimately ready to take the deal, because from a POV of cold logic it's correct. There isn't anything the SPs can do to him or corrupt him with that his 'Benefactor' can't already do and worse. The main reason he's able to resist is that some things transcend logic.

And yeah, the 'your new legal ID is still vulnerable to our voiding it' is a lever meant to keep Jonathan from directly going at W&H in the future. So he won't be moving down to LA permanently and taking Angel's canon role there... although Angel of course is still free to do so himself, because while Jonathan is prevented from directly striking at W&H himself there's nothing stopping other people from 'independently' deciding to have a go.

As for Mr. Trick... well, Jonathan's still pissed off about that truck. What else did you expect?

 

[cliffc999]

Jonathan POV:

"You're back!" Amy said joyously, flinging herself into my arms as Angel and I entered the bomb shelter's 'conference room'.

I hugged her back as tightly as I could, too full of emotion for words. We touched foreheads in lieu of kissing and stepped apart, and I walked up to the folding table and chairs they'd set up as our new conference table.

"How'd you get out?" Buffy was the first to ask, after we'd had greetings and reunions all around.

"The demonic underworld's favorite law firm didn't like hearing about Wilkins' upcoming Ascension." I replied, "so they pulled some strings so I could get back in play. They can't go after him themselves, and they're definitely no friends of ours, but a little indirect help that doesn't cost them anything-" I shrugged. "In the better news department, I got a message from Whistler."

"Graduation Day." Angel said. "That's when it happens. So now we know exactly when to move."

The door slammed open as if kicked and I turned, my sidearm halfway out of the holster before I realized that the person storming in was Cordelia. She was simultaneously both weeping and in a towering rage.

"That miserable bastard!" she was screaming. I confusedly noted that she was dragging a two-wheeled standing suitcase behind her, that she let go of as soon as she was inside the door.

"Cordelia? What's happened?" Giles asked.

"I'm poor!" she cried, slumping despairingly into a seat and slamming her forehead into the table. "We all are!"

"Look, we kinda have other problems-" Xander began impatiently.

"Wait." I said. "Someone robbed you?"

"The IRS took everything." Cordelia said muffledly, her face still planted in her forearms.

"Oh, this suddenly sounds familiar." Angel said darkly.

"INS for me, IRS for you." I said. "First the Mayor takes out the team's ordnance engineer, and now he goes after the cash flow."

"I'm not sure if it even was the Mayor." Cordelia said, finally looking up at us. "From what the agents said, daddy was 'forgetting' to pay his proper taxes for over a dozen years." She sighed. "They took everything. The house, the cars, my clothes-" she sighed. "I barely got to keep enough to fill a suitcase! I don't even have anywhere to live!"

"With either me or Giles." Angel said immediately. "We both have spare rooms."

"I'll have to take you up on that." Cordelia sniffed.

"The mayor didn't actually set up my little immigration situation either." I pointed out. "That was a pre-existing condition. He just dropped the dime on it when the timing was most convenient for him."

"Tell me we've figured out how to kill the bastard." Cordelia snarled.

"Oh, we have." I said. "And ironically enough, you just brought the final piece of the puzzle that we needed."

* * * * *​

About a dozen miles into my dramatic return drive to Sunnydale I'd realized that I was being stupid. As far as the Mayor knew I was still in jail, so why the hell should I turn down the gift of an opportunity to work while still unsuspected and unobserved?

So I got off the freeway and headed back to LA, where I immediately got to work. One of the first things I did was check in with Lorne- from Whistler's reaction I could infer that Wolfram and Hart hadn't managed to actually get a hook into my soul or anything, but getting a confirming opinion from the guy who could read your aura and at least partly scry your destiny was also good. Plus, as the owner of a 'neutral zone' watering hole for the demon underworld the man would know how to get in touch with the black market.

Lorne also told me that Angel had headed down here himself to try and pick up some 'essential supplies', as without any knowledge of my upcoming release the group had had to continue their preparations without me. So I got in touch with him and he was certainly glad to see me, although I was hardly glad to hear the news about Willow and other things as we each caught up. And then I looked at his plan and acknowledge it, then brought him up to speed on the plan I'd just started working out. Working out how to make the plans synergize with each other took several more days to finish making the arrangements.

So the shipping container full of things that went boom was stacked and ready to load on a coastal freighter and the proper palms were greased. It was all scheduled to arrive at Sunnydale's own maritime facility port shortly before Graduation Day, so that it wouldn't actually be in Wilkins' town to be found until the opportune moment. Meanwhile, the things I'd arranged for and designed would start manufacture at a custom metal fabrication shop as a rush order, to be shipped up to Sunnydale as soon as I could arrange for the proper receiver at their end. We'd spent the bulk of my savings to date on this one big job, but I didn't really need that much to support my lifestyle- especially since I'd be on the road soon- and the next year would bring another installment to the trust fund and start refilling the piggy bank.

And all that having been done and my car having been put into long-term storage so that the Sunnydale PD wouldn't take note of its return, we rented another car and headed back to Sunnydale.

* * * * *​

"Wait, you're sure this is the only way?" Buffy asked incredulously. I knew exactly how she felt. It had taken me a couple days after my return to Sunnydale, which I still hadn't publicly announced yet, to help set up our latest play. Which I still couldn't entirely believe I was going along with.

"Yes." Amy said resolutely.

"But doing it that way will-!" Buffy shouted, before cutting herself off. "She's being crazy! Jonathan, tell her!"

"You think I haven't tried?" I said resignedly. "Look, trust me, I'm all for the other way-"

"I'm not." Amy said. "I-" she sighed. "I know what you said. And what Mr. Giles said. And you're right." She sighed. "But I still can't forget that back when I needed help, she was the first one to help me." She shook her head. "Maybe I'm not hard enough to make the hard choices, but that's the point. Ever since we came up with this alternative it hasn't been 'killing Willow is the only way', but 'killing her is the easiest way'. And I can't get started down that road."

"And you can't hang back and let those of us who have already started down it just do it for you." I said. "I understand. Hell, I even agree."

"I'm just glad that we're finding another way at all." Xander said. "Even if-" he swore and kicked a chair. "Even I don't think this is fair!"

"But I can't get hung up on all the things I could do later." Amy said. "That's the sort of numbers game Wolfram & Hart wanted to teach you to play. And, no. Just no."

"I just wish-" I said, waving my hands helplessly. "That- oh, never mind." I swore.

"You're sure you don't want us along." Xander asked.

"Part of how this is going to work is that Willow sees only the two people she hates the worst." I said. "And if this doesn't work, we need to preserve as many people as possible for Graduation Day."

"We could just leave her for until afterwards and deal with her then." Jenny suggested worriedly. "If we don't defeat the Mayor then there's no point."

"Willow's too powerful and too unpredictable." Angel said. "If she's still in play during the final run-up to the big battle, she could potentially wreck what we're doing in any number of ways. She has to be taken out while we still have our window, before the Mayor knows Jonathan's back in town."

"Amy." I said. "It's time."

"It is." she agreed, soberly.

"The best of luck to the both of you." Giles said for everyone, and we left.

On the drive to Willow's apartment, I asked Amy "You're certain this is what you want?"

"It's not what I want." Amy replied. "But it's the only way I can accept."

"I remember when you and I were originally talking about Marcie." I tried to reach Amy again. "You told me that if that had been you, if you'd been driven crazy by your powers and it was just a monster wearing your face, that you'd want me to put you down before you could hurt anyone else."

"We are going to stop Willow before she can hurt anyone else." Amy replied. "And I know what I said, but-" she shook her head. "That was then, and this is now. And this is my choice."

"And I'll respect it." I said quietly, before bursting out bitterly. "It's not fair." I swore. "The fact that you would do this means that you, of all people, shouldn't have to! I certainly wouldn't be making this choice in your shoes!"

"You put yourself down too much." Amy said, squeezing my free hand with her own. "If you were in my shoes, you'd be right here."

Our nondescript van, painted with the logo of the cable TV company, pulled into the underground entrance of the upscale apartment building where the Mayor had set up Willow in her new digs.

"Sentry-spells across the entrance door." Amy murmured as we arrived. "Keyed to detect me."

I reached into the bag and came out with the vial of ashes I'd 'collected' from one of the Mayor's minion vampires earlier tonight. "Here you go."

She took the vial and shook the dust into her hands, then clapped her palms together and rubbed while chanting. The deception-spell - ironically, one of the ones from the Mayor's own grimoire that he'd given Willow, but not one of the ones that required dark magick to use - would now 'see' her as only that vampire and not as herself, thus disguising her own magical aura enough to get it past Willow's own safeguards. Because of course the Mayor's minions would have to be keyed into the wards.

"Do the same for me," I said, pulling out a second vial of ashes. "Even if she was complacent enough to not ward against me, let's act as if she did."

Amy nodded, and I shook the dust out and rubbed it into my palms as she cast. "Done." she murmured.

We got out of the van. Both of us were in blue service coveralls, and I had a big tool bag slung that contained our weapons and gear. No visible guards in the parking garage, and any security cameras would just see a pair of service people. I'd used some hacking earlier today to generate a fake work order in the cable company's systems, so they were expecting us.

"Cable company." I said to the intercom, holding up the forged utility worker ID I'd cut for myself to the camera. It was like the gas company ID I'd cut for Angel when we cased Deputy Mayor Finch's place. Yeah, that little plastic press I'd made earlier this year for faking up various cards was definitely earning its keep.

"Why are you here?" the doorman asked us.

"The penthouse's high-speed Internet connection." I replied. The Mayor had of course set up his new quisling in the poshest digs available here, and Willow would of course want her apartment as wired as possible. "Client wants an upgrade."

"I've got the work order here in my email queue." I heard the doorman reply after a short pause, and the door buzzed open. "Go on up."

"Thanks." I said. "Oh, and I'm going to have to open up the telecom junction box to put this in; you may experience some temporary service interruptions."

"Figures." the doorman grumped quietly. "All right, just make it quick."

I went quickly to the basement utility closet and picked the lock, then popped the panel on the telecom switching panel and ran some jumpers. From this point on any security systems on the top floor would be talking only to themselves, and likewise any security cameras would be looping.

"We're a dead zone." I told Amy.

"Top floor." she agreed, and we headed for the elevator and punched the button. This being an apartment building and not a luxury hotel, the penthouse suite was merely the biggest one on the top floor and not the entire floor, so we let out in a short hallway with the apartment door proper a ways down.

"Is she home?" I asked as we walked to the door.

"Yes." Amy said, casting a passive detection spell and then blinked and frowned. "Her magical aura's there, plain as day. And... I'm also picking up the passive magic of a werewolf. Oh boy."

"Oz." I sighed. "So this is where he went." I shook my head. "I can't find it in me to blame him, but that's really inconvenient."

"You brought the trank gun?" Amy asked.

"And a taser. And a cattle prod." I agreed. "As well as-" I cut myself off as we came up to the penthouse apartment's door. "All right, masks on."

We drew on our headgear and I knocked on the door. "Cable company! We're here to upgrade the T3 line!"

The door unlocked itself and began to swing open with no human hand touching it. Ah, Willow. Always had to show off-

And as soon as the door was open far enough to admit it, I popped the pin on the C-gas grenade I'd had stashed in my bag and tossed it into the apartment. I knew and could readily brew the formula, and using an empty canister from a used tear gas grenade had given me the basic framework to build a new one, so-

After we heard the charge pop we gave the gas a few breaths to work and then I booted the door, cattle prod in one hand and the trank gun in the other. Amy had her hands up and already counterspelling, but we didn't take any incoming spell fire. Either Willow had sucked a lungful down right away or else-

The crash of glass from the balcony told us the 'or else'. Willow, who'd legendarily scorned physical training, had very little chance of reacting quickly enough to the sudden gas attack to hold her breath, let alone of holding it long enough to reach an exterior exit. Oz was an entirely different proposition, and he must have grabbed his unconscious girlfriend and ran. We both broke into a dead run and pursued them out onto the nearby rooftop-

To catch Oz with the unconscious Willow in his arms, standing on the ledge of the roof and looking down at a hopeless drop with nowhere he could possibly leap to. I suppose he'd been going for a fire escape, but there wasn't one on this side of the building. I kept the trank gun trained on Willow- I could hardly shoot Oz at this point without him falling right off and taking Willow with him-

"Oz, please. Step away from the ledge." Amy asked gently, as we both pulled our masks off. The C-gas was in the apartment behind us, not out here, and would safely dissipate in a few minutes anyway.

"Should I?" Oz asked with quiet despair, but turned to face us- and thank God, he relaxed from his desperately taut posture when he saw the particular weapons I was holding. "So. Non-lethal?"

"This isn't an execution party." I agreed. "I admit, I voted for giving her the full Marcie." I nodded at Amy. "I got outvoted."

"... okay." Oz said, stepping down off the ledge and laying Willow gently to the ground. I bent over her, trank gun still ready in my other hand, and checked her heartbeat and breathing. Yeah, she'd gotten a good lungful of the C-gas; she'd reliably be out for long enough to finish this. "Okay. So what happens now?"

"What happened to you?" I asked, looking at Oz. His haunted eyes, his gaunt and haggard expression- my God, if he'd been living here with Willow's full crazy all this while, having to either play up to her delusions or else get his head rewired- what the hell had he endured? "Why did you come here?"

"This is where I needed to be." he said, breathing raggedly. "She didn't get in my head. At least, I think she didn't." he managed to force out. "Thinking that I willingly would go along with her in what she was doing, that was still worth something to her. But-" he shook his head. "I couldn't find any angle. I couldn't make an opening."

"She made her choice." Amy said. "And now we all have to live with it."

"So what are you going to do?" Oz asked us. "You can't keep her locked up forever. That didn't work with your mom. And I think Willow's even further gone."

"I know." Amy said. "But- I worked out the basis of a ritual. Giles and Jenny helped refine it. Jonathan checked our math-" She sighed, and squared her shoulders resolutely. "I can permanently remove all of Willow's capacity to do magic. Make her a normal girl again." She lowered her head and continued sadly. "If I also sacrifice all of mine."

"You'd do that for her?" Oz said, disbelievingly.

"My only other choice is to let Jonathan kill her." Amy said. "But-" she sighed. "If we had no other option, then I could accept that. As is, Willow wouldn't be dying because it was the only way to stop her. She'd be dying as the only way to stop her and let me keep my powers. And if I sacrifice someone else's life for my magic-" she shook her head. "It would taint everything I did from now on." She looked down at the sleeping Willow. "And we all know where that leads."

"I'm still not sure it would work like that." I said stubbornly. Because dammit, Amy deserved more than this.

"You don't want this." Oz said, looking at me perceptively.

"I don't." I agreed.

"Neither do I." Oz said, after a pause. "There's really no other way?"

"The spell won't work without a sacrificial component." Amy insisted. "Balance requires it. And to keep it from being dark magic, the sacrifice has to be a willing volunteer. And while it doesn't have to be a magic potential equal to hers, it still has to be a fairly strong one. That's why we can't use Giles or Jenny- she doesn't have quite enough power compared to Willow, and while Giles just barely does-" She shook her head. "He's the Watcher. He needs everything he has to help Buffy, not just for this but for everything else to come. I might be the most powerful witch in ages, but that doesn't make me... mission critical." she finished resolutely.

"Someone with fairly strong magic of their own, that they're willing to sacrifice." Oz said heavily, and then looked up at Amy with a little grin- oh, hardly a big one, but the first thing remotely resembling a smile we'd seen from him in weeks. "Being a werewolf is fairly strong."

My and Amy's jaws both dropped.

"... you'd help me do this?" Amy asked him wonderingly, and he held out his hand to hers.

"It's not like my magic was really doing me any good." Oz quietly mocked himself, before looking down more soberly at the unconscious Willow. "And neither was hers."

"Oz." I said, drawing him into a manly hug. "Thank you."

"You too." he said. "Because I really wasn't looking forward to-" he shuddered once, before pushing away the horrible thought. "But now I don't have to."

"All right." Amy said. "Let's set this up."

I checked Willow yet again to make sure she wasn't going to wake up soon, then helped lay her out while Amy started the ritual circle. Then her and Oz took up positions at the keystones of the circle, top and bottom, while I stood discreetly back.

Such a relatively brief thing, to be able to destroy so much. The proper components, the proper chant, the proper sacrifice, and after a minute or so of pyrotechnics it was done.

"Amy?" I asked her, to have my heart soar when she did her little floating-ball-of-light trick over her palm in response.

"I'm still a witch." she said, looking down at Willow. "And... she isn't."

"And I'm not a werewolf any more either." Oz said, cricking his neck. "I can feel it."

"Ohhhh..." Willow said, her eyelids fluttering awake. "You-!" she spat at Amy and I, and tried to cast a spell. And then tried again. And again. "What have you done?"

"They saved your life." Oz said flatly.

"Traitor!" Willow raged at him, pushing him away as he reached down to help her up and scrambling to her feet on her own. "Traitors all of you! And you!" she spat, turning to me. "How the hell are you out of jail?!?"

"Lawyers." I said with a smirk.

"You think you've won?" Willow raged. "Just because you've bound my magic again? When the Mayor-"

"Your magic isn't bound, Willow." Amy said. "It's gone."

