The Lesser of Two Evils

By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R Setting: Post-Gift /AU Season 6/7
Pairing: B/S, Spike & Willow friendship
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I'd just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: When Warren Meers traps Buffy in an alternate dimension on his first assignment for Wolfram & Hart, Spike will go to any lengths to free her—and Willow's the only one who can stop him...
Author's notes: Thanks to Lisa, Gene, Fenchurch, and sgac--Betas Are Love!  This story takes place in the same universe as "Raising In the Sun," "Necessary Evils," and "A Parliament of Monsters." It's set approximately a year and four months after POM, in May of 2004. It contains spoilers for the series to date.

It was drizzling when they finished shopping, a fine grey mist that turned streetlights into watery undersea globes and oiled the pavement underfoot. Matched his current mood pretty well, too. "Been going to Kohlermann's for years," Spike grumbled, hoisting a double armful of bags out of the shopping cart and depositing them in the back seat of the Jeep. "Such a thing as brand loyalty, Slayer." He held up the plastic jug of deep red fluid and regarded it with a suspicious frown before stowing it away with the rest of the groceries.

Buffy's mouth pinched at the corners in his least favorite of her expressions. Her knuckles on the door handle were a shade or two whiter than necessary. She set the bag she was carrying down on the bonnet. "If the supermarket's carrying blood, and it's cheaper, why make an extra trip? Dead pig is dead pig. It saves gas. And money. Did it ever occur to you that maybe we should be saving money?"

"For what?" Spike slammed the hatchback shut and reclined against the bumper. Buffy'd been moody this last week and more. Spoiling for a fight and not about to admit it, she was; he recognized the signs. Past time for a certain event, to his mind—had he lost track of his calendar? "Nest egg for our old age? Got news for you, pet, we're neither of us—"

She whirled, one small hand shoving him up against the Jeep with a desperate ferocity. The parking lot floodlights crowned her in gold, mellow light spilling over her shoulders and the lush, tender swell of her breasts, but her eyes were lost in shadow. "How do you know? Things happen! Things might already have happened! Important things! And also, you drink way too much! We must spend fifty dollars a week on cigarettes and beer, and—"

Her voice cracked, and her hand on his chest half-clenched, fingernails digging through the fabric of his t-shirt and into the muscle underneath. The humid air reeked of her, rich with passion and anxiety. Before Spike had time to pick his jaw off the ground, a shabby man shuffled up, one black-grimed palm extended. "Spare some change, mister?"

Spike had never quite mastered altruism, but on good nights, he could muster up a certain degree of camaraderie for humankind at large. His town, his people. You kept the humans in good working order, and they repaid the effort by supplying you with beer and soap operas. This wasn't a good night. He turned a razor-fanged snarl on the interloper. "Sod off, you pathetic waste of skin."

The vagrant looked from him to Buffy with a yellow-eyed blink, mouthed Shit! around newly emergent fangs, and turned on his heel and ran, racing across the rain-slick Albertson's parking lot towards the back alley. Grateful for the interruption, Spike let out a joyful yell and took off after him.

He could hear Buffy behind him, and he grinned and sped up, boots pounding wet asphalt, breath coming harder than it had to because it felt so fucking good. He wasn't quite used to the heartbeat yet, but he was down with the breathing, in, out, in, out, warm wet exhaust-scented air ripping through lungs that actually craved the oxygen. This was what they needed. Good fight now, good fuck after. Clear the air.

They tore around the corner of the store, past the box compactor and into the alley. He had the bastard's scent now, hidden under a reek of sewer filth. One of the idiot fledges-come-lately who thought he could escape Spike's notice by passing as human and killing on the sly—well, not in his town, and certainly not in Buffy's. He didn't have a stake on him, though Buffy most likely did, and he didn't need one anyway, not for this tosser.

The fleeing vampire dodged behind a dumpster. Spike vaulted the lid in hot pursuit. Their shopping cart shot out of nowhere with a godawful rattle of wheels to intercept their quarry as it scrambled out of Spike's way. The vampire doubled over with a whoof! and Spike grabbed his ankles, tipping him face-first into the cart. Buffy's arm came down out of the darkness and the vamp exploded into dust around her stake.

"Bit slow off the mark tonight, aren't you, pet?" Spike grinned, tonguing his front teeth. Truth to tell, it was getting a little worrisome; she'd been tired along with the moody. "But now you're warmed up I expect..."

Buffy didn't respond to the banter, and he trailed off. She stood there in the drift of discarded egg cartons and limp carrot tops beside the dumpster, hugging her stake to her chest, arms crossed over her breasts and her eyes big and blank and dark. She was trembling. "I'm pregnant," she said. "I peed on the strip and it's pink. Or blue. Or something. I forget. The color of me having a baby."

Moody, tired, missing her monthlies, tits swelling—he felt extraordinarily stupid all of a sudden. Stupid, and hollow. A sickening sense of deja vu assailed him. Funny, he'd've thought he'd be killing mad, but instead he felt like his guts had been scraped out. "Who?"

"Who?" Buffy's head snapped up, amber flame kindling in her eyes. She took two quick steps foward, funk vanished in fury. Her hard little fist shot out and connected with his jaw, rocking him back against the side of the dumpster. "What do you mean, who?"

From a Slayer, that was a love-tap, no more, and he took it as such, licking the blood from his chin with a surge of silly relief. Stupid and contagious. Buffy wasn't Dru. There wouldn't be a who. Course not. He was an idiot. His brain was some kind of antiquated clockwork, creaking ponderously towards the obvious and impossible conclusion. "But...Fred did the tests," he said weakly. "Said you and I weren't..."

"Well, then the tests were wrong!" Buffy flexed her hand, looking like she was about to burst into tears. Funny, that; he could have burst into song, himself. "What are we going to do?"

"Buy cigars?" He couldn't stop grinning. He scooped her up, twirling her round in exuberant waltz-step and plunking her down in the shopping cart. He grabbed the handle and pushed hard, building up to a run. "Knit booties?" he yelled over the thunder of the wheels, and as they hit full speed, he hopped onto the rail and together they careened around the corner and out across the parking lot. He flung his head back and his arms wide as they flew over the white chevrons of parking spaces. "TELL THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD SPIKE'S KNOCKED UP HIS SLAYER AN' SHE'S GONNA BE A MUM?"

"Spike!" she hollered, but he could feel the stiffness melting out of her. Her arms twined around his neck as the cart rattled to a halt, and he was on her, kissing her breasts, her face, inhaling the dizzying aroma of her. Worrying at the pulse-point of her neck with teeth and tongue, making her gasp, making her nipples harden and thrust against his palms. Sweet, luscious Buffy-tits. In a few months they'd overflow his hands, swelling over her rounding belly. Nipples gone dark and thick as his thumb. Fuck, he was hard.

"Gonna take care of you good, pet. Buffy, love, whatever you need, whatever you want—"

Buffy buried her face in his shoulder, quivering with the effort of containing her sobs. "I don't know what I want! How can I know what I want when I don't even know what it is?"

"Girl, you think? Gotta be a girl. Summers girl. Right in here." Gloating and protective, he spread his hand across her stomach, still so smooth and flat beneath the lacy top she was wearing.

She looked up, her eyes tear-splashed and golden with distress. "You don't understand! What if it's—what if...I don't even know what I am any longer!"

Something inside him curled into a ball and howled. You can't give me this and take it away in the same five minutes. Not fair, Slayer. He held her tighter, caught despairing between two loves, one so new he could barely separate it from the old. "You're Buffy Summers. What else d'you need to be?"

She was shaking all-out now, weeks of pent-up fretting shivering their way to the surface. Spike lifted her out of the cart and set her down on the bonnet of the nearest car, hitching himself up beside her. Buffy crawled onto his lap and he stroked her hair, the slender curve of her spine, gentling her like a wild thing. She hiccuped against his chest. "It's not like I'm some pathetic unwed mother. I'm twenty-four! Older than Mom was when she had me. I have a job, I have a house, I have—I have you." Her fingers tightened on his arms, kneading his biceps as if to reassure herself of his solidity. "This is when people have babies. I should be able to do this! But I can't stop thinking—will it have a soul? What if it's one of those lizard-things you turned into in Pylea? I've talked to Cordelia, you know, and demon babies, they never go well! What do we put on the preschool application?"

Tentatively, the something uncurled. "You're not thinking about... not going through with it, then?"

"What? No!" She punched his shoulder, without force this time. "It's just—I always figured we'd have to adopt. Kids were something I thought we might do someday. Maybe. When we were ready. Not now." She picked up the grocery bag she'd left on the bonnet, twisting the plastic in her free hand. "I totally get the Xander kid-panic."

