ILLUMINATI CONTROL TO OPERATVE K-H-15: Turn off the program on the Orbital Mind Control Lasers that's trying to brainwash people into thinking vogonguard owns BUFFY. It's just not working.
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“The Mayor, Faith,” said Xander, taking the bag of donuts from her. “His Honour Richard Wilkins the Third. And the Second and the first. Hey, you didn’t get any glazed ones.”
Faith fixed him with a withering look. “Angel has the glazed ones. And you’re a total jackass sometimes, Xander.”
”What?”
”I’m not helping… No. And if you had an ounce of brains, you wouldn’t ask me.”
”I just thought….”
”Leave it Xander!” Buffy put her foot down and took the donuts from him. “We’ll manage. Thanks for bringing Angel back. And thanks for coming back, Angel.”
”We got to talking about… a lot of things,” said the vampire. “I… Perhaps I was out of line.”
”No. I wouldn’t say so.”
Angel smiled at her and then sniffed the air. “Anybody mind if I open a window? Stinks of garlic in here.”
“The mayor?” The younger Giles did his best to get things back onto track.
“Yeah, right….” Buffy turned from watching Angel as he went to get some fresh air into the room and began the next section of the briefing. Faith settled down with fresh coffee, pizza and some donuts to watch and listen.
Meanwhile across the room, Willow went over to her younger self.
”Can we talk? There’s some personal stuff… It kinda got skipped over in Giles’ big moment and I think you might want to hear this in private.”
The young redhead shrunk into her chair and looked up in alarm at the stranger with her own face. “Alone? With… you?”
Willow sighed. The really worrying part was that she could see why her younger self felt alarmed at the prospect. She turned to another quiet listener.
“Umm, Ms Calendar? Would it be OK if you came with us? Opened the computer studies room? There are things here that you ought to know about too. Stuff that you can maybe help me with.”
”Sure. You don’t think we’ll miss anything?”
”I can give you the executive summary. The Mayor’s an evil sorcerer who’s about a hundred and some years old. He built Sunnydale to try to turn into a True Demon. His plan works and on Graduation Day he turns into this thirty foot long giant snake. We blow the school up on top of him to stop him eating first the graduating class and then the whole town. The rest is just detail.”
”Oh, right. Good summary. A-plus.”
++++
A short while later the two Willows and Ms Calendar were seated around the teacher’s desk in the computer studies room. The older Willow looked at the younger.
“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”
”Well, I… Yeah, I think so. You brought Buffy back from the dead?”
”Uh huh. Did that. Wasn’t even the dumbest thing I did. Or the most magical.”
”Now, see, I don’t know that I could ever…”
”It’s easy. You do it like you learned to do computer programming. One step at a time. Start with the easy stuff.” She gestured and a pencil rose from the desk tidy. “This is sort of the equivalent of writing a ‘Hello World’ program or maybe doing scales on the piano. You practice and you build up your muscles and your co-ordination… And soon you’re doing things that you’d never dreamed of….”
The pencil danced around the room until Ms Calendar caught it in mid flight and firmly put it back in the desk tidy. “How powerful are you, Willow?”
”I’m supposed to be one of the most powerful Wicca in the Western Hemisphere. Maybe in the top five or six. There are people with greater depth of knowledge than me, like a friend of Giles I met while I was over in England but I’ve got raw power enough to do nearly anything…”
“Oh. Wow.”
”That’s not good. I’ve got so much magic in me now that I can’t survive without it. If the magic got drained completely from me… Well, I’d die. I’ve got to stay connected to sources of pure, clean magic. I’ve got to meditate and maintain my soul’s equilibrium. It’s sort of like living with diabetes or some other long term disease. It dominates your life. Sometimes… Sometimes even I can’t contain it. Magic happens when I’m not even willing it…. It’s bad when that happens.”
“So are you telling our Willow that she shouldn’t follow in your footsteps? You don’t sound entirely happy about being so powerful?”
”I’m not… quite… saying that. I’m just warning her. And you, ‘cause if you keep on hanging around with Giles and the Scoobies you’ll need to use your magic more, just to keep on top of the stuff that the Hellmouth throws at you and maybe you’ll have to go some of the same places I had to.”
The younger Willow swallowed and said: “And that would be bad because?”
”Because I’m still just human. Inside I’ve got all the stupid passions and feelings and inconsistencies. Because humans want things, even things that are bad for them and for the world. Because magic is altering things to your will, to meet your wants and you’ve got to be smart… No, not smart, Goddess knows, I’m smart enough. You need to be wise and most people aren’t. I was lucky. I had wiser people around me. Giles. And Xander. Most of all, Xander. He’s a goof but he’s also wise. He sees stuff. Even the evil things know that Xander sees everything that’s going on. One of them took out his eye because it didn’t like how much he saw.”
”Umm, did you and Xander…. Ever?”