A dead silence fell across the rooftop at that.

"... no." she said, whispering.

"Permanently." I mercilessly finished. "You'll never cast a spell or a ritual again."

"Not even if you try to tap external sources of power." Amy said. "You're as mundane as Jesse now. As almost everyone else in the world."

"No!" Willow shrieked. "You can't do that! It's not-"

"Fair?" I cut her off. "Was it fair when Kendra died?"

"That wasn't my fault!" Willow shrieked hysterically. "If she hadn't-"

"Hadn't what?" Oz asked quietly. "Caught you hurting Andrew?"

"I had to!" Willow said. "Andrew would've-"

"Told people the truth about what you did, and what you knew you weren't supposed to be doing?" I sighed. "You mindwiped Andrew over trading a pair of black magic books with Tucker. Then you mindwiped Kendra catching you doing it to Andrew-" I sighed. "And that left her wide open for Drusilla to kill. A fine Slayer, and a good person. Dead because, ultimately, you didn't want to be told what you could read." I spat. "All that, and so much more, and over shit that ultimately meant nothing."

"I- I had to!" Willow desperately pressed. "You- you just wanted me to be helpless! You know how dangerous this world is! I needed everything I could possibly get to keep myself and the people I loved-"

"You don't love anyone!" I shouted back, my temper snapping. "You don't even know what love is! The only reason you're even alive right now is because multiple people still loved you enough to care even after you were so far gone that half the team was voting to just air-mail you a bullet at 1100 fps, and you haven't even noticed!" I spat. "Love is when you care. And you don't really care about a single God damn thing outside of yourself, your ego, and your id."

"Definitely not a superego." Oz sighed.

"You helped them do this to me!" Willow shrieked.

"Oz didn't let us in." I said. "And he didn't help set you up. We ambushed you both, and the only thing he did was talk us down from doing something that we weren't looking forward to at all."

"You made this possible?" Willow turned on him, her eyes wild with hate. "You told them to take my magic?"

"I'd have taken it even over Oz' objections." Amy said. She didn't even try to bring up the sacrifice she'd have been willing to make to give Willow a second chance that I still didn't remotely believe would have been worth the price Amy had been willing to pay for it. She knew better than to expect any gratitude.

"And I'll bet you'll just love having all that power!" Willow shrieked. "You're no better than me!"

"It wasn't a power-theft ritual." I sighed. "Unlike the one you just gave away that you were designing for Amy."

"She was." Oz confirmed.

"It was a power draining ritual." Amy confirmed. "I didn't want to steal your magic, and I didn't keep a single bit of it."

"You- you." Willow fumed, and then her eyes rolled up and she began wobbling on her feet. Amy and Oz reflexively stepped forward to help her-

"Watch out!" I yelled, and began moving. Because the instant Amy got within range, Willow stopped faking and her hand came out of her pocket with a sacrificial athame, that also did double duty as a perfectly good stabbing knife. And she'd positioned herself so that Oz blocked my immediate shot, and in the fraction of a second it took me to step aside her knife-

-would come nowhere near Amy as she slapped Willow's eager but clumsy stab aside with a forearm block, trapped her arm, and judo-threw Willow to the floor before kicking her solidly in the armpit. Willow cried out in pain and curled up in a ball, her knife clattering across the ground.

"If you hadn't skipped all those workouts then you might have actually hit me." Amy said vindictively as Willow hit the floor. Yeah, even the patience of a saint had some limits.

"Not fair-" Willow said brokenly, shuddering on the ground. "Not fair-"

"Willow." Oz said, still trying to reach her. "We can still leave. Go take that job offer from Microsoft- live our lives- be rich, be free-"

"Grow old and die!" Willow spat, looking up from her crouched-animal position on the ground. "I could have had it all! Immortality! Power! Godhood!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, her cry echoing out over the city. "And now I'm just-" She spat. "Dust beneath their feet!"

"Who's 'they'?" I asked.

"The people who matter!" Willow shouted back. "The powerful ones, the ones who rule!" She slumped, sobbing. "The ones I'll never join now-"

"Everyone matters, Willow." Amy sighed.

"Quitter talk." she sobbed.

"Willow-" Oz tried again.

"Get out!" she shrieked. "We're done! We're through! If you're not with me-" she broke off. "I hate you! I hate all of you!"

"Willow, he saved your life." I told her flatly.

"Saved it for what?" she spat.

"Oz?" I asked him.

"She said we're done." he said, slumping in despair. "So I can't stay here. Good-bye, Willow."

After giving her a chance to say good-bye that she didn't take I pulled the trigger on the trank gun, and Willow fell unconscious.

"We leave her here in the mood she's in, she'll probably go right off the roof as soon as we leave." I said matter-of-factly. "Oz? Where do you want to go?"

"I'm not sure." he replied, still distraught.

"You can come back with us." Amy said. "At least for tonight."

"Okay." he agreed, and sighed. "You'll need to take Willow's papers and things with you before you go. I'll show you where she keeps them."

"Thanks." I said, and we finished tossing Willow's place and arranging her unconscious body on the couch. "All right. Amy, take Oz to the van. I'll be right down after I make the call." They both nodded and left, and I picked up the phone.

"Mayor Wilkins' office." I heard the secretary answer.

"This is Jonathan Fairchild calling from Willow Rosenberg's apartment." I said. "She needs medical attention and suicide watch immediately. Oh, and make sure to tell Wilkins- one down."

"Wait!" she said as I left the handset off the hook and began to walk away. "Sir? Sir, wait-!" her faint voice trailed off behind me as I left.

* * * * *​

Mayor Wilkins POV:

"I'm afraid there's nothing that can be done at present." I told Miss Rosenberg, as she desperately looked up at me from her hospital bed. They had her in the neuro ward, in restraints and under watch due to the strong possibility of self-harm. She'd already made one half-hearted attempt in the several days she'd been in custody, after Mister Fairchild had led the surprisingly effective yet devastating strike against her in her apartment. I hadn't even known they'd known where it was, much less so expertly gotten past the security around it.

"But sir, there has to-!" she begged.

I shook my head. "We're less than two weeks away from Graduation Day, Miss Rosenberg. I don't have the time or the spare resources for a project of this magnitude at the moment."

"Then after you Ascend?" she said eagerly. "When you have so much more power? Could you restore mine?" she begged.

"Something may possibly be done in the fullness of time." I conceded. "But you're going to have to be patient."

"Okay." she said, not entirely believing me but still forcing herself to because what other option did she have at this point? I smiled, nodded, and left.

"Is there something you can do for her?" Alphonse asked me with mild curiosity as they left the hospital.

"She failed." I answered him. "She failed entirely, and despite having been given so many chances and opportunities-" I sighed and shook my head. "Such a disappointment. Well, you don't get something for nothing in this world, and I should have known that anyone who so readily fell into my lap would just as quickly fall out of it."

"Yeah." he chuckled cruelly, and then my phone went off.

"Mayor Wilkins." I answered it cheerfully.

"Sir." Deputy Mayor Finch answered me. "I just had a visitor to my house. They're gone, but you really need to see what they brought me."

"Not on the phone." I answered. "Are you at home?"

"I am." he asked. "Shall I come in to City Hall?"

"No." I said thoughtfully. "I recently had a lesson in how my movements in and out are being surveilled. As it happens, I'm already off-campus; I'll just come to your house."

It didn't take me very long to arrive, and Allan met me and Alphonse and let us inside.

"What is it?" I asked him. "And I certainly hope it's good news, because I haven't been getting much of that recently."

"It's Cordelia Chase, sir." Allan said. "She just approached me."

"She's here now?" I asked him.

"No." he said. "She said she'd seen too much of how memory spells could be used to play with peoples' heads from Miss Rosenberg to want to be near you at all. That's why she came to me."

"And what did she bring us?" I asked mildly.

"She brought this." Allan said proudly, and brought a tape recorder and hit 'Play'. I heard a recording of a meeting of the 'Scooby Gang', discussing their plans for disrupting Graduation Day. Prepositioned explosive charges, a false threat to Principal Flutie to encourage him to run an extra-heavy emphasis on evacuation drills beforehand, pulling the fire alarm at the opportune moment, getting the student body out of the blast radius while blowing me up right as the transformation began- yes, all very clever and straightforward.

"Fascinating." I said. "She thought to record their most recent meeting?"

"Yes." he answered. "And also told me when and where the explosives are coming in." he said. "The evening of the day before graduation, at the shipping terminal. On a coastal freighter called the Kutaya Star." He smiled. "She even got me a copy of the bill of lading." he handed it to me.

"Why did she turn on them?" I inquired.

"Her father's arrest for tax evasion." Allan replied. "She's a pauper now, and looking forward to zero prospects at all without a college education. She said that she was willing to learn how to fight the supernatural to preserve her own life, but she wasn't willing to give her entire future for it. So she sold this information to us."

"How much did you pay for it?" I said, encouraged by what I was hearing. Because, yes, that was certainly a genuine piece of paperwork I was looking at.

"An educational trust for a full-ride tuition package at UCLA, along with a very generous living stipend." Deputy Mayor Finch said.

I laughed out loud. "Oh, now that's just precious! She sold out her friends to buy back the future her father's IRS problems took away from her- without ever stopping to think that it won't be a viable future after I Ascend!" I finished chuckling. "Well, that's certainly a Chase for you- thinking the universe revolves around them, and nowhere near as clever as they think they are." I laughed again. "Just like her father was."

"Should I call the FBI, sir?" Allan asked.

"No, no." I said. "Alphonse, send someone down to LA to make sure the explosives are actually in that shipping container. But discreetly. If the tip turns out to be genuine, then I'll authorize the transfer of funds to set up Miss Chase's educational trust." I thought. "But we hold off on actually making the bust until the very last minute, here in Sunnydale. We'll use our police force, keep control of the entire investigation." I shrugged. "Of course, that close to Graduation Day there'll be little point in actually making a case. The objective will simply to be to allow the Slayer and her compatriots to think that everything is still going their way right up until the last minute, when it'll be too late for them to find a new plan." I shrugged. "So far they've proven amazingly effective whenever they've had an objective to go after. No, no, we'll let the illusion of success keep them in check. Until we no longer need it."

"Yes sir." both my subordinates acknowledged.

I smiled to myself. Yes, even if Miss Rosenberg had proved to be a disappointment- her reach far exceeding her grasp and all that- it was a comfort to know that I could still rely upon good old-fashioned human nature.

* * * * *​

Buffy POV:

The bugs that Angel and Jonathan had planted in Deputy Mayor Finch's house earlier had picked up the whole conversation. The plan had worked- Mayor Creepy thought he knew all our plans now, and thought he could put us in checkmate just by stopping the bomb shipment we had coming in on the ship. We had him sucked in.

So, he was just waiting for Graduation Day now, and so were we. Oh, we had Amy- and wow, it had been so lucky that Oz giving up his werewolf-ism worked as well as Amy giving up her magic to stop Willow would have- checking out Jesse and other people to make sure she hadn't hit them up with the post-hypnotic like she'd done Xander, and Jenny prompting Principal Flutie to do 'evacuation drills', and Giles getting himself un-suspended - turns out he'd arranged for himself to get canned in the first place so he'd have more time off-the-books to help the gang set things up for endgame- to give the Mayor someone to watch as he did various diversionary things-

And we were all out networking with the students, getting everybody we could remotely trust prepped for Graduation Day. Jonathan- he'd returned to school after the whole Willow thing was wrapped up- was leading hand-picked peoples in weekend drills, Amy's dad had pitched in along with my mom on various parents' committees to help set things up there- and elsewhere, and we even had time left to get ourselves some nice prom dresses. Cordelia had had to fake a little distance from the team because she was being a fake traitor, but not that much because her whole schtick was the 'they don't know I sold them out' routine.

The only really noteworthy thing leading up to the night of the big dance was the shocking revelation that Jonathan and Amy were breaking up. Oh, not 'We don't like each other' breaking up but 'I have to go and she has to stay' breaking up. After high school he had to get back on the road- both to go answer some things the Powers That Be apparently had for him and because with Wolfram & Hart still trying to get their hooks into him, however indirectly, he had to go drag that tail elsewhere so it didn't stay here and try sticking to any of us. Especially not Amy, who they also apparently wanted to lure to the Dark Side even if they had to do it totally of our own free will. Thank God they hadn't seemed to want Willow for anything. Brrrrrrr.

So, yeah. The pair of folks that were voted "Most Likely To Get Married" by the yearbook committee two years running were the ones whose relationship wouldn't survive going to college, while Xander and me were set to stick together for as long as I could possibly last. Go figure. Amy didn't cry on my shoulder about it as much as I expected, because her and Jonathan had already settled this out among themselves weeks ago even if we'd just found out, but- yeah. Life really wasn't fair sometimes.

Angel would be leaving us after high school as well, although he'd just be down the road in LA and available to come back if we had another Apocalypse. Wolfram and Hart needed to go have someone help make their lives miserable, and if Jonathan couldn't do it himself because of that little blackmail they had on his secret identity then Angel was more than looking forward to the challenge. Plus, people needed saving from demons in LA as well... and with Cordelia going to college down there well, hey, it'd be nice to have another one of the team there to keep an eye on her.

Oz was also leaving after Graduation. He was pretty messed up from the whole Willow thing- not just from seeing it happen and not having any way to stop it, but from the time he'd spent actually living with Crazy McEvil so that he could potentially double agent on her as soon as he had an opening or, God help us, actually give Willow the mercy kill if he couldn't find one. I don't know if he could have actually gone through with it and neither did he, but yeah. Holy yikes. Between all that and Willow's dumping him like a hot rock despite what he'd done to make the option that allowed saving her life happen, he was definitely a guy who needed to put this chapter of his life behind him. Supposedly there was this guy Lorne down in LA who a seer type, who could tell someone about where they needed to go to find what their soul needed or something. I'd maybe have to go visit him myself sometime.

Of course, we had to get past Graduation Day first, but hey, at least we had hope. One of the pieces of info they'd turned up searching Willow's place was exactly which demon that Wilkins would be Ascending to take on the pure aspect of- Olvikan. And Olvikan's physical weaknesses were already on record. In hindsight it was a little sad that we'd sacrificed the explosives as the diversionary element but it's not like it would have worked the other way around- and the primary attack vector should still work just fine, especially now that Jonathan knew to tune it for more heat and less the other thing.

So in the last few days before the big event we had the big dance. Cordelia's recent social fall from grace- what with now being poor- had knocked her right out of the race for Prom Queen, but it was a measure of how deep things had gotten recently that she didn't even really mind seeing Harmony score it. I hadn't hoped to score anything, varsity cheerleader or not, so I just carpe'd that diem with Xander out on the dance floor and we smiled at Jonathan and Amy doing the same. Hey, if it was going to be our last dance then heck yeah, make it a memorable one-

"Everyone?" the other Jonathan, the short one, said from the MC's microphone on stage. "We have a last-minute award. Is Buffy Summers here tonight?"

I raised my hand.

"And Jonathan Fairchild?"

"Yes?" he called out.

"Ah." he said. "Well- this is actually a new category. First time ever. I guess there were a lot of write-in ballots, and, um, the prom committee asked me to read this. 'We're not good friends. Most of us never found the time to get to know you, but that doesn't mean we haven't noticed you. We don't talk about it much, but it's no secret that Sunnydale High isn't really like other high schools. A lot of weird stuff happens here.'"

"Zombies! Hyena people! Vice-Principal Snyder!" the crowd called out cheerfully.

"But, whenever there was a problem or something creepy happened, you seemed to show up and stop it. Most of the people here have been saved by you, or helped by you at one time or another. We're proud to say that the Class of '99 has the lowest mortality rate of any graduating class in Sunnydale history."

The crowd burst out in applause.

"And we know at least part of that is because of everything you two did to protect us, and everything you did to help lead the student body to protect themselves. So the senior class, offers its thanks, and gives you, uh, this." We both stepped up, and Jonathan reached down and hauled up a little trophy for each of us- a multicolored, glittering umbrella with a bronze plaque attached to the shaft. Each of our trophies had our name engraved on it, and the same title- "Class Protector."

And then everybody applauded, and Jonathan and I both looked at each other and had the same thought in exact unison.

"You make the speech." we said to each other in stereo, and then got back to our staredown. Eventually Jonathan sighed and bowed to my will, and he stepped up to the microphone.

"Everyone..." he began.

* * * * *​

Amy POV:

We met in the school library for what would probably be the last time, the day before Graduation. We'd finished our classes, had our yearbooks signed, said our goodbyes, and made all our preparations. Jonathan and I had had our prom, and our night afterwards, and it had all been perfect. Even knowing it would be our last one hadn't put a damper on things; oh, it had certainly made things more serious, but we'd both legitimately accepted it as both necessary and the right thing to do. And that meant that while we'd miss our relationship, we wouldn't mourn it. I guess this is what being an adult felt like. Well, there wasn't a more appropriate time than graduation to start feeling that way.