He ducked his head, nuzzling her hair. "Never occurred to me I wouldn't do the family thing. When I was alive. The first time. Find a girl, marry, have a passel of brats. Was what a proper man did." He lipped her ear. "All went out the window when I met Dru. Can't say as I missed it, but now...fuck, love, you have no idea how this feels."

"Good feeling?" she asked, small-voiced.

"Best feeling ever."

She looked down, the gold in her eyes giving way to dark wondering grey. "I have part of you growing inside me."

Her hand on her belly, his hand covering hers. He could hear her heart pattering away, a dozen beats to every one of his, and his own was like to burst out of his chest in a wild exultation of love and pride. "Oh, Slayer," he breathed, "you're gonna have something else of mine growing inside you in half a mo'..."

ZZZZZAP!!!

The air split open—not one of Dawn's neat, tidy portals, but a raw, bleeding rip in time and space. It should have come with neon Batman lettering. And he felt her dissolve in his arms.

Spike leaped to his feet on the bonnet of the car with a roar of baffled rage. Warren Meers was standing twenty feet away in the parking lot, a black-and-chrome contraption of tubes and hoses balanced on one shoulder. He pumped his free fist in the air and whooped in triumph. "Got her! Take that, you—"

The rest of the sentence was lost in a scream. The blood was sweeter than anything you could buy in a jug.

*****

The message on her voicemail had been...terse. Curt, even. More along the lines of Will, get your arse over here now than Watson, come here, I need you. There weren't many things that could get her to abandon a juicy set of lecture notes at eleven PM on a Wednesday night, but Spike using that particular combination of sire-voice and raw pleading was one of them.

Buffy's Jeep was skewed at a crazy angle across the driveway, its tire-tracks thick black marker-scribbles across the corner of the lawn and its front bumper an inch away from knocking over the Triumph. Ungood of the triple-plus variety. Willow got out of her Prius (parental graduation-cum-vampirism-is-just-a-phase-sweetie present) and inhaled damp rainy air, the first breath she'd taken since leaving Berkeley. Oil and wet asphalt, torn sod and the drowsy sweetness of Joyce's roses, and dozens of crisscrossed, rain-washed traces of people and dogs and cats and the occasional demon. And something newer, something sharper. Blood. Pain. Fear.

The front door was smashed half off its hinges, and the blood-scent curled around her olfactory center like a lover as she walked up the porch steps. Willow stood on the threshold, gripping the lintel, and forced herself to breathe. Her fangs kept trying to come down, and she forced game face off with a snarl of effort. Human. Male. Not Xander. Her knees quivered with relief. Familiar, though. Someone she'd met but didn't know very well? None of the blood was Spike's, and she wasn't sure it that was a good sign or a bad one. Stop being a big ol' scaredy-vamp, she told herself. She was the thing that went bump in the night now, and other night-bumping entities had just better watch their PDQs. Or was that Ps and Qs? Or SPQRs...?

The house was dark, lit only by the cold blue glow of the DVD player in the living room and the crimson glare of the microwave. The rug in the foyer was rucked up and the end table at the foot of the stairs listed drunkenly, one leg snapped right off—why on earth didn't Buffy just get rid of the thing? It might as well have a sign on it saying "Monsters, please smash me." Everything pointed to something terribly strong and terribly angry coming through at speed.

Should she call 911? There were some beat patrol officers in Sunnydale with a clue, these days. She tiptoed into the living room. Long dark streaks of clotted blood painted the carpet, through the dining room and into the kitchen where the trail disappeared down the stairs to the basement. Willow dithered at the top of the stairs, nibbling on her lower lip. Wait. She laid a hand on the stair rail, stilled her own nervous breathing, and listened.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump...

Somewhere down there, slow and faint, a human heart was beating.

"Buffy?" she called. "Spike?"

Since she and Tara had moved out, the basement had reverted half to storage and half to a weight room for Spike. It was dark down there even for vampire eyes, Marianas Trench dark, and she half expected some fantastic glowing monster to loom up out of the depths as she crept down the stairs. As her pupils adjusted, grabbing every spare photon, she made out a dim outline—her nose told her it was Spike. Well, duh, was she expecting P.Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way? The shadow raised his head, and pupils flashed red as the reek of blood in the air. "Took you long enough. Come on down, Red."

Uh oh. Just a hair too slow, just a skinch too carefully enunciated. Spike was drunk—not soppy maudlin plastered or cheerful-and-snuggly tipsy, but mad, mean, bottle-in-the-face drunk. She could hear his heartbeat now, too, slow and strong as Donne's death-knell compared to the feeble pattering she'd first picked up. Who was it tolling for? "I got your message," she said, hating the squeak in her voice. Sometimes she wished she could just turn the soul off and be ultra-cool black leather Vampire Willow for fifteen minutes at a time—she couldn't get very far at world domination in fifteen minutes, could she? And it would make descending creepy staircases into pitch-black basements of doom a lot more fun. "Spike, you haven't...done anything, have you?"

A high-pitched, unnerving giggle answered her. "Not yet," Spike said. "Nothing serious, anyway. There's some bits a bloke really doesn't need, after all."

There was a match-flare and the stink of sulfur. A candle burst into golden flower, and then another, and another, and Willow threw up a hand to shield her eyes from the sudden light. Her sire was seated cross-legged on a heap of workout mats, surrounded by several empty whiskey bottles and a selection of cigarette butts scattered with a fine disregard for their house-burning-down potential. His jaw was dark with stubble and both he and his clothes looked like they hadn't slept for three days straight. A wooden crate at his side supported half a dozen candles in various stages of meltdown and the current bottle of JD. Dried blood crusted at the corners of his mouth. His ferocious reddened eyes were fixed on a contraption of coiled tubes and flanges lying on the floor in front of him. Its flaring trumpet-mouth was aimed at a slumped figure handcuffed to the weight rack against the opposite wall.

The captive shivered as she came closer, cringing back against the wall. He wasn't a big man. About Spike's size, maybe, but heavier. Sharp nose, dark wiry hair, full cheeks, petulant lips, slack now with terror. And blood. So much blood. Multiple fang-marks scored his neck, not little pinprick love-bites, but the savage ragged crescent of the full feeding-bite which must have come within a hair of killing him then and there. The captive's arms were pulled up at an awkward angle—both shoulders had to be dislocated—and Willow really didn't want to find out which parts, in Spike's estimation, were the most dispensable. "Warren?" Willow took a step closer, realized her mouth was watering, and swallowed hard. "I thought...I thought you were in prison."

At the sound of her voice, Warren's eyes flickered. They were glassy and dull, and if she'd broken the cuffs right now, Willow doubted he'd have the strength to stand. "Help me," he croaked, voice flat as a recording. Did he even really know she was there? "You gotta help me. He's nuts. You gotta—"

Spike snatched up the bottle of JD and tipped it back, Adam's apple bobbing as he drained it to the amber dregs. He flung the bottle to shatter against the wall beside Warren's head, and rose fluidly to his feet, swaying ever so slightly on the mats. "Oh, Will's not here to slay the dragon, mate," he purred. "She's a dragon too."

"Spike. I don't know what's going on here, but let him go. You can't just tie someone up in the basement and torture them—"

"Can. Have," Spike interrupted. "Synopsis: Buffy's gone, he did it, you're gonna get her back."

"Get her...?" Willow's belly dropped way below room temperature. He couldn't mean...? "Oh, no, Spike, not again! We got super-extra lucky the first time, I know that now—"

"I said gone, not dead," Spike snarled. He bent over and hefted the tuba-flamethrower hybrid thingy to one shoulder. He tossed it at Willow, who caught it with an eep! of surprise—after two years she still didn't know her own strength, not that her own strength was all that much in vampire terms. "If she were dead, this berk would be, too."

Willow turned the...gun? over, examining its dully gleaming coils, curious despite herself. Activation switch, power unit—mini-fusion reactor pack, or...? No, no, no, this was no time to go Werner Von Braun. "Can we unpack that a bit? Gone how?"

Spike inclined his head at Warren, face impassive. In a flash he was kneeling at his captive's side, a small wiry man in worn jeans and short-cropped brown curls. Perfectly ordinary, and therefore infinitely scarier than he ever had been back in the days of bleach and black leather, eyeliner and studs. He vamped out, golden eyes staring into Warren's dark ones, and nipped a divot out of the man's ear in one swift vicious bite. He spat out the gnarled flap of cartilage and smacked Warren on the nose with it. "Tell the lady, mate."

