“Each Proud Division”, 3/4

[aadler]

 
Third installment.

Part 2 here

Part III

< I’m still not sure this is a good idea, > Jonathan complained.

< It’ll be okay, > Tara assured him. < We’ve gone as far as we can on our own. We need another perspective, and she’s spoken of this kind of thing before. >

< That’s not what worries me. > Like Tara, Jonathan stood by the window, gazing silently out at the darkness, apparently lost in thought. < You know I’m not the most popular person with Buffy’s friends right now. If she tells them … >

< She won’t. At least, not right away, and we ought to have this settled by then. >

Actually, Tara wasn’t sure it would be a bad thing if Buffy did find out; this was a serious matter, fully deserving of all the resources that could be arrayed against it. But, no. If Giles were still here, it would be a different matter; his formidable knowledge and experience would be a potent weapon against this convoluted threat. He was back in England, though, and the time frame was too narrow, and Willow - the next most effective in dealing with magic-based problems - still too precarious in her halting recovery from the spell-sequence that had turned ordinary abuse of magical forces into an actual addiction.

Even more than that, however, Tara felt somewhere deep in her being that this was something she and Jonathan were supposed to solve. She had learned to trust her impulses, to determine which ones sprang from a deeper source and to let those choose her path when they appeared, and her instincts were telling her now that her destiny and Jonathan’s were somehow intertwined. It wasn’t ego that led her to believe that fate had thrust this task on the two of them - a near-lifelong insecurity made her highly unlikely to seek any such self-aggrandizement - but a deeper sense that she was determined to follow.

< How much longer? > Jonathan asked again.

< She’ll be here when she’s here, > Tara answered. < I couldn’t make too big a deal of it, or she might have wondered what was going on. Don’t fret, there’s time. >

Forging the mental link had been only slightly more complex than setting the privacy spell, and in fact incorporated some of the same principles. This was nothing like the soul-communion she and Willow had once been able to share, and was both weaker and more elegant than the raw power blast Willow had sometimes used to mentally communicate with others; this was a simple, quiet channel between the two of them, allowing them to ‘speak’ without vocalization. It settled several problems at once: they could now communicate independently of both the collection of Slayers and the remainder of the Trio; Tara could guide and correct (and sometimes forestall) Jonathan in his dealings with the women; and they could more readily coordinate a course of action that, much as Tara disliked it, still depended on a great deal of concealment, evasion and misdirection.

< I really don’t like bringing her in on this, > Jonathan ‘said’ for perhaps the fifth time. < It’s just like when you took the hive-rats and made me invent a vampire amulet. You wanted to make sure I didn’t get anything I could actually use. We’re supposed to be in this together, but you don’t trust me. >

< I don’t trust the company you keep, > Tara shot back. < And, no, I won’t put anything into your hands that you could use against Buffy. And finally, we’re in this together because you asked for help. I’m doing what I can, but I never said - >

“Jeez, brooding much?” Both of them started as Cordelia’s voice broke in on their unvocalized argument. “Is this stare-fest going to go on much longer? Because if I can’t party or go out and kill things, I’m going to start kicking down walls.”

“Oh, wow, sorry.” Jonathan tilted his head to look up at the former cheerleader. “I’ve got a D&D board in the van if you want me to -”

“Spare me.” Cordelia dismissed the suggestion with a wave. “I’d rather trade first-kiss reminiscences with Little Miss Peroxide in there. Which is to say not. Just tell me, how much longer are we going to be here?”

“We’re expecting someone in j-just a little bit,” Tara told her. “After we’ve talked with her, we might have a b-better idea what to do.”

Cordelia huffed and returned to the kitchen, passing Dawn with the stiffness of one pointedly ignoring something. < I’ll get back to you, > Tara told Jonathan, and a moment later she and Dawn were in the short hallway that led to bedroom and bathroom.

Tara had known from the other woman’s eyes that she wanted to talk, but for a long moment Dawn just stood looking back toward the kitchen. “She’s so young,” she said at last. “I was always a little afraid of Cordelia, but she’s so young now. Even the other Buffy is older than her. I know it’s nuts, I’m looking at my dead mother and my dead sister, and what feels weird is Cordelia being younger than me.”