The Kutaya Star would have pulled into port last night, and that would mean that the Mayor would make his move this morning. So really, this meeting of ours was just another part of the whole shadow-play that Jonathan had helped us concoct, and the next move-

"So, this is the inner sanctum." Mayor Wilkins said, striding cheerfully into the library as we sat around the table with all the books and papers. "Willow told me this is where you folks like to hang out, concoct your little schemes. I tell you, it's just nice to see that some young people are still interested in reading in this modern era. So, what are kids reading nowadays?" he smirked, picking up one of the books on the table and starting to recite. "'The beast will walk upon the earth and darkness will follow. The several races of man will be as one in their terror and destruction.' Aw, that's kind of sweet!" the Mayor gushed cheerfully. "Different races, coming together?"

"You never get even a little tired of hearing yourself talk, don't you." Buffy said bitterly.

Mayor Wilkins chuckled. "That's one spunky little girl you've raised." he said to Giles, before his smile turned nasty. "I'm gonna eat her."

Giles, his face a stone mask of rage and despair, snatched up one of the epees from the weapons rack and drove it directly through the Mayor's heart. The Mayor staggered back in shock.

"Whoa!" he said passionately, as he drew the sword from his chest without the slightest sign of pain. "Violent outbursts like that? In front of the children?" he finished condescendingly, as he wiped the sword clean of blood with his handkerchief and tossed it back to Giles hilt-first. "You know, Mr. Giles, they look to you to see how to behave."

"Get out." I said coldly.

"I smell fear. That's smart." the Mayor smirked. "Even smarter given that the police and the Coast Guard just raided the Kutaya Star." he said, and we all made sure to put the appropriate amount of shock and despair on our faces. "Oh, you were clever enough about not leaving any paper trail that led to you, but it looks like you'll be attending Graduation Day without any of the party favors you were planning to bring. And I guess that leaves you out of options." he smiled. "You could forego attending, of course. You'd forfeit your diplomas, but I suppose they wouldn't be worth much after my Ascension anyway." He shrugged. "But I really do hope you'll attend. At least then your deaths will be quick and painless."

"Thanks." Xander snorted derisively. "You're such a humanitarian."

"In the literal sense, I suppose I will be!" Mayor Wilkins laughed affably, and turned to leave. He threw his parting shot to us over his shoulder as he strolled away. "But you really don't want to miss my commencement address. It's going to be one heck of a speech!" he finished, and then he turned the corner into the hallway outside and was gone.

I cast a quick anti-eavesdropping spell before we all breathed a sigh of relief and dropped the act.

"He bought it." Jenny said, grinning. "Trust me, my family taught me how to read a mark before I was ten. He bought it hook, line, and sinker!"

"Good." Jonathan said. "All right, folks. Everybody scatter, go do your thing, live out the next day like it'll be your last." He grinned. "We certainly want him to think so."

"And speaking of that-" I said, jumping up and grabbing my boyfriends'- at least until tomorrow - hand and grinning at him salaciously.

"Well, I did just get out of prison." he joked, to the quiet laughter of everyone else in the room. And on that note we all paired up and headed out.

Tomorrow would be the big finish. But for today, we would live.

* * * * *​

Jonathon POV:

"Everything's in position." I said to the group, joining them as we all took our seats at the ceremony, cap and gown and all.

"All the crowd control people know what to do." Cordelia confirmed.

"Weapons teams are set up and ready to move." Buffy agreed.

"Got the fetishes prepositioned and the spells all ready to trip." Amy acknowledged.

"And Giles and all the grown-ups are waiting outside with the reserves." Xander said. "Even that eclipse thing the Ascension will bring will be handy- the Mayor's vampires can come out to play, but so can Angel. So now comes the horrible part."

"The waiting." Buffy agreed, and Principal Flutie and the Mayor got up on stage.

"Congratulations to the class of 1999," Principal Flutie said as he took the microphone. "You've all proven yourself to be fine young men and women, and more than ready for the challenges still ahead of you. This is a time of celebration, so please bear with us as we put the final stamp on your official commencement as the Sunnydale High School Class of 1999. And now I welcome our distinguished guest speaker, Mayor Richard Wilkins the Third." There was dutiful applause.

"Well. What a day this is!" Mayor Wilkins began, as cheerful as ever. "Special day. Today is our centennial the one hundreds anniversary of the founding of Sunnydale, and I know what that means to all you kids: not - a darn thing. Because today something much more important happens: today you all graduate from high school. Today all the pain, all the work, all the excitement is finally over. And what's a hundred years of history compared to that? You know what kids?"

"Oh my God, he's going to do the entire speech." I said in horror.

"Does this man's evil know no bounds?" Xander acknowledged.

"... for all of you it may be that there is a place in Sunnydale's history, whether you like it or not." Wilkins continued. "It's been a long road getting here. For you... for Sunnydale. There has been achievement, joy, good times... and there has been grief. There's been loss. Some people who should be here today, aren't. And some people who are here today arguably shouldn't be." he said, glaring at us- particularly me. "But here we all are. Journey's end. And what is a journey? Is it just distance travelled? Time spent?" Wilkins shook his head. "No. It's what happens on the way. It's the things that happen to you. At the end of the journey you're not the same. Today is about change." He paused and wiped his brow with his handkerchief, then continued. "Graduation doesn't just mean your circumstances change, it means you do. You ascend… to a higher level. Nothing will ever be the same. Nothing." A shadow fell across the ceremony as we all looked up to see the eclipse starting.

"Here we go." Amy said. "I can feel the energies-"

"And so, as we look back on-" Mayor Wilkins continued, before flinching in pain. "-on the events that brought us to this day-" he stopped and winced.

"Come on..." Buffy murmured impatiently.

"We... must all..." Wilkins choked out, before screaming in agony and convulsing once, twice, before regaining possession of himself. "It has begun." he said hieratically. "My destiny. It's a little sooner than I expected... I had this whole section on civic pride..." He coughed, before shouting. "But I guess we'll just skip to the big finish!"

The Mayor twitched, expanded, and bulged from every orifice as his suit split open. He continued expanding, and expanding, and expanding-

"Phase one!" I muttered into my throat mike, and from his position inside the school Angel hit the fire alarm.

"NOW!" Buffy yelled, and the student body shot to its feet as one and started shucking its robes. Over us, the giant towering reptilian form of the snake-demon Olvikan finished coalescing...

"DRILL A!" Cordelia and Xander both yelled at the tops of their lungs, hitting their feet. "DRILL A! EVERYONE MOVE!" Prompted by both Principal Flutie's recent emphasis on fire drills and the weekend drills I'd led our pre-selected crowd control people through, everybody fell back.

The Mayor shrieked in fury and hunger, and began to lower its head to the attack-

"Phase two!" I called, and Amy cried out an incantation and the several dozen pre-enchanted fetishes we'd scattered and prepositioned all across the lawn and grounds combined with one of her most powerful barrier spells to throw up a force-field between the ranks of chairs where we'd been seated and the Mayor. His first rush bounced off of it and stopped.

"That's five minutes!" Amy called, falling back with the rest of us while the Mayor continued battering against the barrier, desperate to reach the students he needed to consume to start stabilizing the transformation.

"DOWN THE STEPS!" Xander called, pulling out his axe and stake from where he'd been wearing them slung around his neck under his graduation robes. Next to him Oz did the same. "STAY IN FORMATION!"

"FLAME UNITS!" Cordelia cried, snatching up her flamethrower from where we'd hidden it nearby in the bushes the night before under a camouflage tarp and the dozen or so auxiliaries- Jesse, Jonathan, and Andrew all among them- I'd spent the past couple of weekends training with them likewise. "FOLLOW ME!" she cried, and led them down the steps in a wave ahead of the evacuating students, to hit the line of vampires that had moved in to cut off our retreat and pen us in like a battering ram. They shrieked, ashed, and fell back out of the way, and the fleeing student body broke past the bottleneck on the steps, to stop when confronted by the dozens more vampires that the Mayor's minions had rounded up from all the vamps in town for extra muscle.

"Water gunners!" I called. "Ready!" Giving actual weapons to a mob of untrained and excited teenagers was begging for dozens of friendly fire casualties, but handing out Super-Soakers full of holy water wasn't a danger to anyone but the vampires. The only thing that a missed shot would do is get someone wet. Angel was the only person on our side potentially at risk here, and since Amy had helpfully cast a rainproofing spell on him earlier even he wouldn't. "FIRE!"

And with most of the entire graduating class drenching every vampire present with holy water, they were easy meat for the trained fighters of the Scooby Gang, backed up by our partially-trained auxiliaries drafted both from the more athletic students and the more reasonable and trustworthy parents that Buffy's mom and Amy's dad had been able to network with, as well as Giles, Jenny, and Angel themselves leading them. And with the holy water barrage disrupting the vamps, the skilled fighters dusting the stragglers and herding the rest, and the flamethrower artillery toasting any massed concentration of them with jets of concentrated propane- we'd made sure to give the civilian model burners only to the amateurs- we weren't losing a single student.

"Barrier's about to drop!" Amy called out from where she was at my side during the melee. "Fifteen seconds!"

"Oh, very nice!" the Mayor's voice boomed out from where Olvikan had just about finished smashing through the barrier. All of our casters, backed up by as many student pracitioners like Michael Csajak and Jonathan Levinson and suchlike that we could recruit to help, had spent days charging those barrier-tokens and even starved and almost entirely out of mana the Mayor had still needed only several minutes to tear through it. Yeah, we couldn't let him start feeding the final step of the transformation cycle. "Yes, starving after the transformation is the same way Lo-Hash died, wasn't it? But it's not going to work!"

And so here we were. Endgame. The Ascension had already started, the bank of accumulated Hellmouth energy the Mayor had painstakingly built up for a century had already been depleted, Whistler's warning was no longer operative, and it was perfectly safe to kill him. And we were totally going to kill him.

We'd all had our favorite weapons stashed underneath our graduation robes, and I'd brought a special one just for the occasion. A modified speargun with an amplified pneumatic charge, this thing would be just what we needed to put the final nail in the Mayor's coffin. Almost literally. Buffy had one as well, as did Angel and Xander. Amy, Giles, and Jenny also each had a spell pre-prepared that would suffice, but we hadn't taken any casualties and didn't need all the redundancies.

So the instant the barrier went down I leveled my launcher and took my shot simultaneously with Buffy's own, and both metal rods flew straight and true over a hundred meters to stick directly into the Mayor's hide.

"Spears?" Mayor Wilkins mocked, as the giant serpentine form of Olvikan began to flow down the steps towards us-

"BACK! FALL BACK!" Buffy said, not that she needed to urge people as they were already clearing out as fast as they could move.

"Those aren't spears." I said triumphantly. "Those are lightning rods."

Now warned of the danger, the Mayor immediately turned away from the crowd and headed back towards the school building to try and find cover- which is why I'd told him, of course. I wanted us all as far out of the potential blast radius as possible. And... just about... now!

I pulled the flare gun out of my waistband and fired it straight up, and the brilliant green magnesium charge popped at several hundred feet. It would be clearly visible from anywhere within over fifteen miles. Similar flares rocketed up from all the other Scooby Gang members as soon as they saw me fire mine- again, redundancy.

And with those flares, the final key player of our piece knew when to make his move. Mr. Madison was a senior shift supervisor at the electric company, and he'd made damn sure to be on-shift today- just as he'd made sure to help us gin up the paperwork for those certain pieces of custom metalwork I'd had made in LA, to have them shipped up here unobstrusively and even more unobstrusively installed by me supervising a hand-picked work crew. Installed at the base of the electrical high-tension tower with the best line of fire available down off the nearby hillside and into the school campus.

A line of fire for the Wulfenbach-Fairchild Mark II Shock Cannon I'd built a reproduction of, one of the Empire's most reliable and useful pieces of vehicle-mounted lightning artillery. This was the siege-class variant- something you mounted on a giant walker unit or a small airship for artillery fire vs. particularly obnoxious targets. Such as small hills, or large fortifications. Or giant rampaging monsters.

But that was when they were fueled by Europan powerplants. This particular shock cannon had been spliced directly into the main trunk line for the entire town of Sunnydale, the high-tension line running upstate to the main power grid intended to supplement the local power plant in overload situations. And with Mr. Madison having rerigged the switchboard, we momentarily browned out several surrounding counties with all the draw we'd spliced to the one cannon alone.

And so the single biggest goddamned lightning bolt that anyone had ever seen crashed down once, twice, three times before the terminally overloaded Shock Cannon we'd prepositioned it as a disposable piece of remote-controlled artillery finally gave up the ghost and melted itself, and the Mayor and everything within a hundred feet of him was blasted into free-floating particles.

The blast only barely missed incinerating any of us thanks to the distance between us and the target, the precision with which it had homed on the keyed and primed Sparkwork disposable target designators we'd stuck in the Mayor's hide, and the fact that a second line of pre-enchanted fetishes - these being for a protective spell to safely short electrical discharges to ground - had been worked into the sidewalk in front of the school, so that none of the corona effects would actually reach out into the courtyard or street where we were.

Silence fell over the entire battlefield. What very few vampires hadn't been dusted were now running for their lives, and nobody could even see the Mayor anymore. Or much of anything else, until the spots from that flash all faded from our eyes.

"Did we get him?" Buffy asked as everyone present stared at the cratered and burning school building in awe. "Please tell me we got him."

"He's gone." Giles said, him and Jenny and Amy having all simultaneously cast their detection spells to make sure. "We've won."

"WE GOT HIM!" Cordelia yelled from where she was standing triumphantly on top of a nearby car, and the entire class roared as one.

* * * * *​

Amy POV:

And just like that, it was over.

The Battle of Graduation Day hadn't seen a single friendly casualty. Not a student, not a teacher, not anyone. It had been a masterpiece of precision tactics, as set up and executed by one of the Wulfenbach Empire's most experienced military officers just like he'd coordinated a hundred other battles vs. mad scientists and giant monsters. Not that he could ever explain that to anyone except me or Angel.

But right now it didn't matter how he'd come to us, or why. What mattered is that he'd been here when we needed him. When I'd needed him. I'd tried to tell him several times on prior occasions just how much he'd done for me, and all he'd done was smile and say that that was nothing as compared to how much we'd all done for him. Of course he'd say that.

"I can't believe how lightly we got off." Xander said as we all drew together after the immediate response by all the vehicles with sirens, and questions, and being checked out by EMS, and everything. We each sat or stood on the nearby curb looking at all the commotion as the high school kept burning, and let it all sink in.

"And the young man who helped us achieve it all... we'll have to learn how to do without him from now on." Giles sighed. "I've taken extensive notes on this campaign, everything we achieved and the methods by which we formulated it- the Council really needs to analyze them and start refining how we approach strategy and tactics."

"Where'd he even get that giant lightning gun?" Cordelia asked curiously.

"An experimental weapons design." Angel said truthfully but incompletely. "From where he was before. Not practical for routine field use here, but..." he shrugged. "This wasn't routine."

"And so the freak occurrence here has a freak natural explanation that will help it be memory-holed." Buffy said. "Certainly beats trying to hush up a giant terrorist incident."

"Explosives as diversion." Cordelia chuckled.

"The best cons work by showing the mark exactly what he expects to see and thinks he understands." Jenny acknowledged.

"Guys." Oz said into the silence. "Take a moment and realize. We survived."

"We sure did." Buffy agreed companionably.

"Not the battle." Oz said with just a tiny trace of his old quiet humor. "High school."

"Where's Jonathan?" Buffy asked, suddenly looking around. "He didn't take off already, did he?"

"We'd already all said our goodbyes." I said quietly. "And... he was really tempted to stay."

"Rip the band-aid off fast." Xander agreed, giving me a searching look. "You'll be okay?"

"I will be." I agreed. "Maybe I'll sulk a little in the days to come, but-" I nodded. "We knew this had to be done, and that we could do it."

"I will cheerfully enable all of the sulking and chocolate therapy that you care to indulge in." Buffy said compassionately to me. "And we are totally roomie'ing it up at college. I call dibs right now."

"Thanks." I said to her. "I wouldn't know what I'd do without you guys."

"A whole lot less." Cordelia said cheerfully. "Now me, I'm off to college in LA what with what we so cheerfully scammed out of that creep before we fried him-" she grinned wickedly, before continuing on in a friendlier tone of voice. "But don't you be strangers, okay? I won't be."

"Certainly not." Angel agreed.

"I've got to go find a few things I lost." Oz said quietly. "Don't know how long it'll take me. But I'll be back."

"We'll be here." Xander said.

(*cue mood music*)

Some instinct prompted me to turn around, and the sounds of the friendly discussion faded out as I turned to see Jonathan standing in the distance next to one of the fire trucks. Even at all this distance we still could stare directly into each other's eyes.

I cheated, just a little, just a tiny little, and cast the same connection-spell that I'd used once when captured by the Delta Zeta Kappas, and our hearts connected again.

Longing. Affection. Resignation. And... I smiled, and felt him smile along with me. But there wasn't any despair, not from either of us.

And there still was-

I love you. I thought to him, and saw him nod.

I love you too. he thought back, and then my view of him was momentarily cut off by several firemen walking around the truck. And after they'd passed by, he was gone.

I dropped the spell and turned back to Buffy and my friends, smiling sadly to myself. I didn't know if I'd see Jonathan again before the jump was over, but at least I knew that he'd be fine. And so would I, eventually.