"It's a Polyakov open-string dimensional accelerator," Warren gasped. "It can't bring her back. I've told you—" Spike sighed, closed a fist around a pulped, bleeding finger, and squeezed. Warren screamed, back arching, the flesh of his wrists tearing against the handcuffs as he struggled to escape. "It's them, not me! Wolfram & Hart! Call Ms. Morgan if you don't believe me! Oh, God, stop, please stop, let me go, let me—"

She was starving. She was going to throw up. "Stop it!" Willow yelled, loud enough to momentarily drown out Warren's sobs. Spike shrugged and let the ruined hand drop. Warren collapsed in a blubbery heap. "He'll say anything if you keep that up," Willow gritted out.

"I know," Spike said. "But it makes me feel better." He grinned and licked the blood from Warren's cheek in one long lascivious tongue-stroke, his voice dropping to a smoke-and-cinders growl. "Tell me you wouldn't be doing the same if it was Tara."

Too much. Righteous horror went right over Spike's head, but personal pissed-off-ness was another matter. "Get out," Willow snapped. Spike blinked up at her owlishly, transformed in an instant from Hannibal Lector to a small boy caught raiding the cookie jar. She pointed up the stairs and stamped one foot. "You heard me! Upstairs, now! Take a shower, drink a gallon of coffee, sleep for ten or twelve hours, and come back when you can act like someone who's not the main feature on America's Most Psycho!"

There was the tiniest hint of relief in his eyes—finally, someone with a soul can take charge—but it was quickly obscured by a sullen, game-faced scowl. "You don't orger—order me around, bitch," he said, staggering a little as he rose from his crouch. "M'yer sire, and don't you forget it! Just so happens I was going upstairs anyway." He held up a piece of broken bottle, and it was all Willow could do not to flinch. "Liquor cabinet's upstairs." He stared at the shard of glass, and his mouth quivered. "Buffy said I drank too much." Tears welled up in his eyes along with the blue as he lapsed back into human features. Willow skipped back a step as an indefinite number of sleepless nights and bottles of bourbon cracked her sire smartly across the back of the skull, and Spike keeled over face-first into the glittering mosaic of glass on the floor.

*****

Willow hauled Spike upstairs, bumpity-bump like Winnie-the-Pooh, and laid him out like a corpse on the white tile of the bathroom floor. She could have carried him, but she figured he deserved a few more cracks on the head. Wrinkling her nose at the reek of old blood and stale whiskey and unwashed vampire, she stripped him of as many layers of bloodstained clothing as decency allowed, then heaved him into the tub and turned on the shower full blast, trusting water pressure to scour the worst of the crud away. Spike groaned and twitched as the stinging spray hit him, but he didn't wake up.

While he debrided, Willow picked her way back downstairs. Straightened the rug in the foyer. Took the broken table out to the curb. Got out the broom and dustpan, and swept up the crunchy pieces of knick-knacks and doodads. Wished Tara were here—cleaning up other people's messes was Tara's specialty. Considered that perhaps she was being the teeniest bit avoidy. Knowing what was in the basement ought to make it less scary, right? Except... she didn't know for absolute certain, did she? It had been almost an hour. Anything could have happened. Maybe Warren had died down there, in a welter of yummy disgusting blood. She should call someone. Not Giles, definitely not Giles. Xander, or Dawn—oh, God, where was Dawn?

She dashed back upstairs, ripped the shower curtain aside, and shook Spike violently. When that produced no results, she belted him full-strength across the mouth, not that a two-year fledge's full strength was going to make a lot of impression on a vampire with a century plus under his belt. "Dawn! Where's Dawn?" she hollered into his ear.

Shower-water dripped down the crumpled plastic folds of the curtain and puddled on the floor. One bloodshot blue eye cracked open. "'n L.A. Wiv'er Dad."

"Oh." Willow slumped back on her heels in relief. "Oh. That's...good! Very good. So I don't have to go look for her. And there's no reason for me not to..." So much for relief.

The water swirling down the drain was running mostly clear. With a resigned sigh, she shut off the tap and turned Spike's face from one side to the other, examining the crosshatch of healing cuts on his cheeks to make sure all the glass fragments were out. She lifted Spike out of the tub with a grunt and carted him down the hall to the bedroom, his dripping head lolling against her shoulder—Pieta with Jewish vampire. He felt sleek and sinewy in her arms; clearly, whatever else he'd been up to, he hadn't been forgetting to feed. She thought of the wounds in Warren's neck and shuddered.

"You are so going to owe me," she muttered, dropping him on the bed. Spike sprawled across the sheets with a groggy whimper, a starfish of gleaming ivory skin and water-slick black denim. She started to undo his belt buckle and hesitated, fingertips hovering an inch above the quilted muscle of his belly. Her eyes were unwillingly drawn to the trail of sparse dark hair disappearing beneath the low-slung waistband of his jeans. They'd all seen enough of each other in Pylea that the thought of Spike's naughty bits shouldn't bother her, and if she left the jeans on, the sheets would get all wet and maybe mildew, and Buffy shouldn't come home to mildewy sheets. But there was something intimate and scary about the fact that she could reach out and poke the tiny soft curve of tummy under his navel if she wanted to. Your sire ought not to be vulnerable to indiscriminate tummy-poking.

Taking a fortifying breath, she undid his belt, averted her eyes, grabbed the hems of his Levis and pulled. Since Spike's jeans customarily hung halfway off his ass to begin with, they peeled off with a satisfying David Copperfield flourish. Lean thighs, check. Muscular calves dusted with an aesthetically pleasing amount of curly brown hair, check. The obligatory naughty bits, currently as limp as their owner—eye aversion obviously the best course. Willow pulled the coverlet over Spike's middle and started going through his clothes.

A search through wet squelchy pockets turned up Spike's wallet and the keys to the handcuffs. Willow set the wallet on the dresser, tucked the key into her own jacket, and opened the wicker clothes hamper at the foot of the bed to toss the sodden jeans in. Buffy's robe was rolled up in the bottom.

She pulled it out and crushed it to her nose, inhaling Buffy-scent—days old, days cold, but it brought tears to her eyes. She gave the robe a last quick sniff and wadded it up beside Spike's head. He took one long deep sighing breath and snuggled into the worn terrycloth, his restless twitching stilled. Willow said loudly, "I'll just go back down to the basement, then. To check on Warren. The guy you were filleting. Remember him?"

The only response was a blissful snore.

*****

Breakfasts were not Willow's forte, being that she really wasn't much of a morning person any longer, but as the sun was edging over the horizon by the time she got Warren clean, bandaged, and doped up on as many painkillers as she could scrounge from the impressive array of dubiously-legal pharmaceuticals in the Summers' medicine cabinet, breakfast was what Warren got. Their prisoner of war—or maybe he was only an enemy combatant—was now seated at the dining room table, swathed in splints and gauze like some incomplete third-grade crafts project, wolfing down enough carbohydrates to feed an impoverished African nation for a week. All things considered, Warren was in pretty good shape. Spike hadn't even started pulling out toenails yet, which showed remarkable restraint. Not that anyone but another vampire was likely to appreciate it.

"...the new CEO, Mr. Wyndam-Price, was impressed by my work in cybernetics, and wanted to hire me on as part of their Research and Development Department. They're really a hell of a lot more than just a law firm, and the benefits package is to kill for," Warren slurred. He swayed a little in his chair, Spike's borrowed and somewhat too small bathrobe revealing a disturbingly furry V of chest. "Hey, did anyone ever tell you you're pretty cute for a carpet-munching corpse?"

"And I wish I could say that was the codeine talking," Willow muttered. Her stomach rumbled. There was blood in the fridge, and she could have warmed it up, but feeding now, when Buffy could be languishing in a hell dimension somewhere, seemed unconscionably selfish. She took a sip from her cup of weak mint tea and turned the Vampire Lesbian of Sodom glare on him. "Point. Get to it."

"They sent one of their hotshot lawyers, and he got my sentence commuted. I didn't ask for the details." Warren forked in a mouthful of bacon. "I was psyched. At last my life was turning around, right? I was finally getting the breaks I deserve." A boastful note crept into his voice. "And then I got my first big project. The dimensional accelerator."

Willow leaned forward, lacing her fingers together on the dining room table. "Yeah, let's talk about that. I recognized some of the components from your invisibility gun. Spike seems to think you can just flip it into reverse and un-zap."

"Spike's an idiot," Warren said dismissively. He shoved his plate of hash browns across the table at her. "Put some ketchup on this."

"What am I, your mother?"

"No, you're the one with the intact metacarpals."