”No. Sorry. Kissed him twice. Would have been nicer if there had been more of that but by then… There were other people for both of us.”
”Really?”
”Yeah. Really. Actually, I should probably start by talking about sex. Relationships, I mean. It all ties into the magic and how I got so deeply into it and why I did the dumbest of the dumb things I did with magic. How I ended up this way. Let’s start with my boyfriend.”
”B… Boyfriend?”
”Oz. Daniel Osbourne. Little guy. Drummer in a rock band. Way smart. Way cool. And a werewolf.”
”What?”
”Well, actually I suppose he’s not a werewolf yet. You might want to warn him. We meet at the Careers Day Fair though he said he’d seen me about before then. He gets bitten by his little cousin when he’s visiting them over Christmas. Little cousin is the only toddler in California who needs to be kept in a cage with steel bars three nights a month. We managed to live with Oz’s condition. Kept him locked in the weapons cage on the nights of the full moon and eventually he figured out a way to control the condition but that was after we broke up.”
”You broke up? Why? Oh, I suppose that he wanted to have sex and what with his condition you didn’t want to because you might get turned into a werewolf… You’re not a werewolf are you, because that would be…”
”Goddess! You have no idea how weird the babbling sounds from outside! I’ve got to get a better handle on that….”
”It’s weird enough sitting this side of the table. Always hated the way my voice sounds on tape: doesn’t really sound like me and this is even weirder than that…”
”Tell me about it. Well, no we didn’t break up for that reason. And yes, we had sex. Regularly, starting just before graduation.”
”Oh. And you didn’t catch…?”
”No. Seems werewolves are only infectious in the early stages of the condition, which Oz’s little cousin was, or when they’re actually in wolf form.”
”Oh.” Then shyly: “What was it like?”
The older Willow grinned: “Pretty damned fine, actually. He was a good, considerate lover. Wonderful, funny man. And wise.”
Ms Calendar grimaced. ”Spare your poor old teacher the intimate details, Willow. So why did you break up, if he was so wonderful.”
“He… There was another werewolf came round. A girl werewolf. And Oz felt the call of the wild… And I sorta lost it. I didn’t know I was going to be jealous until it hit me. I’m… I guess I’m a fanatical monogamist. Don’t know why. My parents didn’t have a painful divorce like Buffy’s. But I found that I couldn’t stand him having a roving eye. I actually started… I actually started to prepare a curse. To blast the both of them. But she decided to try to kill me: interrupted me right in the middle. And Oz came to my defence. They fought. In wolf form. He was the one who walked away.”
Silence for a few moments.
“After that, well he chose to take off. Go and find a way to keep the wolf under control. And he did. But by then I was with someone else.”
”And what was his name?”
The older Willow looked up at the ceiling for a moment and said: “Do you remember Miss Tompkinson? The art teacher in junior high?”
”Uh huh.” The younger Willow turned to Ms Calendar to explain. “She was all flowing print dresses and looking like something in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I used… Uhhh.” She looked over at her older self who completed the sentence.
“Used to have a really terrible crush on her. Followed her around all googly eyed and I’m sure she thought I was a terrible nuisance. Umm. And I also thought that Oz proved that Miss Tompkinson had been just, you know, a passing phase. Only it wasn’t so much.”
”Oh.”
”Her name… Her name was Tara. Tara McLay. We met at UCSD. In the Wiccan Group there. Which apart from the two of us didn’t contain enough magical oomph to light a candle. Her mom had been a witch. Died when Tara was young. The men in her family were the biggest bunch of hillbilly male-chauvinist bigots ever to keep on living in the fourteenth century. They told her… They told all their women folk who had any sign of magic that they had demon blood in them and were going to turn into monsters and die. Nothing to it: just a mean minded way of keeping them down. Tara… She’d been pretty badly abused by them.”
”We… We fit together. She… She was my other half, my completeness. My anchor. So when I started to use magic too much, to rely on it to do everything, she was the one who told me what I was doing to myself. When we broke up over it… I eventually realised that I had a problem. That I was addicted to magic just as much as a junkie is to his smack or a lush to his bottle. I turned myself around and… and she came back to me. My Tara.”
“Willow,” said Ms Calendar, “go back a little. You said you started to cast a curse but got interrupted?”
”Uhh, huh. A werewolf trying to rip your throat out is lousy for maintaining the concentration.”
”Did you… Did you dispel the magic? Afterwards I mean? Ritually cleanse yourself?”
”I…” The redhead blinked and sat up some more. “No. No, I never did.”
”Does that mean something?” The younger Willow was confused.
“When any ritual working is disrupted, you must disperse the magic you’ve gathered. If you don’t it can turn on you. It’s especially dangerous if it’s harmful magic. A curse can turn against the one who makes it even in the best of circumstances….”
Willow turned white. ”Oh, Goddess! I did it to myself! ‘Let them find no peace or solace. Let them find no love as well…’ Oh Tara!”