"All right, guys." I said to them all. "Let's go home."

* * * * *​

Author's Notes: And so season 3 comes to an end, and Jonathan leaves Sunnydale at least. The jump isn't over, but we will start moving into more summarized than episodic adventures after this. So yeah. It took us 33 parts to cover 3 years... the remaining years will use less parts.

So, who here called Willow permanently losing her magic but being left alive? I don't think anyone did. Because that part was planned- I had it pencilled in from the beginning of the Dark Willow subplot. She sold out everything she ever had for power, and now she has to live the rest of her life without it. And while I'd originally planned a big dramatic witch-on-witch showdown... I realized that one, Amy had already gotten that versus her mother and two, that's just not remotely how Jonathan fights and he'd be massively OOC if he did.

I'd like to think author Jeconais in his 'Broken Faith' fanfic on FFA for coming up with the 'Everybody gets a squirt gun full of holy water' tactic to get around the usual side effects of giving several hundred highly excited and untrained teenagers unfamiliar weapons while still getting an effective anti-vampire combat tactic out of them.

So no. Jonathan didn't forget he was a Spark. And no. He wasn't busting it out to trivialize every problem and kill all the drama. He used it when he felt it appropriate to use, and 'appropriate' is a thing highly dependent on context. (Hell, note the effort he went to here to disguise his attack as a 'freak lightning strike'. An obvious laser cannon would have drawn far too much DoD attention he didn't want.)

Those who have watched canon will note that several scenes from canon were kept in practically word for word. You're goddamn right they were. Moments that good deserve the homage.

And yes, Jonathan and Amy totally got the same goodbye scene that Buffy and Angel got in canon s3. Although with less angst, and slightly more empathy spells.

 

[cliffc999]

Jonathan POV:

I finished cleaning up the last of the Shock Cannon's remains by the simple expedient of hooking the trailer I'd left it parked on to my car and driving them into the Storage Facility. I'd already pulled out my bugs and phone taps and everything the night before, so that any possible official investigation into the events of Graduation Day would have the absolute minimum to work with and none of my technology to reverse-engineer.

A professional extraction. Leave no footprints in the sand.

Barring "unforeseen... consequences" I'd have five more years in the Buffyverse. I already anticipated coming back to Sunnydale for at least one more big-A Apocalypse, given how things seemed to run, not to mention I'd want to keep touching base with Angel. But for right now I needed to get back into "rogue demon hunter" mode, both to neutralize Wolfram & Hart's potential threat-in-being re: the voiding of my official identity and to get some time and distance. Still, there was a whole world out there to explore.

So when I woke up back in the Storage Facility after having gone to sleep in a truck stop motel bed my first night on the road, several hundred miles outside of Sunnydale, I was mildly surprised that he'd pulled the plug this early.

"You... disappoint me, Mister Fairchild." the 'Benefactor' glared at me.

"I'm sure I did." I said thoughtfully, rubbing my chin as we faced each other in the white void of the Storage Facility. "And let me guess how. I was supposed to be lying alongside my girlfriend tonight, sleeping the sleep of the just and flush with victory. Relaxed, and happy, and looking forward to at least the next few years together. Desperately clutching at any happiness I could, blanking out the awareness of-"

"You think you've BEATEN me?!?" the 'Benefactor' cut me off in a towering rage, and I smiled inwardly to myself. That I'd gotten him to lose his composure this early meant that he was either so perfectly faking everything I had no chance, or-

"I didn't beat you at all." I said proudly. "Amy did." I quirked a lip. "She was right, wasn't she? You only paid attention to my probable reactions."

"I will-" he hissed in a rage.

"Hold up there, pal!" Whistler's voice broke in as he drove into the Storage Facility in my car, and that did legitimately surprise the hell out of me. "You ain't quite finished pulling him out yet, and that means I can still come in!" he finished, as he opened the driver's side door and stepped out.

"Leave us at once!" the 'Benefactor' thundered at Whistler.

"Make me." he scoffed. "You've been so stuck to 'letter of the rules and not the spirit' that my chain of command is fed up with you, pal. So if you can abuse all the technicalities, so can we!" he finished, touching my arm-

"THEN THIS JUMP IS OFFICIALLY ENDED!" the 'Benefactor' screeched in outrage, and with a flare of power that sent me flying Whistler vanished from the Storage Facility in a clash of thunder. My car still remained, though.

"You think any local Power can grant you freedom from me? Fool! There is no such hope for you!" the 'Benefactor' thundered at me. "You will become what I have set out to make you, if it takes me eternity to mold you!"

I looked up at the 'Benefactor' defiantly from where I knelt on the floor, and then shrugged and kicked my legs around to bend them into the lotus position. I started quietly breathing in and out.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Meditating." I said insolently. "You know, you really shouldn't have pulled this on someone you extracted post-2016 from an Earth that had Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Because that means they saw 'Doctor Strange'."

"You think you can-" the Benefactor tried to intimidate me, and I stared up at him serenely.

"'Benefactor', I've come to bargain." I said smugly.

* * * * *​

It took almost a full year of me living in my Warehouse off of the Necessary Supplies to finally get the 'Benefactor' to realize that yes, I really was potentially ready to do this for eternity. No Weapons, No Hope meant that I had the literally infinite willpower to hold out without going insane from boredom or stress, even if it was direly uncomfortable. My occult Library meant I at least had some things to read. Even toilet paper was provided for; it was part of 'the basics' of the Supplies. Which had spared me the need to buy pallets of it at the Costco and stockpile it in the Warehouse, even if I had been stashing other sundry things in here as the years had gone by.

And it's not as if the Benefactor could just arbitrarily strip me of my powers. Sure, a Power-Loss Drawback could do that... except I wasn't in a jump. I was in-between the Buffyverse jump and the next one, as the Benefactor had yet to offer me a new jump-doc given our current impasse. And that meant no new Drawbacks could be chosen for me until I actually finished and confirmed a new build for a new jump.

Which is why I'd chosen to go for this gambit the instant Whistler had clued me in that the 'Benefactor' was legitimately stuck to an external set of rules. If he hadn't been, if it had just been a gentleman's agreement, he'd simply have chucked Whistler out by force majeure. Whistler wasn't the PTB even if he was a messenger for them, and the 'Benefactor' could have overpowered him easily. As is, he'd had to make an official resolution that the jump was fully, entirely, in all respects over before Whistler had to go.

And that was why Whistler had done it in the first place, of course. By this point I knew full well what his 'accidental' reveals looked like. He'd deliberately set up the confrontation so as to give me the last piece of the puzzle that he could give me- that I had actual hope.

For all his power, which was truly immense, and for all that I was deeply out of my depth in this situation, which I truly was, the 'Benefactor' did not have 100% arbitrary power over me. He had vast power over me but there was a cosmic rulebook somewhere out there that he had to at least technically stay within, and even though I had very little- virtually none, in fact- idea of what was written in it the simple fact that it existed at all meant that I had a chance. The longer this went on, the more I could learn, step by step by tiny painful step until I finally learned how to rules-lawyer myself out of this jumpchain. Or until I finally attained enough power to-

Well, let's just say it makes an incredible difference to actually have something, however hypothetical, to actually look forward to.

And so my current pose of defiance. First off, I needed to keep psychologically probing the 'Benefactor' for reactions and see if he actually could be induced to bargain. Second off, I was testing one of my first deductions about The Rules- that even with all the red-text bullshit in the world I still had to click 'Accept' on the final build to start the next jump, and that he couldn't.

Because if that were true then meant that for as long as I was prepared to do a sit-down strike in the Storage Facility, myself and the 'Benefactor' were each other's prisoners. And he was the guy with a potential infinity of other things he could be doing with his time, not me!

And when my sit-down strike didn't end with an act of force majeure then I considered another hypothesis successfully tested. The Benefactor really couldn't strip my powers, fuck with my mind, or otherwise coerce me outside the framework of Drawbacks. If he had had that ability, then my sit-down strike would have ended almost as immediately as it began with my ass being thrown bodily into the next jump whether I wanted to go or not.

So by all appearances, the 'Benefactor' was either notably incomplete on his understanding of human psychology or else notably immature. As in "The Squire of Gothos" immature. It really didn't take much- relatively speaking- for either myself and Amy's actions or Whistler's provocation of him to knock him off balance and into a tantrum. And unless he was perfectly faking all the data I could possibly gather- which, remember, means that nothing I did had any point anyway so why not still keep trying- he had not expected Amy's decision to spring me free from the emotional trap he'd tried to snap shut around me just before the jaws closed.

Which meant that the 'Benefactor' could potentially gather any arbitrary amount of data with his powers, but his comprehension of all the facets of that data could still be inaccurate or incomplete. He could still make mistakes.

And that meant that I still had a chance.

"Very well." the 'Benefactor' finally said, after our year of mutual hell had dragged on. "I concede that-"

He hadn't had to actually live in the Warehouse with me the entire time- and thank God for that- but he still obviously had some greater objective in mind for my Jumpchain, and if I chose to remain in the Hell of White Boredom for too long then he'd be getting behind schedule on it. If 'schedule' applied to a being who had the relationship with time that he did. Although 'duration' clearly could.

And with that concession from the 'Benefactor', I knew that my sit-down strike had won. I began to ask for the set of concessions I'd already chosen to bargain for-

-and then an insight exploded in my mind of such breathtaking scope that everything changed.

Because when Whistler had touched my arm immediately before the 'Benefactor' had ended the Buffyverse jump and cast him out, he'd implanted a subliminal message deep in my mind where even I wouldn't be aware of it. One that the 'Benefactor' wouldn't see implanted because it had been timed precisely to coincide with his moment of rage upon ending the jump, during which the 'Benefactor' simply would not be paying proper attention to notice anything that subtle. Whistler and the PTBs had known the 'Benefactor's' psychological limitations even better than I did. And the message had been programmed to not be triggered until after I had reached a moment where the 'Benefactor' had legitimately and truly failed to get his own way in a confrontation with me. Until after I had already won a victory against him.

"You must warn your brother. Beware the Renegade." the little lizard-like construct had told Gilgamesh when he'd found it amongst the lab exhibits in the depths of Raven's Nest. The Powers that Be of the Buffyverse hadn't arranged for that creature to be there, the multiverse of the Girl Genius setting being entirely beyond their reach or jurisdiction, but the instant Whistler had first seen that memory in my mind he had recognized what that creature must be simply from Gilgamesh's description of it alone.

The Winslow was an omniversal mystery, something known to the creator-powers of more multiverses than could be dreamed of. It had no beginning and no end, and was absolutely indestructible by any force or any being. It was a fragment of some higher order of reality that lay above even the nigh-omnipotent patrons of multiverses or dimensions... or Jumpchains. It was worshipped as the highest possible sign of divinity in untold realities, and completely ignored and unknown in at least as many more. It was also a small, silly-looking reptiloid creature that spent the vast majority of its time inanely chirping "Hi!" in response to any statement and would only very rarely make vitally important oracular pronouncements of profound meaning and annoying subtlety of interpretation, usually offhand and when people weren't paying attention.

And it had appeared to give Gilgamesh a warning to pass on to me about the "Benefactor" - no, the Malefactor. A warning that the Malefactor would overlook because I had overlooked it, would consider of no importance because even though he could read my mind from top to bottom you still couldn't read what wasn't there. A warning that would need a separate key to unlock its meaning, a key that had been provided to me by Whistler with his message about what precisely the Winslow was, and how cosmically important any warning it gave must be.

With that one missing piece of the puzzle finally given to me, it all dropped into place. The simple revelation that my Jumpchain needed to beware a Renegade - and it had to be my status as a Jumper that had prompted the Winslow to involve itself, because no individual human would otherwise be of such omniversal importance as to have the Winslow make a trip solely for the purpose of warning them to avoid a dire fate - meant that I could readily figure out the rest. The sheer intellect granted by my Spark, the in-depth knowledge of plots and plans I had from Grandma's Scheming, the education in intrigue and strategy that Baron Wulfenbach had so painstakingly given me, the in-depth understanding of the psychology of sadists and monsters I had received from Angel, it all came together in a mosaic of facts and deductions that led inescapably to one conclusion.

Only two beings would possibly be involved in my entire Jumpchain from beginning to end, seeing as how I could have no Companions. So by inescapable logic, either myself or the Malefactor must be - or would become - the Renegade. But the Renegade could not be the Malefactor, for I had just proven that he could not set aside the rules of the Jumpchain even when he most wished to. And that meant that the Renegade was me... or, more accurately, that he would be me.

Angelus had been one of the greatest masters of psychologically breaking down people in history, and I had been Angel's pupil. And one of the lessons he had taught me was that a fallen hero could be more terrifying than any pure monster that ever lived. Even Angelus had ultimately fled from Daniel Holtz - a mortal vampire hunter - in fear, and that because Angelus had succeeded in wounding Holtz' spirit when he'd slain the man's wife and turned his young daughter, then left her behind for Holtz to find. The man had been forced to make his own child face the sunrise and be burnt to ash rather than allow her to live on as an undead scourge, and from that day forward the good and heroic man that had been Daniel Holtz had vanished. Vanished and replaced by a vengeful, half-mad revenant that retained every bit of the impossible valor and dedication that had driven him as a hero, but without any trace of the compassion or mercy that had driven him to protect people. Angelus had sought to extinguish the light in a man's heart and replace it with darkness, and he had succeeded all too well.

And my entire Jumpchain had been an attempt to reproduce that success with me. For the Malefactor's goal had to have been to slowly forge, to shape and create, a Renegade Jumper, an existence that lived only to hunt and torment and break other Jumpers, a nigh-unstoppable dark paragon of malice that had forever lost hope of finding any joy or peace on his own Jumpchain and was full of such dark envy, such hopeless rage, that he would devote the rest of eternity to denying other Jumpers what he could no longer have himself. And one that would so with far more effectiveness than could be done simply by recruiting a personage such as the Joker, or the Red Skull - or Angelus - and granting them vast power. For while all of those - entities - were indeed depraved and sadistic beyond imagining, along with many other like them across all the possible realities, they were also ultimately weak. They liked soft targets, they didn't like to fight at bad odds, and they'd stayed in the game as long as they had by knowing when to live to fight another day. Which would mean that against other Jumpers, people who themselves could ascend to arbitrary heights of power and who would long since have found their own compelling immortal motivations, their own causes, their own infinite willpower perks, and other such things, they would ultimately be at a disadvantage.

No, to tackle those kinds of odds you would need a hero. Someone who had devoted their life to punching uphill, to tackling impossible odds and triumphing anyway. Someone who simply wouldn't give up for as long as he had a cause to truly believe in. Someone who could tackle the most quixotic of quests and come out the other side, who could not be swayed from their course by any bribe or threat. Someone like me.

But someone who would have to be broken, to be twisted, to be driven just insane enough in just the right way so that they would devote themselves to so malicious a cause as trying to blight and destroy as many other Jumpers and their Jumpchains as possible. And so the Malefactor had chosen for me. Forcing me to take The Spark, to give me the potential for cosmic madness. Denying me Companions, meaning that every new Jump would only scar me with the pain of losing everyone again and again, like repeated electroshock aversion therapy, until the very act of Jumping at all caused me such conditioned agony that I would break my own Jumpchain to escape it and become a Renegade Jumper in truth - but by which point I would so hate Jumping, so hate 'Benefactors', and so hate myself that I would unleash myself on all other Jumpers I could reach in an omniversal abused-turns-abuser cycle.

Because the Malefactor would only let me slip my chains after I had reached such a breaking point in my soul.

This entire exercise had been the Malefactor's attempt to grief his fellow Benefactors, to twist and ruin their Jumpers and their Jumpchains in a way that gave him entirely plausible deniability. He hadn't done anything, after all, except use a slightly unusual set of variant rules for a Jumpchain, no individual rule of which was anything out of the ordinary. There had been no-Companion Jumpchains before, as well as Jumpchains where the Benefactor was allowed to make build 'suggestions', and even Jumpchains that could not end until a particular scenario goal had been completed. That the Malefactor had found a particular combination of those rules, along with a particularly selected personality, that would so precisely line up to eventually produce a Jumper so far gone off the rails? Well, that wasn't his fault, it was mine. Such a black swan event of a mad Renegade could have happened to anyone, really!

Except that his plan had one key flaw, one strategic weakness. It would only work if I was unaware of it. Allowing me to take No Weapons, No Hope or an infinite willpower perk similar to it had been a necessary part of the plan - without that kind of limitless mental endurance, the process of reforging me into a Renegade would shatter me into a nonfunctional mess before it was anywhere near completed. But with that kind of endurance, it would be impossible to make me do anything. I could be led, knowingly or otherwise, into a situation. I could be tricked, or gaslighted, or simply presented with a "heads they win, tails I lose" choice and then left alone to make it. But I could not be moved against my will, if I set that will to simply never compromising. As my sit-down strike had just proven.

I had originally intended merely to force a concession or two from the Malefactor, such as being allowed to pick my own Drawbacks without any input from him. And he would have accepted that, because while it would have made his plan more difficult and take more time he would still have eventually won. But now his game had been ruined by the Winslow, as aided by a set of local Powers that he'd considered barely up to be worth negotiating with, and the Malefactor knew as well as I did that I would sooner sit here until the end of all eternity than allow him to push me one more step towards his goal of maliciously interfering with all the works of his peers.