“Are you okay?” Tara asked.

“No. But that’s nothing new.” Dawn sighed. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know that,” Tara protested.

“Come on, let’s face it, I was never supposed to be here in the first place.” Her laugh was bitter. “I’m the second-oldest person here, and I’m only eleven years old. I was never born, I’m from a future that doesn’t even exist in this world, the Watchers put out a contract on me with the Order of Taraka before Giles purged the Council …” She looked to Tara. “There’s more than you’ve admitted to the others, isn’t there? The problem that Jonathan’s friends are working on … it’s a lot more serious than just whether we can go back where we came from, isn’t it?”

Tara tried to soften it. “There are strains b-between the dimensions, because of the four of you being here. They need to balance it all out before it gets too bad.”

“Right.” Dawn looked away into nothing. “I’ve heard this song before, I know how the lyrics go.” She took a breath that seemed to hurt. “Buffy died instead of me, nine years ago. That should never have happened. Now the same thing is coming around again. This time I won’t dodge it.”

Her guilty memories had carried her directly to the worst possible assumption, and Tara couldn’t even tell her with authority that she was wrong. “Dawn … we don’t know. Wait until we know.”

The pale Slayer smiled, a dreadful thing to see. “You’re not going to tell me I shouldn’t think that way?”

Tara had no answer for that. For all its beauty and wonder, the world could be a harsh and terrible place, and the sad fact was that sometimes people did have to sacrifice themselves for others. Buffy had done it, in her own reality and in Dawn’s; was her now-grown sister any less entitled to make such a choice? “So many things are different,” she said finally. “Between your world and mine. Maybe this is another difference. Maybe you’re not the Key to this one. If you are … But we don’t know that you are, and this isn’t somewhere we can go with a guess. Promise me you won’t do anything … extreme … before we know for sure.”

Dawn studied Tara with an expression she couldn’t read. “When Willow moved out,” she said. “When it was just me and you in the house, with the Buffybot to keep up appearances … I’d lost everything, everybody. You were the only thing left in my life. I was crazy with guilt, I didn’t even want to live, but you wouldn’t let me do that to myself. You held me together, held everything together. You saved me.” She sighed. “I worked up just the most awful crush on you.”

Tara felt her throat threaten to close. “Dawnie -”

“That’s what you said.” Dawn’s eyes locked with hers. “When I started to hint about how I felt, you sat down and took hold of my hands and said, ‘Dawnie - I’m not gay.’ And I’m looking at you like you just walloped me with Olaf’s hammer, and you said, ‘I’m not attracted to women. Or to men, either. It’s just not there for me.’ And I’m just totally flabbergasted, that’s a stupid word but that’s what I was, and I started to say something about Willow, and you said, ‘I love Willow. I’d do … I’d have done anything for her. But for you, this isn’t right.’ ”

At last Tara found her voice. “That wasn’t me.”

“I know. But it’s true, isn’t it? What you … what she told me?” Dawn peered intently at the other woman, then nodded. “Thought so. She was right, too, for me it really was a phase. It wasn’t women I wanted, it was Tara, and she kept it from turning into something it wasn’t supposed to be.”

“I …” Tara shook her head. “I don’t know why you’re saying this.”

“Neither do I, maybe.” Dawn took hold of her arms. “But watch out for Willow. Some things are different, but not everything is, so watch out for Willow.”

“She’d never hurt me,” Tara said, feeling the falseness of the words even as they left her lips.

“Wouldn’t she?” Dawn’s expression was flat and grim. “I said I didn’t have a Watcher, but there’s somebody who stays in touch, funnels me information, coordinates magical backup when I need it. She does it all by computer and phone-link: has to, because she’s in a wheelchair. Willow put her there.”

“No.” It was a whisper, hopeless and pleading.

