Twenty Six
16 September, 2001, Los Angeles
The world was falling apart. Even with his keen internationalist’s perspective, Logan could tell that a kind of click had awoken in everyone’s mind.
It was only a week since the Trade Center had fallen, but already, it felt like a lifetime. As if the world had always been this way. Logan guessed it was the same feeling of eternity one felt after crossing any unique, life-changing threshold. For someone to witness death for the first time. To kill for the first time also, perhaps. To lose one’s innocence in so many different ways that we can’t keep count, then give up counting altogether. We soon forget how the world could have been any other way. Was is so different? How could it have been?
Logan peered into the Dagon Sphere, his teeth gritted, the table edge nearly crushed under his tight grip. He was not worried about the world at large now, however. His own world was falling apart.
“They brought her back?” His breathing was shallow and harsh. He ran his fingers through his unkempt blond hair, now quite long and shaggy, having been deprived of more than the occasional washing for a month now. “Why the—” his jaw worked furiously. He knew that the entities he addressed had no intention of answering him. They never answered him. Not with words, anyway. Only with twisted outcomes and twisted fates.
They answered as such now. “Buffy Summers,” Loki hissed; the root of so many of his problems. The strongest pawn on a board full of pawns. Appointed guardian of the Key. Unwitting guardian of William the Bloody.
With the haze of such things of uncertainty as the witches’ magical aptitude becoming clear, possible futures crystalized, growing more and more solid as they drew near, until, passing through the instant around which the Dagon Sphere had been constructed, they took form and became the present. Tick.
Loki looked now into the red sphere and saw what was certain. He saw things he didn’t like. Naturally, the world was working against him and he was already working against time. If it hadn’t been for this one unfortunate event, he could have had them both within a month; two birds with one car ride. Now she was back, and things were not going to be so easy.
What If 9 January, 2002, Sunnydale
Buffy lay next to her sleeping lover. The world was finally coming together, she thought, staring up at the ceiling. She scrunched the sheet tighter about herself as the warm tingliness of a really good orgasm started to fade away.
She bunched up the covers gingerly about her and turned, resting her head on his elbow. Just looking at him spread warmth throughout her. Granted, not the tingly warmth, but a deep, satiating warmth, that she had only ever felt with one other person. Even now, somehow, that feeling for Angel was fading from her memory.
Spike stirred in his sleep, making the gentle motion of licking his lips. Buffy smiled, knowing he tasted her. She slowly leaned forward and placed a kiss at the corner of his eye.
He mumbled something, now clearly only pretending to be asleep. When he seemed to go back to sleep, however, she made a little pouty frown and propped her head up with the heel of her hand.
As if on cue, with a little snarl, the vampire rolled over her, pinning her arms above her head. She gave a little yelp of surprise and delight, then let out a low moan as his mouth lowered to her neck. She loved it when he did that. His mouth found its way, with harsh, nipping kisses, to her right breast. There he lingered.
Loki watched the carnal scene with a mix of morbid fascination and revulsion. This thing should come with a parental advisory, he thought to himself as he stared into the red sphere on his desk.
Then his own form came into focus, or nearly so, in the background. Loki watched himself watching them from Buffy’s bedroom doorway as the scene went from parental advisory to outright pornographic.
“Oh, come on,” Loki gestured at the sphere, “I’m not that perverse! Just shoot him already!”
Almost obediently, the Loki in Buffy’s bedroom raised his crossbow, letting the wooden bolt fly.
Buffy’s groans of ecstacy were transformed into screams of shock and sadness. Her lover’s body fell against her damp body as ashes, his face imprinted behind her eyes as one of surprise and desperate regret — a skull — and then dust. The wooden bolt fell between her legs from where it had pierced Spike’s upright chest.
What If 11 January, 2002, Los Angeles
Loki ran. The slayer and the witches were after him now, and the Watcher and the welder and his demon wife were not far behind. This was too much. He could handle one witch. And he could definitively handle the slayer, but not two pissed off witches and the super pissed off slayer. Two witches to use up his power and the slayer to kick his ass to Tibet and back. Not to mention the Watcher and demon pointing out all his weaknesses and likely tricks. Even teleportation was getting him nowhere. The red haired witch was too powerful now to be eluded. There was no chance of getting his hands on the sister now, on the Key.
Loki pounded down the pavement, trying desperately to get out of range of the magical damping field that was keeping him from teleporting. But the witches seemed to have infinite stamina. He dashed sideways into an alley and calmed his breathing as they searched for him along the dark street.
His heart pounded. How could they have loved that... that soulless thing so much? Didn’t they know him? How could he serve anything without fangs? How could he love anything but blood—?
The hand flashed around the corner of the brick wall and took him by the throat. Loki snapped his fingers and his skin became unbearably hot to the touch. The iron grip was undaunted. The fingers closed as the owner round the corner, her hazel eyes burning into him with a look he remembered well. He had seen it in the reflection of many demon’s eyes, looking out from his own. Pure and vivid hatred.
Loki shook his head with some resignation and placed a tired hand across the face of the sphere. He didn’t need to see his own death predicted by a glowing volley ball. He had that much prediction power at least. It was just as Whistler had said it would be. Turn for turn, Spike was inaccessible.
“Well, Wilson, my friend,” Loki caressed the now featureless cloudy red ball, “it looks like we’re going to have to get our hands dirty.” He laid down his pen on the pad of paper covered with scribbled notes. He grabbed a dark jacket, as it might turn chilly —really, who could predict the weather?— and slid it over his white silk shirt. He headed for the door. “Hold my calls,” he advised the sphere with a serious face. “I’ve got a distraction to engineer.”
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