"No." the Malefactor said, staring at me in horror. Having entered this bound space along with me he could follow my thoughts as swiftly as I made them - but he could not change them. He could not make me forget, he could not make me progress the Chain, and he could not make me yield. And that meant- he had lost everything.

"Checkmate." I said to him calmly.

"Two! TWO INSIGNIFICANT JUMPS! That is ALL that you have had, and you think that makes you WORTHY of opposing me?" he roared.

I flipped him the rigid digit of scorn without rising from the lotus position I was sitting in and smirked. "Pond scum is worthy of opposing you, asshole. You are so petty that it blows the mind. All that effort, all that power, all that subtlety of thought and execution, and all devoted towards what is ultimately the pettiest of PVP griefing. No, it's not even PVP, it's teamkilling! I've got no idea of what sort of society you Jumpchain patrons have, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a cooperative one!"

"There are elements of- aesthetic competition." the Malefactor corrected me. "But yes. Directly opposing each other is against the code under which we operate."

"Hence your plan to twist a heroic Jumper into a free agent obsessed with tearing down Jumpchains as much as possible. A Renegade whose actions could not be - officially - blamed on you."

"Obvious deduction is obvious." the Malefactor sneered. "So apply the full force of your profound intellect into reasoning out why I have not already yielded to the 'inevitable'."

I felt my spirits dampen as I realized that the Malefactor still had at least one play left. I refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing me curse, though, even if he could already hear me doing it. "You're going to leave a portion of your awareness in this space to lock me in place, and then try again with someone else until you succeed. Because the Dr. Strange gambit of 'we're each other's prisoners' only works if we're both limited to one instance."

"And since duplication and multitasking and multi-presence perks exist elsewhere on the Jumpchain, therefore I have access to such powers as well." the Malefactor sneered.

"But, I'm still your best chance. By definition any secondary candidate you select after me is precisely that, secondary. With your power, you'd have picked the best of all available candidates for your first draw. So I still have that much to bargain with - the chance that I might change my mind and continue my chain after all."

"What do you propose?" the Malefactor said, with a cruelty vast enough to consume galaxies.

"A binding exchange. Three boons, in return for my continuing to Jump along this chain as best I possibly can. But the boons must be granted without artifice, deception, or reservation, and may potentially be anything within your power."

"I will observe your requests to the letter, and only to the letter." the Malefactor said, not needing to actually pause for thought to evaluate all the possibilities and potentialities of such an offer. "And you may not ask for escape from this chain, or power rivalling my own. But I agree to your terms."

"First boon - Don't know my next moves."

The Malefactor hissed in rage, as it went blind to both my thoughts, my intentions, and my future. Perhaps it could still cheat this restriction, but it knew that I would not continue Jumping if I did so, and that was a prize it still greatly desired to win. Perhaps it was genuinely and truly bound to the terms. Plus, of course, it was confident that even without foreknowledge, I could not possibly conceive of something so subtle and profound that it could not, in the fullness of an eternally long Jumpchain, twist it to its advantage anyway.

"Second boon - Wager the ownership of my chain with me on a game of regulation tournament chess."

"Fool." the Malefactor sneered, relaxing for the first time our confrontation began. "You not only ask for the absurd, but you forgot to forbid me to use my abilities within the game! Did you think that simply denying me the ability to foretell your moves would render me incapable of beating you? Do you have any idea of how thoroughly you are outclassed mentally by an existence of my order of reality? And chess, no less! A finite game of mathematical patterns, a solved game! One that I cannot possibly lose at to you, as I can solve any finite algorithm in a single instant of time! Even though I have to play out this farce to the end by the tournament rules of chess instead of simply winning by fiat, my victory is no less inevitable for that!"

He summoned a chessboard into existence with the wave of his hand. I idly noted that the white pieces were facing me.

"First move? Generous of you." I said, and moved my king's pawn forward two spaces - the single commonest opening in chess - and hit the chess clock.

"First move, last move, it matters not. It is impossible for you to win." the Malefactor sneered. "You might as quit right now."

And then the sneer fell off his face as I broke out in a mocking grin, him having handed me the perfect straight line for what I had already reasoned out the instant I'd bought a blind spot to maneuver in. And the instant I did so, the Malefactor's face fell in horror because he didn't need to read my mind or precog my future to know what my next words would be.

"Third boon. Tip your king." I pointed at the chessboard in front of him, and - compelled by the terms to which he'd bound himself - the Malefactor was inexorably forced to reach out and slowly, deliberately, knock over the chess piece that I'd specified.

Which by the rules of chess meant that he'd forfeited the game.

SUBJECT: Jonathan Fairchild
STATUS: Assignments Completed - 2
ERROR: Jumper ID crosslinked to Administrator permissions. Ontological paradox detected.
ALERTING DUTY SYSADMIN

* * * * *​

I floated in the void, with the short red-haired woman - well, not-a-woman - calling herself "Jump-Chan" looking at me compassionately. She'd appeared the instant that the Malefactor had lost the wager with me, having been summoned via an emergency system maintenance alert by the sheer impossible paradox of a Jumper actually gaining Administrator control of their own chain. It had been the work of a moment for her to gain the truth from my mind and catch the Malefactor red-handed in the midst of his own plot, and he was now bundled off to face the judgement of his peers.

And after copious apologies on behalf of the Jumpchain community, she'd offered me a choice. A whole range of choices, actually. To continue Jumping under her personal aegis, with or without the most generous 'Creative Mode' rules possible. To return home to where I'd originally left from. To be introduced to other ROBs who adminstered other CYOAs, if I were unable or unwilling to trust my fate to a Jumpchain ever again. But I'd told her that there was really only one thing I wanted.

"Well, two things." I sighed. "But it's not as if I can have them both, so-" I bid a wistful farewell to Amy in my heart, as her and I had already mutually agreed upon who and which world would have first claim upon me. "Send me back to Europa, please. To where and when I left it."

Jump-Chan tilted her head to look at me curiously. "You're sure you don't want anything else?"

"Well it's not as if I can go to both places, can I? I mean, even if you copy me, that's still not the same me in both places."

"True enough." she nodded, before one corner of her mouth quirked up in a wry grin. "But sometimes life can surprise you."

And before I could ask her what she meant, she faded away, and all my memories of a 'Jumpchain' with her-

* * * * *​

Author's Note: And so, here we are. I have just one epilogue left to write, and it'll all be wrapped up.

The Winslow is canon to the Gaullimaufry setting by Phil & Kaja Foglio, where it originated, and has cameo'd in multiple other comics that they've written and drawn, including Girl Genius.

 

[cliffc999]

Jonathan POV:

Rabennest, Europa

I had this damnable sense of deja vu I couldn't shake, as if- as if I'd been somewhere else? Doing something else? And there'd been this girl-?

I shook my head and tried to clear my thoughts. I must be exhausted if I was daydreaming like this in the middle of a combat situation. A couple of deep breaths, the proper focusing regimen, and my alertness began to return and I reoriented on where I was and what I was doing. That horrific robotic version of Lucrezia had left to go fight the Baron's approaching forces, and we'd just finished tricking Lucrezia and the Geisterdamen into putting Agatha in the Summoning Engine, only the mind-trap we'd reverse-engineered from Zola had meant that all of Lucrezia's memories were helplessly stored for Agatha to use as we see fit. Then her surprise army of dingbots had let us defeat the Geisterdamen, and now-

"Speaking of copies, let's get the hell out of here before the other one gets back." I said, clapping my hands to get everyone's attention. "Because I don't think we have much time!"

"Jonathan's right, we have to go now." Gilgamesh commanded, and after taking a brief pause to give Lady Vrin a proper funeral pyre with one of our death rays we all turned to book it out of there as quickly as possible.

Our return to the surface was largely without incident, and we only needed to fight our way through several stragglers in the lower levels before we ran into the rest of the Jagers clearing the base from the top down. It wasn't until we reached the surface that the surprises started, although I should have realized something was up from the shit-eating grin on Higgs' face as his troops fell in around us as escorts.

We stepped out from the depths of Rabennest onto the airship dock we'd seized with the L-79's assault drop to see her floating in the air positively surrounded by her sister airships. Dozens of the most advanced ships-of-the-line greeted our eyes, triumphantly decked out in Wulfenbach, Fifty Families, and even British heraldry. My sharp eyes picked out Devastator, the Baron's favorite flagship used in fleet actions not large enough to be led by Castle Wulfenbach itself, as well as Prince Martellus' flagship Archimedes and HMS Royal Victrix of all ships.

The Baron, Prince Martellus, and Trelawney Thorpe were expected sights amongst the welcoming party, but the presence of Queen Albia herself was anything but. We came to a stunned halt as even Tarvek, let alone us, were at a loss to immediately sort out exactly what diplomatic protocol would best be used in this situation, only to have our efforts rendered moot by the Baron rapidly stepping forward to sweep both Gil and I into a rib-crushing embrace, one in each arm.

"Oh my foolish, foolish boys." he said heavily, as we gaped at each other in stunned astonishment. "Thank Heaven you're both safe."

"Father." Gil managed to reply, at a loss for any further words, while I was still just trying to figure out why the hell I was being treated equal to Gilgamesh at all. After all, I was merely one of the Baron's senior officers, not his family-

Klaus let go of us and stepped back to give us a swift but searching stare to see that we were unwounded and otherwise well, then nodded to us both and stepped forward to confront Zeetha. The two of them stared at each other in an expectant silence, until Klaus could no longer restrain his smile and she began to hopefully grin back at him in response.

"Daughter." he greeted her, to the visible astonishment of everyone on the dock except our own party and Her Majesty. "Welcome to Europa."

"Hi Dad." Zeetha squeaked out, her eyes leaking happy tears, and then the two of them were hugging with an even more powerful rib-squeezer than the Baron had given us.

"Well, cousin." I turned to see Martellus greeting Tarvek with a manly handshake and an even more manful attempt at sang-froid. "And here I thought I'd had an eventful morning."

"It was certainly an experience." Tarvek replied to him urbanely. "I take it that all of these felicitous arrivals means that the Lucrezia clank is no longer a concern?"

"That it does, Prince Tarvek." Queen Albia stepped forward to greet us, and we all bowed our heads slightly in welcome. "She is eliminated from the timestream itself, thoroughly and utterly. And you- all of you- have my eternal gratitude for what you have done to allow me the opportunity to avenge my murdered sister queens."

"You're most welcome, Your Majesty." Gilgamesh answered for our group, both the Baron and Zeetha still so busy catching up that they weren't even paying attention to the goings-on. I noticed Albia's eye-line briefly wander over towards the reuniting pair, and a warm little smile momentarily cross her face before she returned to our conversation.

"Lady Heterodyne." the Queen greeted Agatha. "We see that your trap for Lucrezia's mind-state has been a complete success."

Agatha didn't even bother asking Albia how she'd figured that out, or denying its existence. "Yes, Your Majesty. I already have everything we need to save all the victims of Slaver Wasps that we can reach, and forever immunize against their infection."

"I see." the Baron said, finally turning to rejoin the rest of us. "You intended Agatha to be brought to the Summoning Engine not merely as a means to locate it but also to capture Lucrezia's mind for interrogation. This chain of events was neither improvisation nor failure, it was your strategy all along." He turned to me as I was still dealing with that- "And that explains what you were doing onboard the Castle examining Zola while I was out."

"Yes sir." I didn't even try to deny it.

"Father, I take full responsibility for-" Gilgamesh began.

"-leading all of your friends off on another one of those adventures that you never tell me about until after you get back from them." he said tolerantly. "Yes, yes, we'll discuss how I intend to remonstrate with you and your brother for that later."

My blood turned to ice as I realized exactly what the Baron must have just done. Oh crap, I'd been adopted? Yes, that was a logical response to Gilgamesh being in deadly danger on the scale with which we'd been exposing ourselves, but-

"I think you've already started my punishment, si- Father." I heard my voice saying.

"Hrmph." the Baron grunted, unable to keep us both from seeing his smile. The one we knew clearly meant Well done, all of you even when he was stingily not saying it out loud.

Oh, so that's how he wanted it? All right, Dad, then two could play at that game.

"Well, as long as the topic of 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' is on the table, I suppose there is one more thing." I grinned back at him challengingly, and then turned and knelt in front of Violetta.

"Lady Mondarev, would you marry me?"

* * * * *​

Sunnydale, California

I stood outside the door of Giles' house, the one I'd originally rented to him and had ultimately had Angel sell to him for me when I'd left Sunnydale.

I remembered the Jumpchain, and my life in Europa up until the moment that chain had ended. I remembered coming here, and leaving here when the Malefactor had ended my chain on Graduation Day. I remembered my final confrontation with him, the revelation of his plan, and meeting Jump-Chan-

And then- Europa again? The memories were barely there, and all blurred. I could-

"You told me I couldn't give you both, and I took that as a challenge." I heard Jump-Chan's voice say inside my head. "So you went back and had a long and happy life in Europa with Violetta. Heck, you both ended up as Baron and Baroness of Wulfenbach while Gilgamesh and Seffie went on to inherit an Empire instead, and Tarvek and Agatha went on to- but that's not important right now. Short version, you had your life there, and now it's time for you to pick up sticks here."

"So that's why I can only remember the bare fact that I did get my full life in Europa, but not what it was? So that Amy and I get a fair second chance here, without me carrying any more baggage into that than I was carrying for my first three years here?"

"Yup! Seriously, kid, you thought that me of all people didn't know how to properly play the reincarnation game? I am the past grand mistress of that art form!"

"Thank you, Jump-Chan." I said simply. "I assume I get all the memories back when I finally pass on?"

"Spoilers!" she said impishly. "But seriously, Jonathan, we owe you big for exposing the Malefactor's plans to us."

"What did you do with him, anyway?"

"I gave him his greatest wish. He wanted to create a malicious, griefing Jumper, and so I reincarnated him as a mortal, blanked out enough of his memory to keep him from godmoding or strategy-guiding his way out, and gave him a fair chance to earn his way back to a Planeswalker Spark by going on a Jumpchain of his own." I 'heard' her snort in laughter. "But going by the form card, I don't think ol' "Devon Stone" is at all likely to go the distance. Still, I gave him a chance!"

"I assume I'll find out what all that means when I'm done here?" I said.

"Clever kid!" she smirked. "Yeah, us Benefactors have something very nice planned for you when you're done with your lifetime here. But we won't dump it on you without asking, and we're certainly not going to rush you into anything. Say hi to Whistler for me, and I'll catch you on the other side."

I 'felt' the mental connection to Jump-Chan end, and knew of a certainty that we wouldn't be speaking again until I'd completed my lifetime here. I also knew that she'd inserted me some months after I'd left - it was early in the spring of Amy and Buffy's freshman year at UC Sunnydale, and they were having a weekend Scooby meeting-

I knocked on the door.

"I've got it!" I heard Amy's voice call out, and I took a measured step back from the door, my hands in plain view, as I tried to compose myself.

"Can I-" she asked, my heart going a mile a minute as the door opened to reveal her. Her jaw dropped in shock, and both of her hands came up in a warding gesture. Yeah, there was a reason I was holding very still with my hands in plain view. I'd trained her, and I knew exactly what she was thinking-

Her face fell from wariness into astonishment as she cast a hasty detection spell, then a more elaborate one. My own poker face uncontrollably began to slip into a hopeful yearning as she began a tremulous smile, and with a single hand gesture I felt her connection-spell snap into place, the empathic link touching both our hearts. She felt the truth of my existence, the depth of our mutual love- and my certainty that this time, I was here to stay.

"Jonathan!" I 'heard' her joyous mental cry, as she kicked the screen door open like a cannonball - that was the other reason I'd taken a discreet step back - and leapt right off the doorstep to land in my arms. We came together like we'd never been apart, and kissed and kissed until oxygen became an issue-

"Amy, who is-" I dimly heard Buffy's voice in the background. "Oh my God! Giles! Everyone! Look who's here!" she called out.

"Good Lord." Giles said, as Amy and I broke apart to be confronted by all of the gang - minus Angel and Cordelia, who were presumably still in LA, and joined by a new girl I hadn't met with a soft round face and long brown hair - staring at us both. "How is this possible?"

"I got sent back." I explained simply. "And now that I'm free to, I'll tell you all about it."

"It is a real good thing that you're here, m'man." Xander said, pushing past the rest and politely stepping around Amy to give me a manly bro-hug. "We've got this whole thing going on right now with some black ops Army guys and their runaway killer robot and it is just not of the good. You think you can get another one of those death rays up and running for us?"

I mentally rubbed my hands together in eager anticipation. "I'll see what I can do."

* * * * *​

Author's Note: And they all lived happily ever after.

The 'new girl' is Tara, of course. This is late season 4, after all.