“She was crazy, Tara. She kept trying to bring Buffy back, she wouldn’t stop, she left you and she shut out Xander and she went places she never should have gone. Xander is dead now, and Jonathan, and Fred, and you’re crippled, she just lost it all -”

“None of that happened,” Tara broke in. She didn’t know who Fred was or had been, but from the break in Dawn’s voice he must have been important to her. “Buffy’s alive here, Willow succeeded, and yes she’s going through some bad things but it’s nothing like that. It’s your world. It’s not mine.”

Dawn opened her mouth as if to say something else, then closed it. “I guess not,” she said after a few seconds. “Maybe you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Perhaps more would have been said, certainly there was more in the air, but just then Jonathan called from the other room. “Someone’s coming up the walk.”

Tara looked to Dawn, but no words would come to her. She turned away and went to the door.

This week Anya’s hair was a bright caramel color, and she swept inside as soon as Tara opened the door, already in full cry. “Okay, I’m here, and I didn’t tell anyone else, just like you asked. So what’s this about? You were very mysterious on the phone, I like mysteries except when they’re historically inaccurate which is almost all the time, and if we’re going to be conspirators we really ought to …” She stopped as she saw Jonathan. “What’s he doing here? Isn’t he supposed to be one of the bad guys?”

“It’s complicated,” Tara said. “We were hoping -”

“Oh, wait. You’re not trying to arrange some kind of threesome, are you? Because I’m really flattered, but that’s just not how this body is programmed. I could learn, probably, but -” She looked to Jonathan again. “Not with him. No.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Tara said. (Jonathan was still trying to recover from the shock of the word ‘threesome’.) “Do you remember saying something once about a world without shrimp?”

Anya frowned. “A what?”

“It was from a … a discussion of alternative realities. I, I can’t really get hold of the memory, but I thought you might know about things like that.”

“Oh, sure. Worked with them a couple of times. They can be tricky, though - well, obviously, I’m here because one got out of control - but it’s not that uncommon in some supernatural circles. Why?”

“We kind of have a little problem here,” Jonathan began, and then stopped as Anya’s eyes fixed on something behind them. Tara followed the other woman’s gaze, and saw Buffy and Joyce momentarily stalled in the space between kitchen and hallway, doing the awkward shuffle of two people stepping into each other’s way while trying to move past one another; made further difficult, in this instance, in that each seemed determined to ignore the other. Then they hit the right timing, passed in opposite directions, and were gone from view.

“Those two,” Anya said. “Yes, you do have a problem.”

“You know them?” Jonathan said, just before Tara would have.

“Of course. I’m not about to forget them. They’re why I’m mortal now.”

Jonathan looked lost, and Tara said to him, “I don’t understand, either.” Then, to Anya, “How can you know who they are? You only saw them for a second. It could have been an illusion, or shape-changers, or a window into the past -”

“No, it’s them.” Anya tilted her head, listening to noises from the kitchen. “But not just them, it sounds like. I think I see why you wanted me to come here by myself. Can I meet them?”

It was difficult to predict the conflicts that might spark, but Tara could think of no reason to refuse; she had called Anya for her insights and knowledge, and these would be less effective if the former demon were denied relevant information. “Try to be, well, discreet,” she said. “They’re as confused as we are, and some of them are a little … touchy.”

Only three of them were in the kitchen; the bathroom door at the end of the hall was closed, so that must be where the scarred Buffy was. “Hello,” Anya said to the ones remaining. “No need to get up, I just want to look at you for a second.”

“Who is this?” Joyce asked Tara. Cordelia was studying the newcomer with some curiosity but little actual interest; Dawn’s expression was carefully blank.

“Anya is one of the Slay Friends here,” Jonathan said, using Cordelia’s term. “She … knows stuff.”

“And you trust her not to bother this world’s Buffy with our little situation.” Joyce looked to Anya. “What do you need from us?”

“Nothing,” Anya said. “Just be quiet for a moment.” She studied the other woman, nodded, then looked to Cordelia. After a second she shrugged, moved on to Dawn. “Well. Well.” Turning away from them all, she said to Tara, “So, where do you want to talk about this?”

“You don’t need to see the other one?” Jonathan asked.