Feeling both guilty and irritated, Willow applied ketchup. Warren had rebounded remarkably from the cowering wreck in the basement, his ebullience increasing in direct proportion to the amount of codeine in his system and the length of time Spike stayed unconscious. She set the ketchup down with a thump and folded her arms forbodingly across her chest. "You were saying?"

"The undead boy toy's an idiot, is what I'm saying. He doesn't grok the basic concepts. Look, are you familiar with membrane theory?"

"I've perused the odd Scientific American," Willow replied stiffly. "And technically speaking he's not undead any longer."

"Whatever. I'll dumb it down for you." He grabbed a sheaf of paper napkins in his good hand and held them up. "You've got an infinite number of universes co-existing in higher-dimensional space, right? You get from one dimension to the next via portals—permanent, natural ones like the Hellmouth, or transient created ones. Got that?"

"Just barely."

"It's the perfect solution for storing valuable or dangerous items or, uh, personnel. Just stick 'em in another world. The problem is, dimensional hot-spots can only be used a limited number of times, and uncontrolled portals can be unstable and cause massive wear and tear on the continuum." Warren stabbed the napkins with his fork, sending shreds of tissue paper flying. "The W&H solution? Pocket dimensions." He held up an illustrative napkin. "Not separate universes, but folds in the fabric of this one. Tailored precisely to the client's needs—volume, duration, physical laws, the works. Hellishly expensive, but the tax write-offs under the current administration make it worth it. Only trouble is, they're usually accessible only by time-consuming, elaborate rituals. That's where the dimensional accelerator comes in. Once keyed to the vibrational signature of a given pocket dimension, it transposes the vibrational frequency of the target's component atoms to match, and voila—they slip out of this world into next. Quick, clean, and unerringly accurate."

He let the napkins flutter to the table. "But once they're gone, they're gone. Out of this world. I can't de-zap your pal because she's not here to de-zap." His grin turned ugly. "Instant karma, Red. She put me away, so I put her away." He nodded out the window at the rising sun, shoved back from the table and pushed himself to his feet. "Thanks for the rescue, but I can find my own ride back to L.A."

Willow's hand shot out, sending the salt and pepper shakers spinning across the tabletop, her fingers closing around his wrist. "I told you," she said softly, "this isn't a rescue. And only Spike gets to call me Red."

Warren sneered as her nails dug deeper. "You're not going to hurt me," he said. "You have a soul."

"Yeh, well, so do you, in theory," a voice rumbled behind them. "Guess that leaves me the odd man out."

It was Spike: freshly shaved, immaculately dressed, every hair shellacked severely into place. Warren paled, and Willow yanked him back down into his chair. She could smell the sea-change in his sweat, from confidence to the acrid stench of fear.

Spike sauntered past them into the kitchen, and after a moment Willow heard the hiss and gurgle of the coffeemaker—Spike hated coffee with a passion, but he wouldn't ruin good tea by putting whiskey in it. The refrigerator opened and closed, cupboards rattled, the microwave hummed to life and in due course dinged. Presently Spike sauntered back into the dining room with a mug of warm blood, which he set down in front of Willow, and a cup of black-as-tar coffee which she suspected was highly adulterated. He pulled a chair out, reversed it, and straddled the seat, elbows propped on the back. He cocked an eyebrow at Willow. "Got to keep your strength up, pet. Running a proper torture session takes it out of a bloke."

"You're never going to get away with this!" Warren snarled. "The firm will be sending someone after me, and your pissant little operation here doesn't stand a chance against—"

"Won't have to," Spike drawled, downing a healthy swig of coffee-with-extras. He aimed a meaningful look at Willow across the rim of his cup. "This little vacation's done me a world of good. Given me a chance to ponder the meaning of life, like. And what I've come up with is that this pathetic craven sod's telling the truth—he's just too blind stupid to see it's bollocks." He extracted his cell phone from a hip pocket and tossed it to the dumbfounded Warren. "Your lords an' masters aren't coming for you, Meers. Go on, call 'em. Yell for help. Tell 'em the bad, bad vampire's got you locked up in the basement."

"Spike," Willow started. He shook his head impatiently.

"Doesn't add up, love. Biggest force for evil on the West Coast sends a known enemy of the Slayer traipsing down here to pop Buffy off all on his lonesome. There's a word for that, and it's 'expendable.'"

Warren's jaw jutted. "I was supposed to have backup! I was—"

"Screwed," Willow summed up. It all made a sick kind of sense. "They have your notes and plans, don't they? Why do they need you?" Warren stared at her, a dull crimson flooding his cheeks. "Oh, come on, you're the twelfth-level mind around here. They expected Spike to kill you, and never find out Wolfram & Hart were behind the whole thing."

Jaw clenched, Warren punched a number into Spike's cell. Willow could hear the other end ringing, ringing, picking up—

"Lilah Morgan," the voice at the other end of the line said.

"Ms. Morgan," Warren said. "It's me. I'm in Buffy's house and the vampire—Spike—he's holding me captive. You've got to—"

"Was the field test of the dimensional accelerator successful, Mr. Meers?"

"Worked like a dream, but that's not—"

"Excellent. I'll be certain to pass that piece of good news on to Mr Wyndam-Price."

"But—"

"Mr. Meers." Ms. Morgan's voice had taken on a disapproving note. "We expect our agents in the field to exercise a certain degree of initiative. If that's not something you can handle, perhaps Wolfram & Hart isn't the place for you after all. Have a wonderful day."

Click.

Warren let the phone fall to the table, his face ashen under its three-day growth of stubble. "She set me up," he whispered, a furious light igniting in his eyes. "That bitch set me up!"

"Puts a whole new complexion on the face of life, dunnit?" Spike inhaled coffee-steam with a thoughtful expression, as if he were committing the phrase to memory for use in future literary efforts. "Where'd we leave off, then? Fingers? Toes? Eyes?"

"She can't do this to me. She can't--!" Warren's fist hit the table, making the silverware rattle. "Fine. She wants to play hardball, I'll get out my bat. You want revenge, it's Lilah Morgan and Wyndam-Pryce you need to go after. I'm just the messenger." He leaned forward, his eyes gone crafty. "I'll make you a deal. You let me walk out of here tonight and never touch me again and I'll tell you everything I know."

Spike set his coffee down and propped an elbow on the chair-back, his cheek propped on a negligent curl of fingers, his lips curved in the faintest of smiles. The tile mosaic on the sideboard behind him wreathed his stiffly gelled curls in ceramic grape leaves, like the crown of some pagan god. His eyes glittered. "You're a little more than the messenger boy, Meers. You really think you're in a position to make deals?"

Willow could see his hands shaking, but Warren gave a short ugly bark of laughter. "Yeah, Spike, I really think I am. Because I'm your only chance."

Her sire continued to regard Warren with the mild and unwavering interest of a cat with a particularly promising mousehole. Willow developed a nervous fascination with the tableware, setting the salt and pepper to rights and scooping the spilled grains into little particolored heaps. If Spike really did try to kill Warren, could she stop him? The fists and fangs route was right out; Spike was a century older, stronger, and faster than she was, not to mention much better at hitting things in general. She was still stumbling along with her new understanding of magic; give her four hours to set up a ritual circle and she might have something, but the point-and-zap method was a bust.

"Will," Spike said, gesturing at the cell phone. "Give that Burkle bird a ring, will you?"

Warren's speeding heartbeat was accompanied by a gush of fresh sweat as Willow punched in Fred's number--vampire senses were a running DVD commentary on life. "Burkle? 'Supersymmetry and P-Dimensional Subspace' Winifred Burkle? You're bluffing. You don't know–"

"Well enough to know her mates don't call her Winifred," Spike said, downing the last of his coffee and licking his lips. "Fred's the physics boffin. Dawn's got Key mojo. Anyplace you've sent Buffy, they can pull her back." He rose to his feet and cracked his knuckles. "Feeling up to some exercise, Meers?"

Warren flailed clumsily back from the table, knocking over his chair. "Stay away from me, you—"

"Both of you—" Willow started, but was interrupted by "Fred Burkle. What can I do you for?" Her spirits rebounded. Fred's honeyed Texas drawl came from another world itself, proof the universe outside the Summers house still existed, and they weren't stuck in some Twilight Zone pocket dimension of their own. "Hey, Fred. Quick question: can you derive trionic dimensional co-ordinates from the vibrational signature of a specific pocket dimension?"

"Huh." Fred's ponder was audible. Willow could all but see the pencil-nibbling. "Now that's one I don't get asked every day. You wouldn't planning to turn Dawn loose on a Riemann-Polyenkov fold, would you? 'Cause that might be bad."