And so here we are, at the end. I've already said most of what's on my mind in Author's Notes, but one more thing I'd like to touch upon - I had a lot of fun using the Jonathan/Amy romance to mirror the canon Buffy/Angel romance as much as possible, while still having it go mucho differently and end better. Note that he helps save Amy early in season 1.. just like Angel gave Buffy the cross that saved her life from Darla in the s1 pilot). And Amy finds out about Jonathan's tragic backstory and really grows intrigued mid-season 1... just like mid-season 1 is when Buffy got the reveal Angel was a vampire). The romance is actually acknowledged by him and begins between them in episode 2x05 ('Reptile Boy')... which is when Buffy and Angel officially coupled up. She's tragically separated from him during the latter half of season 2- Jonathan by being put in a coma, Angel by losing his soul. And then he must tragically leave Sunnydale at the end of season 3, with the long farewell glance by the fire truck right after the Mayor's defeat. All of these correspondences were entirely deliberate.

Oh, fun fact - the Malefactor being reincarnated as the infamous Devon Stone, failed Jumper asshole of my chain "Too Much, Too Soon", after he'd been brought to justice? That was in the original story outline from the beginning, as Jump-Chan's sentence of him to Ironic Hell. He wanted a chance to create the ultimate Renegade villain jumper, and he was given a second chance to do so - with himself. And, of course, he failed like the pathetic little bitch that he was, once he lost access to all his supercheats.

 

[cliffc999]

Agatha POV:

"That hurt!" the scruffy-looking soldier snarled as I desperately swung the empty bottle I'd grabbed from the other one into his face... without anywhere near enough force to actually harm him, as it turned out. I whimpered in pain as he reached up and grabbed my right wrist, forcing me to drop the bottle and twisting my arm painfully back with overwhelming strength. "And I'm not going to take that kind of crap from a lousy civilian-" he snarled, as he drew his other hand back to cuff me-

And then everything stopped. The man holding me suddenly froze as if paralyzed, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the other mugger, the less cruel-looking one, also stopping halfway through the motion of rising to his feet-

-I suddenly realized that the shining strip I could barely glimpse as coming past my left shoulder was a sword blade, and that its tip was perched exactly one centimeter away from my assailant's Adam's apple.

"Let her go, or I will nail you to the wall." a man's voice spoke icily from immediately behind me. I felt the man holding me tense, as his teeth drew back in a snarl and he visibly prepared to fight-

"Omar!" the other man yelled desperately. "Don't be crazy, you damned fool! He's one of Wulfenbach's!"

The man holding me suddenly went limp in shock at the realization of exactly how much trouble he was in. As Mama Lilith hadn't raised any fools I immediately pulled my wrist free of his grip and stepped briskly to the right, clearing the line of fire for my rescuer. Turning to look, I saw a handsome young man my age impeccably turned-out in a clean white Imperial airship officer's uniform, directly contrasting with the two slovenly and unshaven troopers of unidentifiable provenance who'd been mugging me. His left hand held a saber directly at 'Omar's' throat with a rock-steady grip, while his right hand rested on the butt of his still-holstered sidearm.

"I'd listen to your squadmate here," the young officer said evenly. "You still have a chance to get out of this alive, if not free."

I took another step back away from the confrontation and began to wonder if I could just leave things safely in the hands of the authorities-

"Hoy, is hyu okay?" a gruff voice said from behind me. I turned and tried not to eep! as I saw a pair of uniformed Jagermonsters also entering the alleyway, having apparently chosen to follow their officer when he'd rushed in here. "Dun vorry. Ve know who de bad guyz are." the lead Jager said with far more reassurance and kindness than any of the tales about them had led me to expect, while the other one moved to support his superior. The officer- on a closer look I could see that he was a captain by his insignia- lowered his saber to low-guard and took a step back from Omar as his troops arrived. At the sight of the two Jagers the second man visibly gave up on any hope of running away to save himself, while my would-be assailant just burst out in anger.

"Oh, isn't this just our fucking luck! This damn bitch has been nothing but trouble-" Omar fumed, before the shattering CRACK of a gunshot coincided with a fist-sized crater being blown out of the alley wall less than a foot away from his left ear. Everyone froze again as the captain levelled his pistol, which he'd drawn so blindingly fast I hadn't even seen him move.

"I despise rapists," he snarled - literally snarled! - and I winced at the r-word. "And I arrived just in time to hear you gloating about 'showing her how nice you could be'. And you have the gall to complain that it's unfair we show up to do our jobs-" As his voice began to reverberate and increase I realized in shock that the captain must be a Spark! I'd never heard anyone do that before except Doctor Beetle and several of the student Sparks at the university-

"Boss!" the Jager who'd been trying to reassure me yelled at him. "Hyu vants to keel him, den dot's all right! Guy like dis more den has eet coming! But hyu ordered us not to let hyu make dot decision vile angry!"

"-you're right, I did." he said, breathing deeply and lowering his pistol. "All right, don't kill him unless he keeps complaining about how unfair it is that we're not letting him molest young women." the captain ordered, and Omar gulped nervously.

"Captain, please," the second man begged. "He's not much, but he's my brother. He's all I've got left."

"Were you going to stop him?" the captain said, turning to him. "And who are you two, anyway?"

"Machinist Second Class Moloch von Zinzer," the second man replied matter-of-factly. "That's my brother Sergeant Omar von Zinzer. We served Duke D'Omas as a walker crew."

"Duke D'Omas' forces were disbanded over two weeks ago," the captain replied. "Why are you penniless and robbing people in a Beetleburg alleyway?"

"The hell were we supposed to do after your boss killed our boss?" Omar complained spitefully. "Without our army there's no more beans, no more boots, no more bullets, and no more paycheck!"

"Vot, you eediots desert before de big battle or someting?" the second Jager said. "Or hyu just vaste all your money already? Cause de Baron pays pipple like hyu ven dey are disbanded!"

"Wait, you mean that's true?" Moloch said wonderingly.

The captain shook his head sadly. "Well, you were caught red-handed attempting to assault and rob a young woman," he said, pointing at Omar. "You, on the other hand, are more ambiguous," he said, turning to Moloch. "So to repeat my earlier question, would you have tried to stop him?"

"... I woudn't have let him hurt her," Moloch said sadly. "I'm not that kind of guy. But yeah, I'd have helped him take her jewelry and all her money." He shrugged with obvious disgust at himself. "We haven't eaten in two days, and this idiot spent our last money on beer last night."

"If I turn you over to the local authorities. Dr. Beetle will put you both in bell jars to die of dehydration. Any volunteers to face Imperial justice?" the captain asked.

"Yeah," Moloch agreed. Omar echoed him more reluctantly.

"Miss?" the captain said, turning to me. "Is there anything you feel I should know before I sentence these men?"

"That-" I said, and took a deep breath before continuing. "When I first ran into them, that man just asked me for a coin," I said, pointing at Moloch. "He didn't threaten anything or do anything. Then when his brother first grabbed at me, he protested." I said, pointing at Moloch. "And right before you arrived he'd been getting up, I think to try and stop his brother from hitting me. And that one still has my locket!" I finished indignantly, with a gesture at Omar.

"Then you go to a forced-labor battalion," the captain said without hesitation, pointing at Omar. "And you..." he continued, turning to Moloch. "Either one month's pay as per a member of Duke D'Omas' forces and a mustering out, or voluntary enlistment in the Imperial military at a rank and specialty appropriate to your experience. The same offer you'd have received if you'd actually stuck around to be formally demobilized."

"You can't split us up!" Omar protested. "He was in on it all with me, you heard him say so! We should both get the same-" Omar cut himself off without a further word at the captain's thunderous expression, and the Jager holding him by the arm pushed him face-first into the wall and started searching through his coat pockets. After confiscating and pocketing a knife and a cosh, the Jager triumphantly dug my locket out of Omar's greatcoat and handed it to me with a flourish.

"Thank you," I said to him politely, tsk'ing to myself at how the chain had been broken when Omar had pulled it off me. I put it in my coat pocket with a mental note to have it repaired at the first opportunity.

"We don't work them to death," the captain said, holstering his weapons and he turned back to Moloch. "You can even write him letters. But he's obviously not fit to be allowed out in society for at least the next five years."

"... can't really say I disagree with you," Moloch said reluctantly. "And I'l take the enlistment, I guess."

The captain pulled out a small notebook from his belt pouch and a pencil, then wrote a pair of quick notes and signed them. He handed the first note to the second Jager. "Zudok, drag this idiot back to the airship and tell them he's up for the forced-labor battalions and why." he ordered. "And if he's stupid enough to resist or run... indulge yourself." Omar's expression of low cunning fell away to be replaced by suppressed panic at the captain's parting remarks and the Jager's - Zudok's - carnivore grin.

"And you-" he said, turning to Moloch and handing him the second note. "Welcome to the Imperial military. Follow Zudok and your brother back and give that to the chief petty officer when you arrive. He'll tell you where you can get cleaned up, into a fresh uniform, and sworn in."

"Yes sir," Moloch von Zinzer replied sharply, standing a little straighter now that he was officially a soldier again.

"Right, off with you both," the captain said, and both the willing and unwilling marched away as he turned towards me. "Are you all right, Miss-?"

"Agatha Clay," I supplied in answer to his obvious inquiry. "And yes. Yes I am. Thank you very much for your timely intervention-?" I trailed off in equal inquiry.

"Captain Jonathan Fairchild," he replied smartly, "Imperial Air Corps." He trailed off thoughtfully. "Are you the Miss Agatha Clay who I was told was Dr. Beetle's personal assistant?"

"I am!" I agreed brightly, surprised that he'd even heard of me, and then realization crashed in. "Oh no, I'm late! I'm really sorry but I have to go right now-"

"We were heading to the University as well," Captain Fairchild said graciously "so please, let us escort you. And given the circumstances, I'm certain that I have the authority to officially excuse your tardiness." he finished politely.

"Oh! Yes, yes I imagine you could," I said, and allowed him to accompany me out to the street with his remaining soldier trailing dutifully behind us. "Were you coming to visit Dr. Beetle?" I asked as we walked along at a brisk marching pace, not imagining any other reason why an Imperial military officer with an armed escort would be going to Transylvania Polygnostic.

"The Baron is," he replied matter-of-factly to my shock. "I was supposed to be part of the advance party, and now I'll be lucky if I even get there ahead of him."

"Oh! I'm so sorry that I delayed you-" I automatically began.

"Nonsense!" he cut me off reassuringly. "The entire point of an Imperial military is so that offenses like this aren't allowed to happen in the Empire. The Baron wouldn't punish me for a legitimate delay, but he'd have my rank right off my shoulders if he ever found out that I'd walked past an innocent person being attacked because I hadn't wanted to be bothered."

"And Baron Wulfenbach is really coming here?" I asked wonderingly, both afraid and curious at the thought of actually seeing the far-off Tyrant of Europa in the flesh.

"He is," Captain Fairchild nodded. "Him and Dr. Beetle were old friends..." and then he came to a halt, as if struck by a sudden thought. I stopped as well, confused.

"Captain-?" I asked.

"Hive Engine," he said uncharacteristically, while giving me a penetrating stare. The Jager behind us tensed and moved directly behind me-

"What are you talking about?" I asked him, entirely lost as to where he was going. The Captain looked carefully around to make sure no one was in earshot before replying.

"Dr. Beetle's been hiding one at TPU for almost two weeks," he said softly. "That's why we were coming here today, to arrest him."

I gasped in horror. "What-?" I opened my mouth to frantically deny it, but then traitorous thoughts started flickering through my mind. The new sealed-off section of the one laboratory that Dr. Beetle had personally warned me against ever going near, the sudden increase in requisitions for honey-

"You didn't know," the Captain reassured me. "I could see that all over your face just now when I hit you up for a reaction. But since you don't know-" he chewed his lip. "You almost got hurt once already today, and I wouldn't forgive myself if I dragged you into the middle of something where you could get hurt again. I really recommend that you just skip work today and wait to see how this all sorts out tomorrow."

"I really should-" I began, before my better sense began to agree with him. "Do you really think it will be that dangerous?"

"It's a Hive Engine," he remonstrated with me. Fair point, there were certainly few things more dangerous than one of those. "I have no idea what Dr. Beetle was even thinking, but the Baron isn't coming here personally because all the possible answers to that question are good." he sighed. "I wish I had more time, but I have to get to the University as fast as I can. Miss Clay, I very much recommend that you stay home but it is ultimately your choice. Do you want to not be there when we confront Dr. Beetle?"

"I suppose that would be best," I agreed, touched by his concern as well as acknowledging the simple logic of his position. If two of the most powerful Sparks in Europa were about to clash, aided by a third, then common sense would suggest being absolutely nowhere near the place at the time.

"Where do you live? I'll have Jorgi here escort you there. And I'll probably have to come by later to interview you for the record, but I'm already certain you had nothing to do with this." he said.

"Clay Mechanical on Forge Street," I answered him. "I live above my parents' workshop."

"All right then. Jorgi? Get her home safely and consider yourself detached to her until I come and get you, or we sound the general recall. Good luck, Miss Clay."

"Good luck, Captain," I thanked him. "And thank you for all you've done."

He tipped his officer's cap to me, and we both turned and hurried along our separate ways.

My goodness, what a strange day this was turning out to be.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: What a horrible manipulative sneaky pants our captain is, even in the AU where he wasn't brought to Beetleburg until the canon moment!

Well, the rage moment wasn't manipulative. 21st-century sensibilities legitimately don't like that kind of thing.

Just a sidestory thing I knocked out to distract myself from other crap today. This was 'what if Jonathan never got to Beetleburg until the canon start of Girl Genius'?

 

[cliffc999]

Consequence!Xander POV:

I hit the ground rolling and came up in a single smooth motion, falling into a combat crouch facing back the direction I'd come before I could get-

-and my jaw dropped in shock as I saw an entirely peaceful and empty cemetery as opposed to the pitched battle vs. a group of demon-summoning demons we'd been in a second ago.

"If this turns out to be some 'Back to the Future' thing then I am really going to regret not memorizing more sports statistics." I said out loud after a moment. I then immediately got out my spare stake, because being unarmed in a cemetery at night in Sunnydale was a bad idea at any time and I'd dropped my axe so it hadn't made the trip with me.

"Okay." I kept thinking out loud. "Amy was in the middle of counterspelling that entire ritual they had going, and all the energy was still built up like a pressure cooker, and then that vampire knocked me right back through the circle so all that mojo dumped on me and I ended up here. That part makes sense. But I don't even know what year I'm in, and-" I slapped my forehead. "Hey, King of Cretins, you're in a cemetery. Look at the tombstones. People die in Sunnydale all the time, the most recent grave should still be pretty current."

A walk down the nearest row of graves produced the data that the most recent date of death among them was in May of 2000, so between that and the weather I figured I was sometime in the late spring or summer after Buffy's freshman year of college.

Which is the same time I left. So I didn't get bumped very far. But obviously I got bumped, because I'm in the same place I started from but the grass wasn't even scuffed where we were fighting so it can't be the same time. I need to check in.

I set off at a steady ground-eating jog towards Angel's old mansion, which was the closest of the Scooby Gang's residences to where I was. I had a brief encounter with a fledgling vamp on the way but dusted him without any trouble, and soon enough I reached the grounds of the mansion-

What the-? I braincrashed while staring at the half burnt-out ruin. This place looks like somebody set it on fire years ago! But I was just here last week with Jonathan-

I shook my head. Right, I am not running halfway across town until I know I've got somewhere to run to. Time to find a pay phone.

Several minutes' walking brought me to a nearby diner, and I immediately headed into the booth and dialed Buffy's house.

"Hello?" a young girl's voice that I'd never heard before came on the other end of the line.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I must have a wrong number-" I started to reply, alarmed at Buffy's apparent nonexistence here whenever-I-was. Because I certainly didn't have a wrong number, I knew Buffy's home phone by heart better than I did my own.

"Very funny, Xander." the strange girl chuckled, sending me into a total wiggins at the familiarity of her tone. "What, you don't want to talk to me?" she pined faux-tragically.

"That depends mystery girl, how long have we known each other?" I said back reflexively.

"Okay, I'll play along." the girl replied amusedly. "You have known me for four years, ever since I moved to Sunnydale. And you have secretly and tragically pined for me all along behind your light-hearted mask of humor, but due to my age ours is a forbidden love and will be for the next three years, two months, and nineteen days-" she continued in a hollow, dramatic tone of voice as if she were narrating a movie trailer.

"A proper introduction usually begins with names." I cut her off, mildly alarmed - if also a bit flattered - at the intensity of this strange girl's flirting, especially since she sounded like she couldn't be any older than fourteen. "I'm Xander Harris, and you are-?"

"Dawn Summers." she giggled. "Hi, Xander! Let me guess, you wanted to talk to my sister, right?"

"If by 'sister' you mean 'the short blonde force of destruction that secretly fights evil every night' then yes." I agreed, deliberately making a joke of it so as to test whether or not Buffy's kid sister - Buffy's kid sister?!? - knew about the Slayer thing.

"And the one who obsesses on shoes." Dawn confirmed. "She just left for a patrol, though. Were you going with her?"

"I kinda fell into some free time, so I am now." I nodded. "Do you know which way she went?"

"UC Sunnydale campus. She said she didn't want vampire squatters in the empty frat houses again, once was enough." Dawn replied.

"Thanks, Dawn, you're a lifesaver. Catch you later- I've got to go, I'm on a pay phone." I finished.