Jenny watched appalled as the witch crumbled into tears. “It may not have been that…”
”It may have been, though. It may have been.”
The younger Willow took her older self’s hand and said: “Tell me more about her.”
”We didn’t have long together. Forever wouldn’t have been long enough but… This guy… An enemy of Buffy’s. A human enemy. A wannabe evil mastermind called Warren Mears. Decided that he was going to take a direct approach to getting rid of Buffy. Went and bought a gun and shot her. Didn’t kill Buffy. But one of the bullets went wild, went through Tara.”
”But… You said you bought Buffy back…”
”Yeah. But the Powers… One of their damn regulations! No resurrection for Tara…. Worst thing is… I think that now, with what I know now, I could maybe have saved her. If I hadn’t panicked, I could have got her to the Hospital and kept her alive while the surgeons fixed her. Get her on a heart lung machine and open heart surgery to repair the artery the bullet went through… But that’s just hindsight. Just regrets…”
”And after that… I lost it completely. I didn’t have enough magic to save her. But I would have enough magic to avenge her. I gathered every bit of magic I could find and took it into me, no matter where it came from, nor how dark it was. I… I killed two people. Warren Mears was one of them and I honestly can’t say I regret that. Not too much regret about the other one either, a magic pusher called Rack. But with Warren dead and his buddies smuggled out of town I was still riding the wave of the black, hot magic and I was still in so much pain…. I decided the only way to end the pain was to end everybody’s pain. To bring the world to an end.”
Utter silence for a moment and then Ms Calendar said: “Is that even possible? For a single human to do that?”
”In Sunnydale? I had a choice of how to do it. The town is littered with failed attempts to bring about the apocalypse. The Mayor saw to it that anyone who tried to bring about the End ahead of his timetable got it in the neck. All I had to do was find one that was just short of the last incantation and finish it. I nearly did too. Xander stopped me. Stood between me and my target and told me to kill him first, not some faceless billions. Told me he loved me no matter what. Brought me down. Got me into Giles’ hands. Giles got me to some friends of his who taught me how to live with what I am now.”
The younger Willow stood and said: “I gotta go.”
”Go where?”
”Away. Anywhere that’s not here. If living in Sunnydale means that I’m going to try to do… that… I’ve got to stop myself, turn myself away from…”
”Yeah, that might work. But see the thing is, they need you. Buffy and Xander and Giles. They aren’t going to leave, not until they’re on the bus riding just ahead of the ground collapsing into a sink hole as we close the Hellmouth and destroy the town. Dozens of times it was me, just me with a spell or a piece of research or hacking into some computer somewhere that made the difference between victory and defeat, living and dying. Maybe you can turn aside from knowing Oz or Tara: you’ve only got my word about them. But can you turn aside from Xander? Leave him here while you save yourself? No, don’t think you can.”
”But.. But I can’t take the risk. Not knowing…”
”There’s things you can do to reduce the risk. Ms Calendar, I was mostly self-taught. I had no formal training in the Art. I found my own way to the Goddess. Tara… Well, her family traditions helped a bit but we both had to find out by doing. If you could act as my… her mentor. Show her some guidance.”
”I… Well, all I have is my tribe’s traditions, Willow. And what I’ve managed to pick up from my neo-pagan friends. I’ll share what I have, surely but the day is going to come when she… you out pace me. I’ve been studying since I was a teenager and I’m pretty much as powerful as I’m going to get. What do we do when you outgrow your teacher? Find someone more powerful? How am I supposed to know if we can trust her…”
”I… I don’t know… There’s the coven in England but…they…. Humph!”
The older Willow sat quite still for a moment with a slightly dazed expression on her face.
“What?” said the younger redhead. “What is it?”
“I am an idiot. A complete noodlebrain. I’ve been thinking about the problems and not thinking about the opportunities! Come on! Two birds with one stone… We’ll need an escort. Grab your coat and hat! It can be chilly at night in Sunnydale.”
Pupil and teacher looked at each other, shrugged and followed. Back in the library, the older Willow went over to where Faith was sitting watching proceedings with some disgust.
“Faith, do you mind if I drag you out of here? I want someone to watch our backs as we go on a little nightime trip through Sunnydale.”
”Suits. Xander is driving me nuts here: every two minutes he turns to me and says ‘Isn’t that right, Faith’ or ‘Faith would be able to tell you more about that.’ Guy does not know how to take ‘Fuck off’ for an answer.”
”Sorry. He’s being a doofus.”
Faith lowered her voice and whispered: “And what’s worse, I think he’s told young Xander about me and him. The kid keeps looking over at me and drooling.”
Willow giggled.
Faith put down her coffee cup and said: “Red and I are going for a walk. Giles, don’t forget to tell them about Gwendolyn Post.”
“And don’t forget the cook with the rat poison,” added Willow.
And with that the four of them swept out and off into the darkness.
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