Warren, plastered up against the dining room wall, broke into a triumphant grin. He couldn't hear Fred's words, but Spike could, and the expression on her sire's face had gone from cool control to crushing dismay in a millisecond. No wonder he had to cheat at poker. "Bad as in risk to life and limb bad, or bad as in catastrophic dimensional collapse bad?" Willow asked. "I only speak pidgin physics."

"In-betweenish. Pocket dimension's a fold in this reality. You get in and out by using translational equations that slip you along the fold—right into the pocket, see? Dawn's for openin' doors between worlds. She pokes holes right through this reality, and you go poking holes in a pocket, I can't guarantee you where the stuff inside's gonna fall out. It might land six dimensions to the left of us."

"But then Dawn could take us to where the stuff landed, right?" Willow interrupted in excitement. Warren's grin was starting to falter. And then, because she was completely responsible and all about looking before she leaped now, "Um. There's no dangerous side effects to falling out of a dimensional pocket, are there? If this stuff is kind of a person?"

There was a long pause. "That's a dilemma. There's a good chance they'd survive with only minor molecular damage."

Spike braced both fists on the table and leaned forward to shout at the receiver, shoulders tense. "What's minor?"

"Hard to say," Fred admitted. "We're talkin' random single-base mutations in the DNA. Odds are real good it wouldn't be any more dangerous than, oh, sittin' through a couple dozen X-Rays. Now, I could work out translational fold equations for you, which'd be a whole bunch safer, but doin' the math from scratch would take about six months. "

Willow bit her lip and glanced at Warren, who was oozing along the wall towards the kitchen and freedom. She pinned him in place with a glare. "If you take one more step towards the back door, it's Newt City for you, buster." To Fred, she said, "I think we're more in the market for speedy right now--"

Spike's face settled into chill planes. "No."

Willow covered the receiver with her hand and hissed, "No? What no? Where is the no? Slayer healing, remember? Buffy should be able to come through this just—"

"I said no," Spike snarled, snatching the phone. "Can't use any fewer syllables than that, can I?"

"Willow?" Fred's miniaturized voice asked. "What's goin' on up there?"

"I'll call you back," Willow yelled as Spike clicked the phone off and stuffed it back in his pocket.

Warren smirked and started to folded his arms across his chest, giving up when his bandaged hand wouldn't tuck properly. Despite the bravado in his pose, his voice was a note or two higher and shakier than it should have been. "I take it that means we have a deal."

"Excuse me," Willow snapped, "while I have a word with my colleague in private."

Spike gave a startled yip as Willow reached across the table, caught him by the ear, and dragged him protesting into the living room. "What the fuck was that for?" he complained, shaking her off and feeling his ear tenderly for damage. "That bloody well hurt! And you can't change him into a sodding newt!"

"My heart bleeds purple Kool-Aid for you. And he doesn't know that." Willow planted herself in front of the fireplace for maximum scold factor. "Do you need a head-smacking from the experts? Because I can call Angel in if you want! Fred gave us a plan that doesn't involve removing digits, and you're with the No? For all we know Buffy got sent to a dimension full of ravenous bugblatter beasts, or-or evil garden gnomes! It could be just as dangerous to leave her there for six months as to risk a little cosmic freezer burn getting her back now!"

"Bugger all you know about it!" Spike swung round, looking for something to smash, caught between the couch that'd replaced the one he and Buffy had wrecked, the fashion magazines on the coffee table, and the framed photos of Buffy and Dawn and Joyce on the wall. There was nothing in this room that wasn't a memory of the one thing that wasn't in it. His face folded along lines of despair and took his knees out with it, and he collapsed onto the couch, head buried in his hands. "Buffy's pregnant," he whispered.

Willow gaped at him. "Buffy's what?" She couldn't have heard that right. When Spike had first done the Pinocchio bit, Fred had marched him down to the Gregson Clinic to have him analyzed down to his once-again-functioning mitochondria, trying to figure out how he'd survived the Mohra blood with no soul to make him human. Willow had scrupulously read through the eight cubic feet of resulting reports, with all their speculations about 'demonic animus optimally integrated with residual anthropic personality matrix,' and 'Vestigial physical reactions unusually well-developed.' All of which boiled down to 'Huh. Cool. Who'd'a thunk?' But none of it boiled down to a high probability of bouncing baby manpires.

Through Spike's laced fingers, she caught an irritable glint of eyeball. "Knocked up, bun in the oven, expecting the patter of little feet, up the duff, in the family way, member of the pudding club! You getting deaf in your old age, Red?"

"But you're, quote, 'minimally compatible with human DNA," unquote," Willow objected, appalled at this lack of respect for the scientific method. Of course, since that whole thing with the shadowcaster last year, Buffy's DNA wasn't exactly entirely human any longer, but still. "Your swimmers shouldn't be synchronizing with Buffy's, much less heading for the Olympics!"

"Minimally seems to have got the job done," Spike replied shortly. His shoulders slumped. "None of that matters, don't you see? Slayer may be tough enough to survive getting tossed hither and yon across dimensions, but there's no telling what it'd do to the sprog. Can't risk that, can I? Not with Buffy not knowing. Maybe she'd take the risk if she knew, but I—" He stared down at his hands, and his voice cracked. "I can't take it for her. Baby's part of her, innit? I can't just–"

She should say something. Congratulations, maybe, though this didn't quite seem the time for them. Buffy as a mom just didn't compute. She was still getting used to Xander as a dad. She tried and failed to imagine Buffy changing diapers, or Spike attending a Little League game. What was with this sudden rush to breed, anyway? Buffy had been her first and only real girlfriend, Xena to her Gabrielle, Cagney to her Lacey, Thelma to her Louise. Minus the lesbian subtext, alcoholism, and plunge into the Grand Canyon. This was going to change everything, and God, how much more self-involved could she get? She should be happy for them. And for herself. She was going to be a... a... if she was Spike's get, and this was Spike's son-or-daughter, what did that make her, a cousin? An aunt? Or a half-sister? Aunt, hopefully. She wasn't ready for sibling rivalry. The cool, bohemian aunt, not the scary one with the mustache. "We can't just leave her there!" she burst out.

"Never said I intended to, pet." Spike got to his feet, his jaw like granite. "Meers!" he roared. "Crank up that popgun of yours. You're sending me after Buffy."

Daylight poured through the blinds, stenciling brilliant white checkerboards on the kitchen counters. Willow had retreated to the living room, where blackout curtains kept the sun at bay. She knelt in the middle of the floor in the mellow light of a dozen designer candles, surrounded by an entire Radio Shack's worth of coils, wires, circuit boards, and silicon logic crystals, arranging components at Warren's direction. The miniaturized, magnetically shielded fusion generator that served as a power pack hummed sullenly on top of the television.

Warren huddled on the couch, cradling the splinted fingers of his left hand in his lap and wincing every time Spike past, which was approximately ten winces per hour. Her sire prowled the house like an ambulatory volcano, chain-smoking and gathering supplies. Powdery grey ash marked his passing, kitchen to dining room to living room and back again, ground into the carpet by his endlessly pacing boots. Buffy was so going to kill him for that when she got back.

If she got back.

No. Willow clamped her mouth shut, as if stifling the words could keep the thought from reality. Buffy would be fine. Spike would be fine. The baby would be fine. Fred would work out the translational equations and in six months (which was hardly any time at all) they'd all be laughing, ha ha! "Do you think I should plan a baby shower?" She fitted a component into place with a satisfying click. "For when Buffy gets back. Whatever else there is in a pocket dimension, I'm pretty sure Pampers don't make the short list. Except, boy or girl? Fangs or no fangs? What do baby vampires teethe on? And breast feeding? Ow."

Warren grunted and re-arranged his circuit-board mosaic. "Use this one," he ordered. "Cross-couple it with the right-hand bank of P-state translation coils."

One thing you had to say for Warren Meers (and Willow was all for saying as little as possible), he was a grade-A, number one, certified cybernetics genius. The accelerator's design might have had its roots in the invisibility gun, but the improvements in the phase resonance circuits alone... "I know Spike's sure it's a girl, but a boy would be nifty-keen," she mused, warming to the subject. "Xander and Anya just had a girl. Romance could be in the air! Of course, the air could be romanceful if it's two girls, too. Potentially. In fifteen or twenty years. Very Montague and Capulet. Demons and humans living together in–well, not always so much with the harmony, maybe, but I never noticed till I moved to Berkeley that they don't have take-out windows at the blood bank in most cities—wait a minute." Willow picked up the indicated widget with a frown. "Won't cross-coupling make the vibrational translation field unstable?"