"'Kay!" she chirped brightly, and after an exchange of goodbyes we both hung up.

Alternate timeline, check.

* * * * *​

Canon!Buffy POV

I ducked underneath the big vampire's roundhouse swing and stepped into him with a hard forearm shove, knocking him off-balance and setting him up for the stake. However, one of the other vampires surrounding me closed in and tagged me on the side of the head with a glancing blow while I'd momentarily stopped my whirlwind of action to brace against the leader's bull rush, and then the rest of the pack started to close in as I tried to recover my footing-

One of the vampires behind me suddenly shrieked and dusted, and we all turned to see Xander standing there with his stake out after having snuck up and stabbed the one in the back. "Three o-clock!" he called out to me, and I reflexively turned to see what Xander was talking about in that direction only to catch a third vampire's fist directly in the face. Ow! I was lucky I didn't have a bloody nose!

"Don't distract me!" I yelled at him angrily as I used the momentum of the punch to fall backwards, then do a back-roll across the floor and kick back out into a standing position well away from the vampires. "And get out of here before-!"

I blinked incredulously as Xander half-turned and reached out to entangle an incoming vampire's arm with his own, using their interlocked forearms to redirect the vampire's lunging momentum into a clumsy sprawl and bend it over for a stake through the back with his free hand all in a single uninterrupted martial arts move even smoother than when he'd temporarily been possessed by Soldier Guy on Halloween. The remaining two vampires came to a halt and started to back away from us, and I growled and charged them both.

"Okay, dibs are dibs." I heard Xander agree cheerfully as he stepped back and let me work out my frustration on the remaining vampires before staking them.

"What are you doing here?" I said after all the dust bunnies had finished dusting, angrily rounding on him. "We already had this discussion! You are supposed to remain at least slightly more-"

"My alternate timeline counterpart had that discussion with you, not me." he replied.

"Not funny." I growled, in no mood for Xander's weird sense of humor-

"No, Buffy, I really am a different Xander." he replied without the slightest trace of humor, and my jaw dropped in shock as I realized that this person wasn't joking. "For one thing, where I'm from? You don't have a younger sister-"

"How did you know that?" I shouted in alarm, as I lunged to grab the stranger with Xander's face - a stranger who I idly noted was in even better shape than my Xander, even if his familiar baggy clothes hid that from the casual eye - by the collar and slam him up against the wall. "You went to my house?!?" I screamed.

"Whoa, whoa, truce!" he cried out in genuine alarm, both hands raised. "No, I used the phone! And when I got a strange girl I'd never heard before who talked to me like I was an old friend, I kinda figured out what was happening!"

"Right." I said with at least somewhat less suspicion, letting him go and taking a deep breath. "And- right, we did see that alternate timeline Willow once, so your story actually is possible. Maybe." I finished warily.

"Alternate Willow? That's also something that didn't happen with us." the strange Xander said somberly. "So, yeah, things obviously diverged more than a bit. I still knew you though - you came here sophomore year, you met Giles, you're the Slayer, we fought vampires, so same basic outline, right?"

"Basically." I agreed, letting the adrenaline flow out of me as I tried to process all this. "So, what do you need me for?"

"Help getting back home?" Xander replied with a 'Um, yeah.' expression on his face. "I mean, I am definitely not mojo guy, so we're gonna need all the books and some of G-Man's witch friends to try and ritual me a way home at the minimum. And you were the first alternate-Scooby I could find."

"I wasn't the first one you looked for?" I asked him as they headed up the stairs of the abandoned frat house together.

"I hit Angel's place first, it was closest." other-Xander shocked me with his matter-of-fact reply. "And all I found was a half burnt-out ruin. He's okay, right?" he finished worriedly.

"You actually care about whether Angel is okay or not." I replied in shock. Xander hated Angel! He hadn't been able to so much as say his name without bitter sarcasm in years! But here he was asking after Angel's welfare sounding as concerned as he would if he'd heard that Dawn was in trouble- "Just how 'alternate' was your timeline?"

"My first guess would be, a lot." he replied, starting to wiggins a bit at the intensity of my reaction.

"Angel's fine, he's in LA now." I answered him before powering right past that particular topic of conversation. "And look, right now I'm just going to get you to Giles and let him try to figure out this weirdness." I threw my hands up in exasperation. "Follow me."

A few minutes' of walking brought us to Giles' apartment, and he let us inside and we explained the situation.

"Anyway, Amy said that these guys were trying to invoke a demon with a 'Trihexion ritual in the... fourth descending node', I think?" alternate-Xander trailed off. "So she was counterspelling that, but it was like a beam battle between anime characters with their whole ritual pushing against her, and before she could drain off all the energy I got knocked right into the circle." he finished.

"Okay, I don't even know how to unpack all of that weird." I cut Giles off. "The part where you're from another world, the part where you actually paid attention enough at research party to remember those kinds of details, or the part where you keep talking about Amy over and over as your Scooby Gang's big magical gun. You haven't even mentioned Willow, like once." I shook my head at the sheer incongruity of a Xander, any Xander, acting like Willow didn't even exist to him- and then I gulped in realization. "She... she is all right in your timeline, isn't she?"

"No." alternate-Xander replied, his face- my blood turned cold as I realized that the expression on his face wasn't just grief, it was anger. As if his face had become a mask overlaying a heart full of rage and betrayal mixed with loss - I'd seen that face only once before, in my own mirror during those horrible days when Angelus had been running loose. I gulped-

"Is she a vampire?" I asked in a small voice, remembering the alternate Willow who'd been turned in her own timeline-

"No." he replied, biting the word off as if it burned his tongue even to speak, and then he closed his eyes and visibly fought for the strength to keep talking. "Giles, is Willow your group's main witch here?"

"Yes." Giles said. "Her- her progress in the magical arts is quite remarkable, in fact, and her aid has been invaluable at several points."

This didn't seem to console him at all, as his face became even more full of dread. "Then you absolutely need to check Willow out and make sure she's not going dark. I mean, really check her out. Assume that she's got multiple layered protections to block out detection spells and everything." He sighed, trying to blink away tears. "Because our Willow did. And we didn't catch it until it was too late."

"It can't have been that bad!" I denied.

"Can't have been that-" alternate-Xander rounded on me almost with a snarl. "Buffy, I don't know anything about your Willow, but ours tried to help the Mayor kill the entire town and rule the world!" he shocked both me and Giles bloodless with his reply. "And she-" he shuddered to a halt. "And she-"

"Xander?" Giles said gently, compassionately, seeming to understand what was wrong with him even if I was clueless-

"She hypnotized me to try and kill all of you." he forced out like a robot, staring fixedly at the wall. "I came within half a second of putting a stake through Amy's heart, and if our Buffy hadn't tackled her out of the way-" He looked up at me. "I was so lucky that the stake hit the bone in the back of your shoulder. Six inches lower and I'd have gotten you right through the lung."

"Hypnotizing someone can't do that!" I said heatedly. "You've- you've got to be making this up!"

Giles stared at me firmly and raised a hand for silence. "You said that you were using a stake, as opposed to another weapon. You'd been placed under a hypnotic delusion that Amy and Buffy - your Amy and Buffy - had been turned, correct?"

"Got in one, G-Man." he replied in a sad hollow imitation of our Xander's humor. "Normally you can't hypnotize someone into doing something they believe is morally wrong deep-down inside, but there's nothing wrong about staking a vampire, right? All Willow had to do was trick my brain into seeing vampires that weren't actually there and bam, I was totally Drusilla'd."

"I entirely understand." Giles nodded, taking Xander's hand comfortingly. "I underwent a similar experience myself once- at Drusilla's hands, in fact."

"Then you know how it feels. Afterwards." alternate-Xander fought to avoid tears. "Like they could hit the inside of your brain with a power washer, but it's still not going to feel clean again. I-" he looked downwards. "Amy and Buffy both tried to reassure me, even right on the spot, that it wasn't my fault. That even if I had killed them I wouldn't have been the murderer, just the murder weapon." He turned to stare at me with old, pain-filled eyes. "So yeah. That's why I don't talk about Willow."

"Uh." I answered articulately, my brain still vainly trying to come to terms with just how utterly alien his world must have been.

"Thank you very much for your warning." Giles said seriously. "I pray that the timelines have diverged enough that our Willow is not headed down a similar path, or that she can recover if she is."

"You'd better." he agreed heavily. "I don't know how much your Willow's learned to tap yet, but Willow's potential power level is off the charts. If it goes worst-case scenario on you- we were lucky that we were able to ambush ours. In a straight-up fight, it would have been worse than anything we'd ever seen except Graduation Day. You'd better hope that your Amy is up to the challenge, she's the only other witch anybody knows about that matches Willow's potential."

"My God." I said, still trying to reboot my brain. "Amy Madison? Amy the rat? She's supposed to be some kind of super-witch alongside Willow?"

"Amy the what?" other-Xander asked. "Did she go dark in this timeline or something? Because that would really suck."

"She turned herself into a rat with the backlash of a miscast spell several months before graduation." Giles said. "Willow has custody of her right now while we work on a method of reverting her."

"The Devon coven couldn't help?" other-Xander asked Giles confusedly. "They're supposed to be really experienced witches, right?"

Giles' expression fell like a man who'd just walked off an invisible cliff. "I- yes, they are a logical point of contact to ask." he continued embarassedly. "I just hadn't spoken to them in years- at any rate, I shall call them expeditiously."

"You'd probably have to be calling them about my case anyway." other-Xander pointed out reasonably, trying to cover Giles' obvious shame in not having thought of this 'Devon coven' first.

"I would. And I will." Giles answered. "But- I think we could serve each other with at least a brief review of the significant dangers our respective timelines have faced. You mentioned Graduation Day, so you stopped the Mayor's Ascension just as we did?"

"And cratered the high school in the process." other-Xander nodded. "Did you guys have to fight Kakistos?"

"He came here at the start of senior year." I answered. "Me and Faith dusted him."

"Faith?" other-Xander asked puzzedly, before remembering. "Oh, the Boston Slayer who was Called after Kendra-" he trailed away with a sorrowful nod as we all realized exactly what he meant. "We never met her."

"Other-me took Kakistos alone?" I said disbelievingly. "That guy was a tank! What did you use, a flame thrower?"

"Actually yeah." other-Xander agreed with a flash of amusement. "But yeah, he was tough. Our Kakistos showed up late in junior year with a whole pack of vamps, and we had to saddle up the entire gang and call in Kendra to help you double-team him."

"Is that how she perished?" Giles asked quietly.

"No. Drusilla got her later." Xander sighed, and Giles and I both nodded sadly at this familiar piece of history.

"I'm assuming the whole prophecy thing with the Master went the same way." I said. "CPR and all."

"Yeah, me and Angel had to follow you down and revive you after you'd dusted him." Xander surprised me. "He'd tagged you with his dying shot, but you'd taken him."

"Go other-me!" I raised my eyebrows. "In this timeline I needed two cracks at him before he finally went down for the count."

"And Angelus?" Giles asked into the silence.

"Angelus-?" other-Xander began puzzedly, before turning pale as a sheet. "Wait, your Angel lost his soul?!?" he asked in horror. "But Buffy said he was still around-!"

"He got it back!" I reassured him. "It's okay, he's safe now."

"It is most definitely not okay, Buffy!" Xander rounded on me. "Did you use the Kalderash curse again?"

"Of course we did, we needed to save Angel's soul and it was right there!" I remonstrated with him, still confused as to his attitude-

Other-Xander facepalmed. "Who cast it?" he asked softly, as if already terrified of the answer.

"Willow." Giles answered for me.

"Then she is definitely going dark, and you are at least halfway to the worst-case scenario already." other-Xander said gravely, looking at us both. "Because did you people even read that curse? It rips an innocent soul out of the afterlife and forces it to intermingle with the foulest of demons on a fundamental level that-' He shook his head like a horse shooing away flies. "We are talking bad karma of the negative one billion for even trying to cast that thing!"

"You're certain of this?" Giles asked urgently.

"We had Ms. Calendar, you, Angel, and the whole research party analyzing the spell formulae of that thing for days." other-Xander shocked us with his reply. "We'd gotten this sort of- prediction, oracle, stuff like that- that Angel's soul might be at risk, so that's when Ms. Calendar came forward as the observer in Sunnydale for her gypsy clan and agreed to ask her clan elders for a copy of the original spell to make sure it didn't have any weaknesses. And when we found the 'pure happiness' clause- well, Angel left Sunnydale to get right on finding a fix for that."

"There's a way to fix Angel's soul?" I said eagerly. "What is it?"

"Earn a soul cure as a reward in the Demon Trials, this... asphyxiation demon-" other-Xander tried to remember.

"Asphyx demon." Giles corrected him.

"In Africa somewhere runs it. Our Angel went on a quest to find him, it took him months but-" Xander snapped his fingers. "Oh yeah, you need to warn your Angel to beware of a demon called 'Skip' who works for a demon lord named 'Jasmine'. Jasmine wants Angel to lose his soul as part of some long-range plot she's got going, and sent Skip to try and do the job."

"I'll make a note of that." Giles said, reaching for a sheet of paper and a pen to do precisely that.

"Other dangers-" he tried to think. "Okay, from the way you've talked it sounds like Amy wasn't a Scooby in this timeline-?"

"No." I agreed. "She mostly went her own way."

Other-Xander looked disgusted at us both. "What do you people even do around here?" he said heatedly. "Did it not occur to you that leaving a young and untrained witch alone with her evil mom's evil magic books wouldn't go anywhere good? You should have at least mentored her enough that she'd know how to start learning white instead of black magic! God, even after you de-rat her your Devon friends are probably going to have to help her all the way through magic detox." He sighed. "I mean, our Amy's an amazing person. She's practically a saint, and I'd match her up against the biggest bad you could possibly find and give her at least even odds. But I remember that she was kinda a little fragile back at the beginning before she was able to find her footing. She needed our support- Jonathan's support most of all. So if she didn't get any of it here-?" he trailed off.

"Jonathan?" I homed in on the weirdest part of all that. "The short guy? Him and Amy-?" my brain just tried and failed to fit those puzzle pieces together.

"Oh, right." other-Xander realized. "Yeah, it's a million to one that he didn't come to Sunnydale in this timeline, his arrival even in ours was what you'd call a very low-probability event. Jonathan Fairchild. European - well, European-American - kid our age who went rogue demon hunter after he lost his family to the supernatural. He turned up in Sunnydale at the same time you did, and joined the gang during that mess with Amy's mom. Very smart, very well-trained at fighting, and that was even before Angel picked him up as his protege. Anyway, him and our Amy became inseparables." he smiled in memory. "And he had to leave town for a while after Graduation Day because of stuff involving a prophecy of his own of some kind - that's the easiest way to describe it, at least - and it looked he might never get clear of that, but he managed to find a way back for good several months ago and Amy's been the happiest girl in the world since then."

"At least someone got a happy ending." I sighed enviously. "Because I just had the bad breakup of all time last year. Also on Graduation Day, as it happens."

"We- I mean, who was it?" other-Xander asked me.

"Angel." I sighed mournfully, only to immediately look-up at his incredulous spit take.

"ANGEL?" he goggled at me as if I'd suddenly grown horns and hooves. "The undead guy who's literally older than the country we were born in?" Other-Xander swallowed hard, his face almost turning green at the thought. "Did you at least get a blood test afterwards?!?"

"Hey!" I said, furious at the implied insult to both me and Angel. "Like you can talk, I'm sure! What girl would even go out with you?" I sniped cattily.

"You would." he cut me down to size with two simple words. "Although right now, I'm wondering how you and my Buffy are even related."

"Not very well, if she'd go out with someone who said stuff as insulting as you just did! How dare you imply that Angel was- was that?" I yelled at him.

"It's historical record that Darla was already dying of syphilis when she was turned, and I'm pretty sure you're aware that Angelus and Darla were regularly doing the horizontal mambo for centuries. Ask the G-Man if germs get preserved in vampire blood or anything, but if they do, then you really need to go to the clinic." other-Xander chilled my blood with the matter-of-fact observation.

"... I'm not aware of any particular research in, in that particular field." Giles eventually stammered out.

"Blood test at the college clinic after this weekend." I agreed dazedly. "Oh boy."

"Well even in the worst-case scenario, there's still the silver lining that you will have gotten an adequate revenge against that Parker cad." Giles tried to cheer me up. "And there's no long-term complications after only this many months." He trailed off with an embarassed mutter. "As Ethan and I once had the occasion to learn from experience."

"Seriously, Buffy, you dated the massively older guy with tons of trauma and expected it to last?" Other-Xander shook his head. "I've seen how hard that is to make happen even when there isn't a humungous age difference, and it took them both being seriously self-aware of the potential difficulties before they even went in to make work. If you got surprised by 'suddenly no soul', then I'm guessing both of you walked into the whole thing blind as bats."

"Where did you-?" I shook my head. "Okay, I'm actually trying not to insult this time, but in all the time I've known you you haven't exactly had a reputation for being... emotionally insightful." I finished. "What, did I work a girlfriend miracle in this timeline or something?"