Anya brushed it away. “Already did, she’s nothing new. How about outside? Can we talk outside?”

“Why can’t you discuss it here?” Joyce said, seeming annoyed rather than suspicious.

“Because you all make me uncomfortable. Well?”

“It’s after dark,” Tara reminded her. “Outside might not be the best -”

“Oh, it’s all right, the ‘Big Bad’ walked me here.” Anya made the quote marks with her fingers. “He’s watching from across the street, we’ll be perfectly safe. Don’t want him getting a look at them, though. So, coming?”

< I don’t think I want him to see me, > Jonathan said in Tara’s mind.

< No, you’re right. > To Anya, “What about the bedroom? That should give us enough privacy.”

Anya made a mouth. “Oh, all right. But remember, no threesome.”

Once they were inside and the door closed, Jonathan said, “So, what did you see?”

“Nothing. I’m mortal now, I don’t have any mystical senses. I just wanted to look at them.”

“You saw something,” Tara insisted. “Somehow you recognized this Buffy and this Joyce. You even said you couldn’t be mistaken.”

“Oh, that’s different. We’re connected.” At the puzzlement visible on their faces, Anya gave a heavy sigh, and began to explain. “I lost my power center in a temporal fold. They’re from the same place. I can feel the link to it from them, so I know it has to be them.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jonathan said. “They can’t be from the same place, each of them comes from a reality where the other is dead.”

“Not exactly. Probably the other two are from parallel timelines, but Joyce and Buffy …” Anya frowned. “I don’t know how to explain it, mortal minds don’t have the reference framework. The power of the Wish temporarily remade this reality, accessed an alternate reality and overwrote it here. But the Wish was rescinded somehow, and that branch was canceled, and this reality snapped back to what it used to be.”

Jonathan wasn’t letting go of it. “I still don’t see how they both could have come from this, this …”

“Temporal fold, like I said. I heard that something similar happened in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but I never knew why.” It appeared that Anya considered this a personal affront. “That’s the problem with a temporal fold: by definition, it’s something that isn’t there anymore. Anyway, either Buffy or Joyce came from the first iteration; probably Joyce, because the original wish was that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale. But then I tried to reach back in, twice. Didn’t get anywhere on the first attempt, but on the second one I managed to rewrite the Wish.” She sniffed. “And wouldn’t you know it, the exact same thing happened? Somehow the Wish was overridden again, because there was just a blink and there I was, still human.”

These were things well outside Tara’s normal experience, but she found herself understanding. “The Buffy and Joyce in there are … aspects. Different faces of a, a possible time.”

“Alternative versions of a time that doesn’t exist any more,” Anya corrected. “Odd, but not really significant. And there’s nothing special about this Cordelia, she just looks like Cordelia, only more … butch. But Dawn, oh boy jiminy! Do you have any idea how rare it is to see someone from an alternate future? Whoever called her here was either really skilled, or screwed up really bad.”

Or both, Tara thought, reading Jonathan’s studious lack of expression. That wasn’t a discussion for this time, however. “So, if you knew one of the four didn’t fit here, which one would you expect it to be?” Not Dawn. Please.

Anya tilted her head to the side. “A riddle? I used to enjoy those, but it was always me posing them, ‘Answer this and you get to keep all your entrails,’ only I made sure none of those men ever got …” She stopped, frowning. “What was that?”

“Um, toilet flushing,” Tara said. “Buffy was in the bathroom, I think -”

Jonathan came to his feet. “It wasn’t just that. Does your toilet go bump when it flushes?” He pulled open the bedroom door and went quickly down the hall; Tara followed him, alarm catching up to her belatedly, with Anya in her wake.

There was no one in the kitchen or the main room, but the front door was wide open. Buffy emerged from the hallway behind them, looking around with dispassionate curiosity. “Hey, where’d everybody get off to? Not that I care, but I thought we were all supposed to stay together.”

“We are.” Jonathan stepped outside, looking in all directions, hands shading his eyes from the streetlamps so he could see farther into the darkness. “I don’t spot them anywhere,” he reported. “I don’t understand it, why would they have left?”