"The word you're looking for is 'duh,'" Warren said. He jabbed a gauze-wrapped thumb at the mountain of sleeping bags, propane lanterns, machetes, canned jalapenos, and coolers full of frozen pig's blood Spike had already heaped on the rug in front of the fireplace. "But it's the only way to get enough power to take Davy Crockett's wagon train of camping equipment."

Willow pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, trying for mildly threatening I-already-know-what-you-know-but-you-don't-know-I-know-it omniscience. His heart was racing, but it was hard to tell the thumpity-thump of Spike's going to rip my spleen out from thumpity-thump of telling a big fat lie. "One thing bothers me," she said. "What kind of threat is one free-lance Slayer to a multinational law firm? The demons Buffy fights aren't big on the class action lawsuits, and I kinda get the idea Wolfram & Hart doesn't do pro malo work. Which kind of makes me wonder..."

Spike stalked in before Warren could answer, almost vibrating off his toes with nerves. He tossed a canteen and a double-barreled shotgun onto the growing pile on the hearth. "How much longer?" he demanded. "It's livable, right? This pocket wotsis? Bloke can manage without a spacesuit?"

"How should I know?" Warren eyed Spike with a poisonous loathing Willow couldn't entirely dismiss as unfounded. "I told you already, if you want the big answers, you've gotta go for the suits. I'm just an R & D grunt. My assignment was to build the accelerator and field-test it. All I know is that they needed the Slayer contained--not dead, just off the playing field indefinitely. And considering the number of times that little bitch fucked me over..." He rose laboriously to his feet, took the power pack from the TV and slotted it into the magazine of the accelerator. "You ready, or what?"

Spike chucked his cigarette into the fireplace and raked a hand through his hair with enough force to dislodge a curl or two from their straightjacket of gel. He strode over to the stack of supplies. "Will, you get back to Fred with whatever she needs to winkle us out of dimensional stir. If you can suss out a way to speed it up with magic, all the better. Call Lawson, and tell him he's to get his arse down here and take charge of the minions–David's a clever lad, but he can be a bit too clever. And get hold of that berk Summers and let him know what's happened."

It was funny how she'd forgotten, after a mere six weeks in Berkeley, what it felt like for the world to end on a regular basis. And funny how easily that sinking, shaking feeling, half exhilaration and half terror, rushed back after less than twenty-four hours in Sunnydale, filling up cracks she hadn't realized were empty. "Spike..." But there wasn't anything else to say, so she hugged him hard, with all the vampire strength she didn't dare use on Tara, crushed up tight against firm muscle and solid bone.

"When you tell Niblet..." His hand cupped the nape of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair, and she shivered. "You tell her I've gone after her sis, and we're both coming back. You tell her just like that." Spike stepped back and looked down at her, eyes like the sky outside, alight with beautiful, deadly sun. "I'm depending on you, Will."

There were a lot of other things he could have said. There were none of them she wanted to hear more.

"Come on, come on," Warren said, gesturing impatiently with the bell-flared muzzle of the accelerator. He seemed understandably eager for Spike to be gone. "The Hallmark moment can wait, unless you want to go with him."

"You wish," Willow said frostily. "I'm staying right here to keep an eye on you." She paced off a careful five steps from the fireplace and extended a hand to Warren. "Hand it over."

"Keep your shirt on." Warren bent over the accelerator. "Unless you want him to end up Willie Wonka'd into a million pieces, I gotta fine-tune this sumbitch."

Willow watched impatiently as Warren adjusted the frequency modulator and fiddled with the calibration of the phase coils. Her sight was attuned to pattern and movement now–even in human shape, the blazing colors of day pained and confused eyes meant to sift the smallest details from night's starker, darker shades. Maybe if they'd been in the kitchen, or if he hadn't been trying to maneuver around two broken fingers, Warren would have gotten away with it. But here in the friendly dimness of the living room, the twitch of his finger hand on the activation button drew Willow's eye like the wriggle of a wounded mouse draws a cat.

Warren swung the muzzle of the accelerator up and Willow leaped without thought. At vampire speed, she moved in realtime through a red-shifted world: objects hung forever in the gelid air and people were frozen mannequins. All they needed was the gold watch and everything. Fangs extending, eyes blazing yellow, Willow bowled into Warren's molasses-slow point-and-click and caught the muzzle as the accelerator fired, yanking it upwards against inertial resistance it took vampire strength to negotiate. Blue-white lightning slashed a diagonal across the fireplace, leaving charred mortar and slagged brick in its wake.

Spike ducked and rolled, the only other inhabitant of her 78 RPM universe, springing to his feet on the other side of the armchair. The outer layer of the sleeping bag topping the pile of equipment lost molecular cohesion in a cellophane crackle of energy and dissolved into fine grey dust. The accelerator spun free of Warren's damaged hands, pinwheeling lazily through the air. Spike kicked off the armchair, sending it into a slow-motion tumble, and caught the accelerator just before it smashed into the chimney. A sharp CRACK!, a shower of violet sparks—the living room filled with the stink of ozone and burning metal, and Spike convulsed with a scream and slumped to the ground.

Willow snapped back into sync with the rest of the world. "What did you do?" she shrieked, grabbing the front of Warren's borrowed bathrobe and shaking him like a doll. "What did you do?"

Warren was laughing, tears rolling down his cheeks. "Showed some initiative!" he whooped.

Willow dropped him with a snarl and dashed across the room. Her sire lay motionless on the hearthrug, curled around the ruined accelerator. Angry red electrical burns streaked his palms. He's not dead if he's not dust! her brain gibbered, but that wasn't true anymore—Spike was a demon, incredibly strong and incredibly tough, but he was alive now, and that meant he could die. He could drown, or suffocate, or catch pneumonia, or get electrocuted, or oh the irony bleed to death.

His chest was statue-still. But then, he only inhaled out of necessity once every ten minutes so. Willow pressed her ear to his breastbone, holding her own purely optional breath. Resting heart rate of twelve beats a minute, that was once every five seconds. Had it been five seconds? One potato, two potato... even if the shock had sent him into arrest, Spike's circulatory system was a maze of contractile vascular tissue and valves which squeezed blood wherever it needed to go with only minimal cardiac encouragement so there was still a chance and how the frilly heck did you give CPR to a vampire?

Thump-thump.

Spike twitched and gave a little moan. Willow straightened with a sob of relief and turned to Warren, who was still flat on his back and giggling weakly. It looked like he'd exhausted the second wind that food and first aid had given him, and was going to pass out any second. A small reasonable voice in the back of her heard observed that a good twist to one of those broken fingers would wake him right up, and she wasn't sure if it was the demon talking or not. Not that the demon part of her talked, any more than her soul did—if they had, it might have made things a lot easier.

Warren sneered woozily up at her. "I jiggered the accelerator, that's what. And made you help me do it! Think you're so goddam smart? Instead of transposing the target's vibrational frequency to match the pocket dimension, it scrambles the translational slope of the pocket dimension to a randomly generated variable." He waved weakly at the fused mass of metal beneath Spike. "And the power surge destroyed the phase modulator, so you've got no record of what it changed to."

Willow dropped to her knees and backhanded him hard enough to loosen teeth. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. "You're lying."

If looks could kill, it wouldn't have mattered since she was already dead. "You wish," Warren mimicked. He shoved her clumsily off and grabbed the arm of the couch with his good hand, hauling himself upright. Shaky but triumphant, he loomed over Spike, mouth twisted in a grimace of fear and pain and hatred as savage as any vampire's game face. "You don't get involved with a land war in Asia, you don't go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line, and you don't fuck with Warren Meers! Listen up, Fangface: Your precious Slayer's gone forever. Even if that Burkle freak has access to Thunder down at Livermore it'll take decades to find the right frequency with no reference point."

Spike rolled over and sat up, coughing. "Funny thing," he said. "Last bloke I tore apart, I came over all queer about it later. Buffy thinks I'm evolving as a person. Featured it for indigestion, myself. Let's find out."

"If you were going to kill me, you'd have done it already." Warren's face was the color of old oatmeal, but he stood his ground, clutching the back of the couch. "Right, Spike? Because if you kill me, Willow and little Dawnie and all your goody-goody pals will be really, really disappointed in you. And hey, maybe Burkle will get lucky. She's a smart cookie. You kill me, and Buffy finds out, you can kiss her sweet little ass goodbye." Warren spat, fortunately for Spike with no great accuracy. "That's your Kryptonite, asshole. You give a shit about what they think of you."