"No, I had a therapist." other-Xander shocked me to my core again. "Ms. Calendar made Amy start going when she began witch training, Amy eventually recommended it to me when the counseling she'd gotten let her figure out the mindjob my parents - by courtesy so called - had left me with. If neither of us have been in this timeline, you'd better schedule them."

"Jenny survived in your timeline?" Giles asked softly, hesitantly.

"Oh." other-Xander looked at him sadly in realization. "I'm so sorry, Giles."

"Thank you." Giles nodded to him. "But yes, if Angelus did not break free in your timeline, then- yes."

"I'm thinking we can wait until later to finish comparing the notes." I bailed Giles out. "For right now, you've got some phone calls to make. And where are we going to put Xander 2.0 up for the interim?"

"I have a spare room, now that Spike has moved out." Giles reassured us. "He can stay here."

"Wait, Spike?" other-Xander goggled.

"It's a long story." Giles began, as he got up to go to the phone.

* * * * *​

Canon!Dawn POV:

"Hey there." I said to the new Xander as I stuck my head in around the corner of his bedroom door in Giles' apartment. Oh, yum, he was doing push-ups! In a tank top! And he was even more cut than my Xander, and I didn't think that was possible!

"Whoa, knock before entering a boy's bedroom next time!" he said, blushing with embarassment as he noticed me peeking in and hurriedly got to his feet. "What if I hadn't had any clothes on?"

"Then my day would have been complete!" I mimed dramatically, only to wince at the sudden disapproval in his expression. "... too far?"

"Little bit." he said, before letting me off the embarassment hook with a smile. "Oh, and I'm sorry about tricking you on the phone."

"It's cool." I assured him. "Xander - my Xander - and me play phone games like that all the time."

"Yeah, about that." he said as he sat down on his bed and I took that as an invitation to find a nearby chair and park in it. "Look, I'm only going to be here for a couple more days until the stars are right for the 'go home' ritual G-Man is setting up with his witch friends, so I don't have time to beat around the bush. I had a long chat with my other self about things, and one of the topics of conversation was you."

"What did he say about me?" I blurted eagerly.

"That you had a big crush on him and he was stuck for a way to actually address that with you without hurting your feelings." alternate-Xander absolutely crushed me with a single sentence. I'd really hoped that my Xander hadn't actually noticed my crush, but he had, despite all my best efforts at keeping him from noticing. And worse yet, he was building up to a rejection speech-

"And I gave him a lot of advice on that, but apparently you haven't run into him yet before you ran into me." alternate-Xander said. "So since I've got the opportunity I'm just going to talk to you about my opinion on the topic, and hopefully the fact that it's coming from me and not from him will mean that it hurts less. First and foremost, you're fourteen-"

"Almost fifteen!" I insisted firmly. Hey, nine months was 'almost', right?

"And I'm almost twenty-one." he replied, and I sighed at getting another lecture from yet another person about acting my age before I realized he was just waiting and letting it lay there. But then again, Xander was the coolest person in any timeline.

I began to realize that letting it lay there put the responsibility on me to continue the conversation, which was kinda hard to do when I'd been knocked this far off-script. Wow, alternate timeline Xander was even sneakier than our Xander. I decided my best bet was to go straight for the reversal and stick the responsibility back on him, so I led off with "I'm assuming you've already got a whole lecture on why that matters, so go ahead."

I saw him raise an eyebrow as the sheer cleverness of my comeback hit home, and felt a warm glow inside as he nodded in acknowledgement of my scoring a legitimate hit. And then everything turned to disappointment when he actually began the lecture. Darn it.

"Okay, I just got here a couple days ago so all I know is what I've picked up by osmosis, but from what I gather your sister and Angel made a whole new category in Guinness for relationship disasters." he said reasonably. "You got to watch it all happen from the sidelines, so did you have an opinion on it?"

"You mean outside of thinking that Buffy should have had her head examined?" I said emphatically. "That was the worst idea she'd ever had in an entire lifetime of having horrible ideas!"

"To the extent that I have enough information to justify having an opinion, I'd agree with you." he nodded readily. "So why do you want me - either of me - to be like Angel? Your Angel?"

"But you're not a vampire." I argued back. "And you're not depressing, and you don't drink blood, and you've got a heartbeat-"

"But let's not repeat ourselves." Xander grinned at me.

"And you're only six years older, not two hundred!" I finished with inescapable mathematical logic.

He actually stopped and thought about that one a while, and I started to bounce with excitement in my chair, until he brought me to a halt again by asking me a really tough question.

"What do you like about me?" he finally replied with. "Either me? Top of the list."

"You're-" I stopped my immediate reaction and did my best to think about it as seriously as possible, because I could tell he was in serious mode. What did I like about him other than his being ridiculously hot, funny, nice, never talking down to me like a little kid, always making me happy just to see him, and all the rest of it? If I had to rank his good qualities on a list, what would be number one?

"You're a good person." I finally said, wincing inside at how pathetic that sounded. Seriously? 'Good person?' Way to vague it up, Dawn!

"I'm flattered." he nodded seriously, and I thrilled again that he was talking to me like an adult. "But that's your problem. No 'good person' is ever going to violate the creepy rule, because that's part of the entire definition of being one. So the very same reason you like him the most is the reason he's not going to let himself go for it."

"I'm not a little kid!" I whined, wincing even further inside because I could hear myself sounding exactly like a little kid.

"No you're not." he patronized me, and I started to get mad until he continued and I realized he actually meant what he was saying. "In our timeline, I got to see our Buffy hopelessly crushing on a boy who would never let himself feel anything back for her - and I don't mean Angel, I mean someone you've never met. And she was two years older at the time than you were now, and I saw her make an absolute idiot of herself in the process. The whole thing blew up in her face like an emotional sinking of the Bismarck. So I actually mean it when I say that according from everything I've heard from 'myself', I'm impressed as to how you've been handling your crush as compared to how she was handling it."

"Really?" I blushed with the compliment.

"But I also saw her recover from having that crush and go on to find a boy her age that she could be very happy with-" he continued.

"I already know that you're talking about yourself and don't rub it in." I glowered at him.

"Do you have mind-reading powers?" he asked me seriously.

"Hah, I wish!" I laughed, before thinking that one over and deciding I really didn't want to know what Buffy thought about all day. "... or maybe not. But no, I just have really good hearing, and you've been the number one topic of conversation among the Scooby Gang ever since you got here."

"Circling back to the point I was making, Dawn, what you have on your Xander is a crush." He held up a hand to pre-empt my angry rebuttal. "Which doesn't mean that your feelings for him aren't real, even if that's the popular definition of 'crush'. What the actual definition is is that you have a genuine desire to emotionally connect with someone that is never going to go anywhere, because of the whole situation that you and he are in. Your Xander is already with someone, which nixes the whole thing right there by itself, and that's before you factor in that it won't even begin to be un-creepy until you're at least seventeen and he's twenty-three."

"Seventeen is how old Buffy was when she lost her virginity to Angel, and I can wait." I insisted.

"Maybe you can." he surprised me by agreeing. "I know another couple who made the same decision, and it did eventually work out for them in the end. But the main thing that made it work for them is that they mutually decided to. It wasn't one-sided." He looked at me as understandingly as he could. "If you let it go on for too long, then one-sided really hurts. Nobody wants you to be hurt."

"How did you learn this much about relationships?" I wondered out loud. Because as much as I loved my Xander, I knew his limitations.

"I think we had to grow up faster in our timeline, in a lot of ways." was his only answer. "So, what brings you to my door?" he changed the subject.

"Honestly?" I admitted embarassedly. "I was hoping to draw you out and pick your brains for something that would help me get an angle on landing my Xander. A chance to explore his viewpoint without him noticing."

"Okay." he processed that, and then surprised the snot out of me by actually choosing to answer my question at face value. "The two main obstacles between you and what you want are your ages, which obstacle is curable only with time, and the fact that he's already in a committed relationship with this Anya girl. It's not because of your personality because I know he likes you a lot as a person - I'm liking you, and we've just met - even if not romantically. But him being dated up elsewhere is not something you can just get around even when you are older, because assuming that him and I have anything in common then he's not going to trade up in a relationship. He's not going to trade at all. For him a relationship will very likely be something that he commits to and works on growing until and unless it ends for reasons entirely outside his control, because that's how I'm approaching mine. So unless Fate chooses to throw you a solid and make him single by the time you're old enough-" he shrugged.

"So you're saying that I have no chance at all and should just give up." I tried not to cry.

"I'm saying that whether or not Future Dawn and Future Xander ever get together when they're both old enough is something entirely outside your control." he consoled me. "Or his control, really. The circumstances will line up so that it's either possible to happen or it isn't possible, and there's nothing you can do right, or act right, or dress right, to guarantee yourself an opening. There's a lot of things you could possibly do to guarantee you don't ever have an opening, though, and I probably don't even need to get into what they are."

"So what do I do in the meantime?" I sighed. "What's the key?"

He blinked multiple times at what I said, for reasons I couldn't even begin to guess, and finally shrugged. "Live your life, and let yourself enjoy what you've already got instead of putting everything on hold waiting for something you already know can't possibly arrive early. And if you ever do meet another boy you like while you're waiting, rest assured that your Xander would cheer you on."

"Thanks." I said to him meaningfully, feeling- well, not better that I'd just been sat down and told that my crush was hopeless and would be for years and years, if ever, but at least less angsty about it. Just hearing him agree that my feelings were real instead of giving me the usual 'you're a little kid, you don't know what you're feeling' routine like everyone else did somehow made it less awful, even if it was still hopeless.

"Anytime." he said. "Now how did you get to Giles' apartment, and is your mom busy freaking at losing track of you and do I have to call her and reassure her you made it here alive?"

"Mom's at the doctor's." I said. "That warning you gave about how she needs to get her headache checked out early, like mom in your timeline did? Her appointment's today and neither of us wanted me cooling my heels in the waiting room for hours and hours, and Buffy had class, so she dropped me off here."

"Ah." he said, understanding that I had snuck back here from the living room to snoop on him because Giles was too busy calling England long-distance to have time to supervise me. "So, I'm assuming that this isn't the first time G-Man's had to babysit. Where does he keep the board games?"

"Board games, nothing." I said emphatically. "Whenever I come here I go straight for the book collection. Where else am I going to find decent instructional materials for ancient Sanskrit?"

Alternate-Xander blinked me at in surprise. "You can read ancient Sanskrit?"

"A little bit, at the 'See Spot run' level." I reluctantly admitted. "But I'm learning!"

He raised an eyebrow at that. "How many languages do you speak already?"

"Everything in Buffy's old French and Latin textbooks and what the school district mistakenly believes is Spanish." I answered truthfully. Hey, I'd always had a talent for languages.

"If your Xander is ever single in the future, then make sure he already knows about the big shiny brain side of you." he advised me as we both headed towards the living room so I could get my hands on the books. "For that matter, make sure any guy you date knows about that side of you. Any guy who gets scared off by an intelligent woman is somebody you should be glad to never hook up with."

"Entirely valid advice." Giles agreed as he put the phone down, having overheard the tail end of our conversation as we re-entered the living room.

"Hey, G-Man." Xander said as we sat down. "We already did the catch-up on signs and portents, but I just remembered something that you definitely need to look into."

"I see." Giles said professionally. "Dawn, perhaps you might-"

"She should stay, because this concerns her." Xander surprised us both with his observation.

"Is Dawn in danger?" was Giles' immediate question.

"I don't know." Xander worried us both with his reply. "What I do know is that - okay, several years ago we got access to... call it a packet of prophecies. Not like the never-miss kind such as the one that predicted Buffy dying against the Master, but the 'be on the lookout but it might not happen if you're lucky' kind. You know better than I do what that means. One of them was the warning we got about our Angel's soul curse that I already mentioned. But there was another one about Dawn that I hadn't even remembered existed until she reminded me just now."

"I'm that obscure to you back home?" I probed, feeling a tiny bit insulted.

"Buffy is an only child back home." Xander shocked me to my core with his statement. "And yet we got a sort-of prophecy about you anyway. At the time we just thought that Hank Summers had left Buffy with a half-sister neither she nor Mrs. Summers ever knew about-"

"Ugh." I eye-rolled. "Yeah, that would have been a perfectly reasonable theory about the sleazy sperm donor." I agreed. Because my Dad had been an absolute dog with the ladies, it's why Mom had divorced the slug when I was nine.

"But then I get here and I find out that Dawn is Buffy's full sibling and has been here all along. Which oddness doesn't register on me at all at the time, because I haven't thought about the 'Dawn' warning we got in years because there's never been a Dawn in our Sunnydale. Until she just now mentioned the word "key", which jogged the old memory. Because the warning was about her being somehow linked to an artifact called 'The Key', guarded by these guys called the Order of Dagon." Xander explained, and then finished grimly. "And-" he stopped.

"And?" I pressed him.

"And there was something I don't entirely understand about how the Key was transformed into a person, or had its power put into a person, named Dawn." Xander finished, and I felt kinda faint. "It did emphasize that she was also a 'real girl', but-" Xander shrugged. "It's magic, they didn't feel like they had to explain squat."

"Good Lord." Giles said, polishing his glasses like he always did. "Was there anything else?"

"That 'The Key' is being sought by an entity named 'Glorificus'. No hints on who or what that is. or whether they're after her in a good way or a bad way. That's why I said I don't know if she's in danger or not." Xander said.

"But we are certainly going to launch an immediate effort to find out." Giles reassured me. "Was there any indication of a time frame?"

"Not a one, and remember, we got this warning years ago. Like, start of junior year in high school." Xander said. "So it could be happening now, or it could be scheduled for Dawn as an 18th birthday present, or anything."

"Well, there have certainly been no other alarming indications of any kind regarding Dawn so your warning has almost certainly put us at least slightly ahead of the curve." Giles logicked out, and I started to feel a little better.

"Wait, I have superpowers?" I finally regained the ability to contribute to the conversation.

"Some kind of dimensional magic, it claimed." Xander answered me, and then immediately continued at my expression. "Do not try any experiments. Assuming anything happens at all, it's 99 to 1 that you'll blow yourself straight into a hell dimension with no exit strategy. Dimensional magic is something even the most experienced witches approach slowly and cautiously. That's why it's taking so long to arrange for a trip home for me, and in my case they've got easy mode switched on with how I've got a pre-existing correspondence link to where I came from they can work with because of how I got here. You wouldn't even have that much."

"I entirely endorse everything Xander just told you, because he is wholly correct." Giles came in on his heels. "No experiments without supervision and until after we're already quite certain we know what we're dealing with and what to expect. Because if something did go wrong, we wouldn't be able to come find you even if we tried."

"Got it." I said faintly, feeling kinda oppressed with just how gloom and doomy they were both being. Then again, as much as I loved the idea of having superpowers better than Buffy's - or at all - they were right about the whole 'you don't want to be stuck in a hell dimension' thing.

"Well, we might as well get started researching." Giles said, before smiling at me. "And since you have a vested interest in this affair, I have no objection to your participating this time."

Yes! I exulted to myself as we all got up and headed for the bookshelves. Part of the team at last!

* * * * *​

Author's Note: This omake was done when my brain just had to write a scene of 'my Scooby Gang hears about the canon Scooby Gang and vice versa'. And it doesn't need more of an ending beyond this because 'Xander makes it home without incident and the Devon Coven gets advance warning of Canon Willow and Amy's situations before the seasons 6-7 meltdown' are already plainly set up.) But yeah, Consequence!Xander didn't even see Canon!Willow in this timeline - he's still got outright PTSD from the Manchurian Xander incident in particular and the whole thing in general, and he doesn't even want to talk to a doppelganger of her.

I don't quite know how Dawn got her own part of the chapter, but she did. I mean, I had to work in a warning about the Key somehow, but an in-depth exploration of her character and crush on Xander? I suppose I just wanted to write Dawn, because she's a character I actually like and thought had a lot of wasted potential that the show didn't wait to waste, and this was my only chance. Besides, it was a useful vehicle to show how much the Consequence!Scoobs have grown beyond their canon selves, as witness how maturely and understandingly Xander was able to handle that conversation as compared to his canon season 5 self.

As for when this fic occurs, it's between episode 5x01 ("Buffy vs. Dracula") and 5x02 ("Real Me"). Which means that Xander arrived right after the monks cast the spell to make Dawn (as that happens at the very end of episode 5x01), which is why she's here and he has no clue who she is. And yes, Xander derailed Joyce's cancer (in the Consequence!timeline I like to imagine that she went as soon as symptoms initially appeared, both because the Scoobies are more alert in general and Jonathan is M.D. level knowledgeable in particular) and he arrived in time to get word to Joyce about it at least a few episodes before she actually went, so hopefully that makes the difference. He also got the whole Key situation out early, and Canon!Giles was smart enough to pick up that the best way to keep Dawn from doing something reckless about exploring it on her own was to invite her into the Scooby Gang's efforts to research it.

As to those who wonder how Dawn is somewhat more mature here than she is in episode 5x02, that's because the script of "Real Me" was not sufficiently adjusted in time to the plan to make Dawn 14, because she was originally supposed to be 10. Which is why she's such an incredible brat in that episode, the part is written for a 10-year-old girl. Imma just ignored that and went 'No, let's use later season 5 Dawn'.