“We can ask Spike,” Anya offered. “They couldn’t have gone out this way without him seeing them …” She trailed off, peering across the street. “Well, now he’s gone, too. If that’s not just like a man -!”

And Tara knew. “Where are they?” she demanded, rounding on the alternate Buffy, sharp with urgency. “You’re a Slayer, which way would they go?”

“That way,” Buffy said, gesturing toward the street. “I can hear them down the block, sounds like they … Hey!”

Tara had taken off running the instant she had a direction. Aware of the variety of demands that could fall on any of the Slayerettes, she had privately worked on increasing her fitness; even so, her body was built for endurance, not speed, and Jonathan caught up with her in seconds, even Anya following at an interval she could track by ear. Anya, she had blithely mentioned the “Big Bad” where the others could hear her, and at least one of the Slayers must have known what that meant. That realization, that she and Anya and Jonathan were somehow associated with Spike, would have made the women unwilling to trust them. So they had waited until their hosts were out of the way, and then …

It wasn’t fear that drove her; she knew of Spike’s background, and neither his behavior nor his personality gave her any reason to like him. He was important to Buffy, though, and even more so to Dawn, their Dawn. How could she ever explain it to them if harm came to him through her carelessness?

She almost passed it, she was moving in a straight line and they must have veered off at an angle; this was a stretch between streetlights, cloaked in night, and her ears were filled with the sound of her own running footsteps and harsh breathing. Movement caught a corner of her eye, however, and she pulled herself up and turned to track it. Beside her, the other Buffy appeared, she had paced them without effort.

The house was one of many caught in the vagaries of Sunnydale’s volatile real estate market: vacant for years, too valuable to raze and replace, too expensive to rent, too much out of style to attract ready buyers in a community made up more of an economically mobile population than of settled, “old” money. It was a three-story Victorian with a tower steeple and a railed porch that extended across the front and down one side; weeds grew unchecked in a huge front yard surrounded by an antique iron fence with a sagging front gate, and in a corner of the yard four figures plunged and leaped in furious motion.

It took a moment for it to resolve into a pattern, she was gasping for air and her eyes were still adjusting to the transition from indoor lighting through streetlamps into night split only by a sliver of moon, and the quickness and violence of the conflict further confounded her perceptions. Then she blinked, and the action fell into focus for her. It wasn’t all three women against Spike, she should have known the chipped vampire couldn’t have lasted a minute against a trio of Slayers; no, Dawn was helping him, battling full-throttle against a raging Cordelia while Spike was left to face the white-hot fury of Joyce.

The tableau was phenomenal, impossible, unprecedented; Tara didn’t know which way to look, recognizing without thought that she was witnessing something the likes of which had never before been seen and never would again. Cordelia and Dawn … she had heard stories of Buffy’s clashes with the dark Faith, but it hadn’t prepared her for what it must mean when two Slayers confronted one another, striking and tearing with brute muscle force many times human strength, and speed that nothing else living could equal. Yet, in a way, Spike’s match with Joyce was even more impressive, for he was clearly outclassed and yet he was still alive (well, unstaked) when he should have been scattered by the night breeze long since. He twisted, spun, rolled and whirled, the black duster whipping about him like leathery wings; he held what Tara recognized as a paling torn from the iron fence, and used it to parry, block, counterstrike, cutting the air with swings and jabs that never quite connected despite the rapidity and accuracy of their delivery. The virtuosity of it was breathtaking; for all its lethal power and focus, his every action was a defense or a feint, crafted to both compensate for and conceal his inability to launch a true, deliberate attack.

He didn’t need to breathe, she knew, and perhaps vampires didn’t tire, either, but this couldn’t last. “Help us!” she entreated the other Buffy. “You can’t let them kill him!”

The scarred girl looked to the battle in the weed-choked yard, and then back to Tara. “Why not? Take a vampire, add a Slayer, stir until dust settles. That’s the recipe, and I don’t see any reason to change it.”