The whole world was still. Willow held breath she didn't need. Spike got to his feet, fists clenched, his face, for once, unreadable. "Someday, somewhere out there," he said, "I'll have a little bit of my own. And when she asks about her dad, her mum's going to tell her..." He closed his eyes briefly. "Not that he was a good man. But she'll tell her that I tried. I'm not about to make a liar of her." He pointed to the front door. "Leave. Before I change my mind and kill you where you stand."

For a second Warren just stood there blinking, as if he couldn't believe his ploy had worked. Then he shook free of Willow's grip and limped for the door. "Be seeing you, Fangless. I have a feeling Ms. Morgan is having a sudden change of heart about my value to the company."

The injustice of it all left Willow breathless. This couldn't happen. She couldn't let it happen. It couldn't end with Spike's desolate face, and Buffy and her quasi-niece-or-nephew-to-be doomed to be interdimensional pocket lint, and Warren walking out the door free and clear to a high-priced job in an LA law firm. "Wait! We can call the police, and tell them you kidnapped Buffy!" She bared her teeth. "She was a witness at your trial, you've got a known grudge—"

"Try it and I'll press countercharges so fast your head will spin," Warren snapped. "No body, no evidence of foul play...except against, what do you know, me! I've got lots of photogenic bruises, and you've got...what?" He looked the two of them over, his lip curling. "A missing girlfriend. With a history of emotional instability. Who probably couldn't stand the pressure of finding out she was knocked up, and ran away from home."

Warren's hand was on the knob. Another five seconds and he'd be gone. One beat of a vampire's heart. She could stop him. She was strong, she was fast. She could reach out and snap his neck in the space between one breath and the next. She'd killed before, after all. She remembered the feel of magic running like fire in her veins, lives burning to ash in her hands.

And that, she realized with a stomach-wrenching sense of failure, was why she stood paralyzed now. She'd killed before. She couldn't kill again. She looked to Spike, desperate, but he was staring bleakly after Warren, restrained not by guilt or remorse, but by that entangling web of self-imposed rules he'd constructed so laboriously over the last four years: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not kill humans. Thou shalt not kill humans, except in self defense. Thou shalt not kill humans, except in self defense, as a last resort. He'd slipped, with Warren, but he hadn't fallen. This should be a triumphant moment. Willow felt nothing but defeat.

When Glory had taken Tara, she'd gone after the hell goddess with a carpetbag full of knives. Here and now, she only had one knife to aim and throw. "I have to hand it to you, Warren, you outsmarted us both," she said. "And Wolfram & Hart, too. Every step of the way."

"And this is where you cleverly flatter me into revealing my secret plans?" Warren opened the front door with a snort. "Nice try, Rosenberg." Beyond the shaded porch, roses bloomed in May profusion, red and pink and yellow. The colors of blood and love and fear. Two strides across the porch, three down the steps; he'd be into the sunshine and out of their reach. "I'll give you a little advice: It's not even about smarts. You've got those. Just not the cojones to use them. It's about power. Get enough of it, and the rules don't apply anymore. That's where I'm heading."

"So what you're saying is you don't think the rules should apply to you?" Willow said, shooting another look at Spike. "One man is an island, and you're Bikini Atoll?"

Spike was at the threshold, his eyes threaded with gold and every muscle thrumming with suppressed violence, a hundred and sixty-some pounds of death held in check by a leash of words. Willow hadn't seen him move. Warren rounded belligerently on the two of them. "The rules," he sneered, "were made for mouth-breathing Jerry Springer rejects. It's all about making it impossible for anyone who actually has brains and talent to get anywhere in the world." He stabbed a finger at Spike's chest. "I've got an IQ of 230, dumbass, and all my life I've been taking it in the shorts from guys like you, with pretty faces and designer muscles and all the brainpower of a sliced cucumber. Is that fair? I don't think so. From now on I make my own rules. Suck it up, Count Chocula—awk!"

Spike's hand shot out and closed around Warren's throat. "Believe I will." He hauled Warren back inside with one brutal jerk, paying no more attention to his struggles than to the squirming of the live ferrets Dawn sometimes bought him for a treat. He grabbed a handful of dark wiry hair and yanked Warren's head back. "Remember what I said about leaving before I changed my mind? Should've listened."

"Wait!" Warren choked out, scrabbling futilely at Spike's wrists. "I can tell you why they wanted her!" Spike eased the pressure on his throat slightly, and Warren drew in a great broken gasp of air. "It's because of what's happening here. In Sunnydale. With your business, with her deal with the Initiative—humans and demons working together." His words stumbled over each other in their rush to escape. "There's been Slayers and champions for thousands of years—they're born, they slay, they die, and nothing changes. What Buffy's doing–it's small potatoes now, but in the long run it could change things. Big things. Things the Senior Partners don't want messed with. Killing her would make her a martyr. But if they isolate her and... re-educate her..."

"It's Room 101." Willow squeezed her eyes shut, shuddering. What would it take, to re-educate a Slayer? Her fingers crooked, aching to dig into warm wet eyesockets. For once the demonic impulse was a welcome one.

"It was only going to be for three or four months!" Warren's oh-so-pokeable eyes darted from her to Spike, wild with fear. "And then she'd have been released. To pass on the right message. And that's why you need to let me live! I can be your liaison!"

Judging by the timbre of Spike's growl, he found that argument unconvincing. "And the baby?" he asked, his voice soft and bleak.

"Christ, I don't know!" Warren sobbed. "There's no prophecy about you two. It's just some random halfbreed. They'll probably extract it for dissection or something–she'll never even know it's gone!"

Her sire's tawny eyes glittered beneath his ridged brow, his fangs an inch away from the intoxicating throb of Warren's carotid. Looking at her. Because she had a soul, and he depended on her. Depended on all of them, to tell him when he was going wrong. To give all those rules meaning. She could stay her hand, or drive the knife deep. She said nothing.

Spike smiled. Almost tenderly, if an expression composed entirely of ivory razors could be called tender. "You'll be wanting to leave now, pet."

How could she walk out and pretend this was nothing to do with her, when it was her hand that guided the blade? In a small hard voice she barely recognized as her own, Willow replied, "No. No, I really won't."

Pale new stars freckled the sky overhead. Willow sat on the porch steps, watching the streetlights coming on up and down Revello Drive. Spike reclined on the steps beside her, booted feet outstretched, one hand folded behind his head, the other tucked into the waistband of his jeans. The tip of his cigarette dimmed and brightened, steady as a pulsar, and the smell of tobacco mingled with the delirious scent of early roses, sweet and strong and heavy on the night air. Neither could entirely mask the scent of blood.

Warren had family in Sunnydale, didn't he? Would they file a missing persons report. Would someone measure the rosebed? Not that there was anything under there—the sewers of Sunnydale were conveniently well-supplied with scavengers, with some of whom Spike was on a first-name basis—but it was the principle of the thing.

"You feeling all right, love?" Spike asked. He patted his stomach. "Bloke was a bit rich. Who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him?"

"How do you think I feel?" Deliciously warm and full and guilt-ridden and sick. Willow wrapped her arms around her knees. She'd done it again. And she'd dragged Spike in with her. All for nothing. Warren's death hadn't changed anything. Buffy was gone. She was never going to be a quasi-aunt. She'd probably blown any chances of making things work again with Tara. "This is all my fault. I made you—"

"Bollocks. Don't flatter yourself." Smoke trickled out Spike's nostrils dragon-fashion, the blue coils writhing upwards to merge with indigo night. "Nor make me out an innocent lamb led astray by bad companions. I knew exactly what I was about."

"Oh, yeah, that makes it all better." Willow sniffled and leaned into his side. Spike hooked an arm around her shoulder. In the distance, a cicada buzzed shrilly and fell silent, tuning up for the summer orchestra. A bat flittered past, and down the block the snik-snik of automatic sprinklers turning on, one after another, vied with the chirp of crickets. "Do you feel even a little sorry? Feel free to lie through your teeth."

Spike chuckled. "Yeh. I'm sorry I didn't let him live long enough to break the rest of his fingers." Amusement fled, leaving his face stark as a cliffside in winter. He studied the butt-end of his cigarette as if he could read portents in the disintegrating ash. "Bit of a relief, actually, after that bloke last year. Not gonna claim I'm eaten up with remorse about that, but...it didn't feel right. Still doesn't." His voice roughened. "Been a bit afraid I was going soft. I can live with being a vamp who doesn't kill, but not with being one who can't." He reached across and smoothed a lock of hair off her brow. "Had a feeling you'd regret it in the morning."

