Preface
Dawn slid the slice of pizza into her mouth. “Whatcha reading?” She asked between chews.
Buffy folded the manuscript keeping its contents out of sight from her little sister. “Nothing, for young eyes,” she said with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
“Ugh,” Dawn shook her head, “you’re disgusting.” She took a generous swig of root beer. She eyed Buffy’s open bottle enviously.
Buffy resumed reading the manuscript, noting that Dawn had stopped chewing. “Dream on,” she muttered. The chewing resumed, spitefully.
Willow walked in, spying the manuscript. “Ah, research,” she said in admiration.
“Is that what they call it these days?” Dawn stood from the kitchen table dumping her plate into the sink already full of sudsy water. When she turned around, both girls were eyeing her oddly. She threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m done,” she marched out of the kitchen and down the hall to her room.
Will sat down as Buffy pasted the paper flat on the tablecloth. “What have you found?” the redhead asked.
“This thing is bigger than we originally thought,” she said, keeping her voice low. “The complete translation implicates these ‘three historical entities’ in four attempted apocalypses, and that’s just for starters.”
“Wow,” Willow said, impressed. She waited a beat. “Good Giles impression.” Buffy gave her a stabbing glare. “Hey, that’s a compliment.”
“So these three baddies,” Buffy erased all traces of the watcher from her vocabulary, “do major bad, a whole bunch of times in a whole bunch of places and there’s only one connection.”
“That they never get caught,” Willow finished.
“Exactly.” Buffy nodded. “A whole bunch of the big bads that we thought were the big bad bosses were just pawns.”
“I hate when that happens,” Willow said in mock frustration.
“What are we talking about?” Andrew strolled in, his attitude entirely too cavalier for the suit he was wearing. He was the very picture of a very bad James Bond.
“How everything evil always comes in threes,” Buffy said, her implications intentional.
“Well you’ve asked the right man,” Andrew said confidently, stuffing his hands into his suit coat pockets. If it had been convenient he would have lit a cigarette and tipped his fedora. Both the girls, however, knew he was exactly neither the right person to ask, nor really a man. “I was once the fearless leader of an exceedingly evil trio...”
Buffy couldn’t help but grin, if only in pity, for this display. “Okay, Andrew, if you were an evil triumvirate of-” she stopped, cursing the vocabulary she had acquired now that Dawn was in college, “an evil trio of beings of limitless power, where would you hide?”
Andrew appeared to be thinking hard, working his jaw as if chewing on a toothpick. “My basement,” he said at last, snapping his fingers as if this was the revelation they had all been waiting for.
“Oh my God, the basement!” Buffy said in a good approximation of horror. This was enough to send Andrew dashing out of the kitchen towards the stairwell that led to the basement of the small, three story Italian apartment.
When he was gone, the Slayer shared an impressed glance with the witch. “Is he getting more gullible, do you think?” She asked, looking down at the manuscript again.
“Is that even possible?” Spike asked, stepping in from the hall.
“I called you, like an hour ago,” Buffy complained, folding up the manuscript and sliding it surreptitiously under the mess of pages that littered the kitchen table, along with pizza crusts and bottle caps.
“Traffic was horrible,” Spike said offhand, turning a chair around and straddling it.
“You live a block away!” was Buffy’s response. “Never mind,” she dismissed. “We’ve found what we’re looking for.”
“We have?” Will said, taking the side of Spike in her ignorance.
“‘And those three who shall see the end of days will find their time with the Challengers and the Champion.’” Quoted the Slayer, “‘And their meeting place shall be a place of Abandon.’”
“They’re not there,” Andrew’s voice came from the top of the stairs. Soon he was in the doorway to the kitchen. “They’re not in the basement,” he clarified.
“Did you check the boiler room?” Willow asked nervously.
“Of course I checked the boiler room,” he said emphatically, then for a moment, his eyes drifted across the kitchen and he slowly backed out of the room, making another dash for the stairs and down he went, to check the boiler room.