Right, she should have known better even than to ask. She turned to Jonathan, and he was already reaching for her hands, and in that moment they were so unified in purpose and understanding that they might have been a team of years’ practice or even a single mind in two bodies. She felt the power surge through her as their hands clasped, almost as strong as the first time she had joined Willow, and she let it manifest the same way now, a bolt of unseen force slamming the combatants apart; while, from Jonathan, a wall of fire fountained up between the separated pairs, roaring with incandescent heat and brightness even though the weeds somehow never ignited. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Stop fighting, you can’t kill him, he … he’s one of the good guys here!”

Joyce pulled herself to her feet, and hate curdled her voice as she spoke. “That thing couldn’t be good in any universe. He killed B- … my daughter, he killed Kendra, killing is what he does. And you’re helping him?”

The contrast with the woman she had known was so shocking that Tara found herself unable to respond. Instead she looked to Cordelia, who had come to her feet more slowly, face like flint. “Y-you know him, too?” she asked.

Cordelia’s smile would have cracked glass. “Oh, he took his time with me. Studied me, learned all about me, and then arranged a little welcome-home party for me.” Her fists clenched. “I had to stake my father in my own house. You think that doesn’t traumatize a girl?”

“You don’t understand.” The words were strained from Dawn’s throat; she coughed, swallowed, and continued, “He’s not the same person, he isn’t the one you know -”

Spike had listened without speaking, looking from one of them to another, his expression a half-sneer probably assumed to conceal his confusion; but now he turned to the Goth girl standing a few feet from him, and his shock was so great that it subdued his tone to something that sounded gentle rather than simply stunned. “Bit? Wh- what’s happened to you here? And …” His gaze fixed on her wrist. “You’ve got my mark on you. Bloody hell …”

“Don’t,” Tara said, sharply enough that the vampire looked back to her, and she went on quickly. “Just go, take Anya home and then go to ground, we’ll handle it here. And, and don’t tell anybody, either one of you, please, I’ll explain it when I can.”

< Watch it, > Jonathan cautioned, but Tara had already seen Joyce take a step toward the other two; the phantom flame had faded to a low flickering line as her synergy with Jonathan ebbed, but Tara somehow didn’t think it would have made a difference. “Let them go,” she told Joyce. “If you try to go after him, we’ll have to paralyze you. I’m sorry, we really are on your side, you just d-don’t understand how things are here.”

Joyce looked straight through her, and for the first time since the discussion about Gwendolyn Post she directly addressed the alternate Buffy. “Help us,” she commanded. “Don’t let him leave.”

Buffy looked to one group and then the other, and folded her arms. “Forget it. I don’t like you, I don’t like them, and I don’t know what’s happening. Work it out yourselves, I’m sitting this one out.”

“Spike?” Anya called. “Can we go now? If they dust you, I’ll have to walk home without protection. I don’t think I’d look very good on a morgue shelf.”

He came out of the yard, moving like a sleepwalker, and joined Anya on the sidewalk. “I’ll explain when I have time,” Tara said again. “Just don’t say anything to Buffy or the others until then.”

Spike looked back to a woman he had seen buried and an adolescent suddenly in her twenties, wrist marked with scars he knew he had never placed there, and then over to a Buffy who didn’t seem to know him. “Wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, and then he and Anya started off down the street together.

Jonathan was watching Joyce and Cordelia with some uneasiness, but Tara was cautiously sure that the crisis moment had passed. No combination of threats and force would have stopped them from pursuing the enemy they knew, but she had seen it in the women’s eyes: despite their resistance, they seemed to have recognized that this was in fact a different version of a hated face. She looked instead to Dawn, alone and forlorn, and had to work to overcome her own astonishment at the thought of Dawnie with Spike, Spike … “What happened?” she asked. “Why didn’t you call us?”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do,” Dawn said. Her voice was still hoarse and ragged. “I heard what Anya said, but I couldn’t tell if they understood what it meant. When you went to the bedroom, though, they got up and started toward the front, like they were just tired of sitting and wanted to move around a little. So I did the same thing, nobody said anything, it was all so casual … but when they went to the door, I knew. I tried to stop them, and Mo-” She stopped. “And Joyce chopped me in the throat.”