"Who's waiting till morning?" Willow asked bitterly. "Why do I keep making the same stupid mistakes? It's not like they can stick another soul in me! Or maybe they should, because mine's obviously defective! At least your thing last year was self-defense. Mostly." Her stomach had started squirming again. "And you didn't...didn't..."

"That was business. This was pleasure." Spike sat up with a grunt and stubbed the cigarette out on the concrete steps. "Two options, love. Lie about it, or fess up, take your lumps, and give the straight and narrow another go. All any of us can do, innit? Soul or no soul. Keep trying." He stretched, every vertebrae cracking. "In the meantime, we pray Fred can make heads or tails of that heap of scrap iron the corner. We make certain Dawn's settled and the house is hers, free and clear. And then I," he emphasized the singular pronoun, "find every bloody lawyer at Wolfram & Hart who knew anything about this, and kill them. One by one or in lots, I'm not fussy."

Spike was no knife. He was the sword you couldn't sheathe until it had drunk its fill–and a vampire was always thirsty. Willow took a gulping breath, with no idea what she intended to say with it.

"Or," said a light voice, "We could do something that actually, you know, works."

At the end of the walk stood Buffy Summers, a miniature Valkyrie in oversized pink t-shirt and grey sweats. Her eyes were huge dark hollows in her pale face and her disheveled hair was matted with blood and dust. Spike sprang to his feet as if someone had run another hundred thousand volts through him, joy as extravagant as his previous grief suffusing his face. "Buffy!"

It was just like that movie with the running across the fields of flowers, except with more concrete. Buffy launched herself at Spike, and vampire and Slayer slammed into one another's arms with the approximate speed and force of two runaway freight trains. Buffy clung to him like a burr, face buried in his once-more-unruly curls, and Spike's fingers skimmed over her body in a lover's symphony of touch: arms, shoulders, hips, trying to encompass the whole of her between the palms of his hands. "Buffy, love, you're all right? That bastard Meers said they'd...they'd..." Spike slid to his knees, the knife-edge of his cheek pressed against the soft curve of her belly, a diamond glitter along the dark slash of his eyelashes. Listening, maybe, for a heartbeat still too faint even for vampire ears. "They'd take the baby for experiments. "

Buffy shuddered and her grip on his shoulders tightened. "I didn't give them a chance," she gasped. "I'm all right. We're both all right. Everything's all right."

And for that moment, it really was.

Buffy sat enthroned upon the couch in a clean fluffy bathrobe, freshly-washed hair done up in a towel turban, playing Godzilla to the mini-Tokyo of Szechuan takeout boxes on the coffee table. Spike was curled up on the couch beside her—or more accurately, around her; he appeared to be unwilling to let her out of arm's reach any time in the near future. It had been all Willow could do to keep him from following her into the shower, though judging by the steamy looks they were exchanging now, possibly Buffy had wanted him to follow her into the shower.

"...a dozen of us, and all we had to eat was the bag of groceries I was holding when I got zapped." Buffy set the kung pao chicken aside to dive into the hot and sour soup. "Four days of Saltine and tuna fish sandwiches. Blarg. I never thought morning sickness would be a blessing."

"A dozen different Buffys?" Willow asked, sticking a label on Part #34 of the dimensional accelerator, noting it down on the inventory, and tucking it into its nest of packing peanuts. She needed something to distract her from the inevitable. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad. Buffy had killed human type people herself in the line of duty. Coach Marin, Gwendolyn Post, assorted Byzantian Knights... who was she kidding? She was stake fodder. "You mean, like clones?"

"Twelve Slayers, no waiting?" Spike speared a hot pepper on one chopstick. "I've had dreams like that."

Buffy shook her head around a mouthful of noodles. "Not clones. More like..." She elbowed Spike. "You remember when the First Evil gave us that It's A Not So Wonderful Life peep show? Let's just say I got a good long look at myself. I never realized how annoying I am en masse. You guys deserve a medal." She eyed the living room, which despite Willow's earlier efforts was still liberally festooned with cigarette butts, broken glass, and random pieces of electronic equipment. "Though not for housekeeping." She wrinkled her nose. "Some of it was just...weird. I get the me who ended up with Angel, but that sleazy Italian demon? Or Faith. I mean, seriously. Faith?"

"Who turned herself in and paid her debts to society? That Faith?" Willow squeaked. Both Buffy and Spike stared at her. "I knew she was going for the toaster."

"Had dreams like that, too," Spike offered.

Buffy smacked him, and he subsided with a smug grin—Willow often suspected that Spike deliberately invited smacking. "Short version, capturing one Buffy? A clever plan. Capturing a dozen Buffys? Not so clever, planwise." She slurped up the last noodle. "Result: Mass Buffy uprising. One of me had studied some magic, and she put together a release ritual with the, uh, cooperation of one of the W & H techs—which took awhile, because someone on the outside had messed up the access codes or something."

"Warren," Willow said, her throat gone suddenly dry. Part #37 gleamed at her accusingly. So much for distraction. "I hope all of them got back to the right worlds. I mean, imagine if we'd gotten back the wrong you. It's ooky to think Wolfram & Hart's got that much... reach."

"We knew they were in Pylea." Buffy waved a chopstick. "Why not the world without shrimp? Mmm, shrimp. Is there shrimp?"

Spike handed her the cardboard container of her desire. Buffy dug in with a happy little wriggle and Spike beamed as if she'd just aced the triple axle in the Olympics. "Anyway," Buffy continued, "That's what I meant about doing something that works. From what Angel's said about Wolfram & Hart, if we pipe-bombed the entire senior staff, they'd throw us a party. If what we're doing here in Sunnydale is hurting them, then the smartest thing we can do to get them back is do more of it, and do it better." She snapped open a fortune cookie and pursed her lips. "'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' I hate it when they give you advice, not a fortune."

"Living well may be the best revenge," Spike grumbled, combing Buffy's damp hair with his fingers. "Still, there's times you can't beat a good slaughter."

Buffy rapped his nose with a chopstick. "Says you. I've had enough excitement for, oh, the next nine months. I have important gestating to do. I never want to see or hear about Warren Meers again."

Spike pulled her closer with a rumbly-purry growl of delight. "No more worries, sweeting?"

"Tons of worries. But even if it's a lizard baby, it's ours. And after meeting all those different Buffys...let's just say I wouldn't trade with any of them, even the ones with millionaire Eurotrash boyfriends." She snuggled up to Spike with a giggle and tickled the half-inch of tummy overlapping his belt buckle–for Spike, evidence of considerable indulgence. "Ooh, someone put on an ounce or two while I was gone!"

"Er..." Spike looked at Willow, obviously awaiting her cue. "Haven't much felt like hitting the gym these last few days. We'll not be hearing from Meers any time soon."

Willow stiffened. Here it came. Truth or consequences. The house was a wreck, Warren was missing, and Spike practically sloshed when he walked. Baby hormones couldn't have addled Buffy's ability to add one and one and get eleven just yet. And when the math was done, Buffy would have to...well, maybe she wouldn't have to, because she'd resigned as official Slayer, and she certainly wouldn't want to, and Willow doubted that Buffy had it in her to drive that particular sword home a second time herself. But she was still Buffy, and she'd feel compelled to do something, no matter how horrible a person Warren had been. Send Spike away, or worse, call Faith in to deal with him. Or them.

She could lie. She was the good vampire, after all, the one with the soul. Buffy would believe her. There'd been a demon attack. A plague of locusts. A terrible flood. Which had left bloodstains all over the basement. Give her four hours to set up a ritual circle, and no forensics team in the universe would ever be able to prove that Warren Meers had met his end here. Or...

A baby could live without a quasi-aunt. A father, on the other hand, even an intermittently evilish one... "Buffy, about Warren? It's all my fault," she said. "I pushed Spike into—"

"What she means is, she couldn't stop me from—" Spike intercepted.

"Ah, ah, ah!" Buffy slapped a hand over his mouth. The laughing girl had given way in an instant to the stone-faced woman who'd once stared them all down with If anyone touches Dawn, I'll kill them. "You know, I don't think the two of you heard me correctly," she said, laying her free hand protectively over her stomach. "I repeat: I never want to see or hear about the man who cheerfully turned me and just incidentally our baby over to Mengele Mark II again." For just an instant, her narrowed eyes flickered demon-gold. "I'm sure you two had all kinds of wacky adventures while I was gone, and normally I'm all for communication in a relationship, but just this once, ignorance? Bliss. Do I make myself clear?"

Willow exchanged looks with Spike. "Crystal."

"Good." Buffy held out a cardboard box. "Moo shu?"

Spike stifled a belch. "Thanks, love, but no thanks. We're not hungry."

END