“Where is this abandoned place?” Willow asked, turning her head to try and read the translated text.
“Well for once it’s not a stone’s throw away from Sunnydale,” Buffy said chuckling slightly. When she got no response from the other two, she cleared her throat. “Though it’s not exactly a stone’s throw from Rome either.” She looked up to see their unimpressed faces. “It’s in Spain,” she said quickly. “A few hours outside of Pasajes, in an isolated valley of the Pyrenees mountains.”
“So what do we know about these challengers?” Will said at length. “Is there any historical reference to this showdown they had?”
Buffy shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I’ve actually been in contact with Angel-” she admitted.
“Oh, right,” Spike stood from the table, “here we go!” He turned to leave, but ended up hanging around the entrance to the hall.
“He’s the one who had the original translations,” the Slayer explained. Ever since she and Spike had gotten back together, informally at least, Angel had also suddenly made a reappearance, not going so far as to move to Rome, as Spike had, but calling her several times a week and filling her e-mail inbox with all manner of what he considered “interesting” prophecies and legends about the destiny of certain “historical players.”
“He thinks,” Buffy continued, no longer trying to explain herself, “that this prophecy might actually be talking about us.”
“Us...?” Willow prompted. “As in us in particular?”
“What about us in particular?” Dawn asked from behind Spike.
“Nothing,” Buffy snapped. “Private conversation,” she added.
“Andrew’s looking for baddies in the basement,” Willow offered, and recognized the spark of interest in the girl’s eyes.
“Cool,” she said and dashed away towards the stairs.
Buffy gave her friend a look of gratitude. “Anyway, why not?” She looked from Spike to Willow and back again. “What’d you say Spike, wanna go to Spain?”
Spike considered this, putting a contemplative, yet mocking hand to his chin. “Hm, feed the fish in Rome, or fight the baddies in Spain,” he muttered, just loud enough for them to hear. “Tough call.”
“You in, Will?” Buffy asked, a tiny kernel of excitement, the old thrill she hardly ever felt anymore, was growing inside her. “Us three and a potential apocalypse, just like the good old days?”
“W- what about Xander,” Willow countered, “a- and Giles? It wouldn’t be the good old days without them.”
“Giles hasn’t got back from Big Important Conference in England yet,” Spike reminded her, “and old boy Harris spends too much time with the new girl. What’s her name?”
“Trish,” Buffy said absently.
“Right,” Spike nodded, returning his attention to Willow. “I don’t think she’d just let him drop her and run to Spain.”
Willow looked down at the mess on the table, then up into the hope filled eyes of her best friend. “Well, alright,” she conceded.
Buffy grinned as if she were a child who had just been granted a second helping of dessert. “Great. The train leaves tonight.”
“You’d booked a bloody train” Spike asked incredulously. Willow was equally appalled.
“Call it good foresight,” she said weakly, then stood, assembling the mess of manuscripts into a rough pile. “Besides, I would have picked Xander and Faith if you two hadn’t wanted to come.”
“I feel so privileged,” Willow said, dryly.
Just then, Dawn and Andrew wandered in from the hall.
“Find any baddies?” Willow asked, hopefully.
“No,” Andrew said dejectedly.
“Well, we have to go out for a little while,” Buffy said over her shoulder, like it was nothing, “maybe a couple of days,” she added.
“Whatever,” Dawn replied, closing her door.
Buffy grinned, amassing the pages and picking them up as a unit, stuffed them into her leather folder. “You guys might want to go pack a few essentials,” she suggested, stuffing the loose paper in. Willow and Spike departed to the weapons chest to select a few items of value. Buffy gave one last stuff to the incorrigible stack of paper and noticed one leaf lying on the kitchen floor. She bent down to pick it up, noticing it was the same one she had furtively hidden from Spike. The sentence she had been reading caught her eye for the second time that evening.
And the Champion shall drink of his opponent as of the dust of the Earth.
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