“His mark,” Joyce said, low and even and seething with contempt. “His mark on you. I knew you couldn’t be trusted, but for you to be with him … vamp-loving suck-slut, traitor to humanity, you make me want to vomit.”

“Way too much imagery there,” Cordelia observed. “But, you know, I can kind of go with it. Doing the horizontal mambo with William the Bloody, that is miles beyond sick.”

“Hey, can everybody just mellow out a little?” Amazingly, it was Jonathan. “Look, I’m not part of the Slayer’s crew, but I keep up with their activities. They’re good people, and if they let Spike hang around, he must be okay, too. If he’s so different, then why not the one Dawn knows?”

“Not even,” Cordelia began, and Joyce’s mouth twisted to spit out something even stronger, and Tara was quick enough to intervene.

“Angel,” she said.

The power of the word froze Cordelia, while Joyce was brought up short by confusion. “What?” she said.

“You love Angel,” Tara said to Cordelia. “Here, it w-was Angel and Buffy, always Buffy, there’s never been anything between our Angel and Cordelia, and there never will be. Joyce knew Angel, b-but she never met Angelus; if she had, what would she think of you?” She looked to Joyce. “In your reality, Spike k-killed Buffy. Here, they work together. It’s complicated and crazy, but it’s true. They fight side by side, they’ve s-saved each other’s lives, she trusted him to protect her mother and her sister and he did it -”

“Sister?” Joyce interrupted. “Buffy has a sister here?” And then she halted; maybe a number of subliminal clues had just come together for her, or maybe Tara’s or Jonathan’s eyes had darted automatically toward Dawn as she spoke. She turned to look at the second-oldest Slayer, her face working with tangled emotions. “No. No. It’s impossible.”

Buffy made a show of yawning. “Is this gonna go on much longer? ’Cause I’m thinking, since we’re out anyway, maybe we could still do something about that beer.”

Joyce’s face became a mask; she looked at the brash Buffy and the stricken Dawn, and Tara could see her thought with near-telepathic certainty: Neither one of these is my daughter.

Wait, wait just a second -

“I think she’s right,” Jonathan said. “Not about the beer, but we can’t just stand out here all night, somebody who knows Buffy - our Buffy - and her family might see us and start raising questions.” To Tara he said, “Back to your place?”

“Yes,” Tara said; and then, to the others, “Will you come? We can’t m-make you, and I know all this has b-been hard and confusing, but I still think we need to stick together.”

The previous unity, however tenuous, had been fractured, and for a moment Tara was sure at least one of them would refuse. Then Cordelia said to Joyce, “Oh, come on, we might as well.” The older woman looked to her, and Cordelia gave her a thin-lipped grimace. “Let’s face it, what else is there for us to do? We still need to find a way home, and they’re our best shot, and if you come along, we can watch each other’s backs.”

“There’s that,” Joyce admitted. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. “All right.”

No one spoke on the walk back. The situation was still too delicate, their own moods too somber, and Tara took the opportunity to follow out the thought that had struck her a few minutes before. She studied each of the four Slayers in turn, using all her senses and intuition, weighing what she could see against what she knew and what might be guessed. Each in turn, but she kept coming back to two in particular. It made sense, if you looked at it in the right way; and, given what Anya had said …

She had let Jonathan lead, she taking up the rear so she could see all the others. As he passed through the front door, he was already saying, “Okay, we still have some chips and drinks left. Let’s just sit down around the table and try to figure out our next move -”

The flash dazzled Tara, its brilliance blinding her momentarily, and she instinctively reached for and loosed her deepest protective magic, augmenting it with the power still coming through the link with Jonathan. She couldn’t move, but she would have remained motionless anyway, still and quiet and safe, and as she stood waiting for her vision to clear, a new voice spoke.

“Good going, Spanky, funnel ’em straight into the target area. Did you have a good time? ’Cause we’ve got it figured out, and we’re ready to wrap this sucker up.”

Tara didn’t need any divining spells to tell her things had just gotten worse.

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