In Your Dreams

a BTVS/POTC crossover AU by Setcheti

Rated FRT; MV, MP, SLC

Disclaimer:  Don’t own either set of characters, they belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the evil corporate behemoth that is Disney.

Author’s Note:  Inspired by a picture and a challenge by Tex - which partially spawned out of a discussion about the movie "Somewhere in Time." And I started writing this before POTC3 came out, so in this universe Tia Dalma wasn’t a goddess and Jack was the one who took over as captain of the Flying Dutchman.

It was just another demon fight in a long line of demon fights, and for Xander Harris they were all starting to sort of blur together.  Names he couldn’t pronounce, heavy books of lore and prophecy and arcane knowledge he could barely understand, flying waves of spellcasting he couldn’t see…blah, blah, blah.  Same demon shit, different demon day.

So he could perhaps be excused for not being sure exactly which demon and which day and which spell had gotten him into his current predicament.  All he could remember was that he’d gone out to fight the demon-of-the-week with the girls and Giles, on his own insistence not theirs, fighting had happened, magic had happened, being insulted by Buffy and patronized by Willow and Giles on the way home had happened, and then a shower had happened and his bed had been there waiting for him and that was about it.  Just another night in Sunnydale, like a score of other nights before it.

Which didn’t explain why he’d suddenly found himself not in his bed and standing in a cramped, cluttered room – cluttered with some things he recognized and others he was glad he didn’t.  Magic tingled in the air around him, and he knew he was in a witch’s house.  Which would mean that the woman standing in front of him – and far too close to him, too – must be the witch.

The witch laughed and took a step closer when he thought that, which just confirmed Xander’s suspicion.  She didn’t look old, she looked…like someone who’d just stopped getting older at some indeterminate point.  She was a good six inches shorter than he was, dark skin marked with arcane white patterns, teeth stained black, long dark hair dreadlocked and braided and feathered and beaded, black eyes alight with a combination of amusement, mischief and power.  Lots of power.  Xander thought she could probably drop him where he stood with a single word.

She laughed again and reached up to pat his cheek with a hand that was stained but smooth.  “You see much,” she cackled in a young-old voice, and he forced himself not to draw back.  Black eyes bored into his, sending a shudder through him with their intensity, making him feel like his soul was being stripped naked for her to examine.  “Just so,” she told him, and with a final pat she withdrew and even took a step back out of his personal space.  “I have to know who enters my house, don’t I?”

Her accent had what hinted at a Jamaican lilt, and Xander switched his mental title from witch to priestess.  “I…I don’t know how I got here,” he told her.  “My name is Xander Harris.”  He held out his hand.

She took it, but instead of shaking it she turned it over and intently examined his palm.  Her small, stained fingers traced the lines with minute thoroughness, reading them as much through touch as through sight.  It was weirdly, uncomfortably intimate, but he didn’t pull away and after a moment she let go of his hand.  “Just so,” she said again, seeming satisfied for some reason.  “I be Tia Dalma, young Xander, and I am very pleased to meet you.”

“Um…thanks.”  Xander decided to risk a question.  “You didn’t bring me here to…”

“No, notin’ like to that.”  Tia Dalma clucked and shook her head.  “You were tinkin’ of bein’ lonely, weren’t you?  When someone’s spell brushed against you as it winged its way by?  And I was callin’ out with my own spell to find someone lonely, so I tink we sort of met in the middle and den you rode here on a dream.”  She smiled at his look of dismay.  “Don’t you worry, young Xander, you’ll be home when you’re wakin’.”

“Oh…okay.”  A spell brushing against him, huh?  So it was Willow’s fault, or Giles’ – again.  Xander held back a sigh and focused on his hostess.  “You were calling for someone because…you’re lonely?”

“No, but I be knowin’ someone who is – twas for him I sent out my call, it be breakin’ my heart to see him so sad.”  She pointed to the door.  “Follow the paths that be marked, the swamp can  be treacherous for your footin’.  Maybe you can make him smile again, or at least make him be rememberin’ he’s alive and wantin’ to be like he ought to.  Go on, be off with you.  I be havin’ tings to do.”

Xander figured he might as well do as she asked.  If she was telling the truth, then this was just a dream and it didn’t matter; if she was lying, then pissing off a powerful witch-voodo-priestess-whatever probably wasn’t in his best interest.

The house he came out of was something between a beach shack, a jungle hut, and the place where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys lived – Xander wasn’t sure quite what to make of it, except that it looked like it belonged there in the middle of a dark swamp and it didn’t look like it was planning to fall down any time soon.  The dock in front of it did, but he didn’t plan on venturing out onto that unless he had to so he didn’t worry about it too much.

A path crawled around the side of the house, but once it left the leaning wall it widened into a barely visible track that led further in between the dark trees.  Sticks were placed upright in the ground at irregular intervals to mark it, and occasionally a small pile of stones, shells and bones had been left to mark the stick.  Xander was careful to keep to the path, not wanting to find out just where the ground was boggy enough to suck him down – Tia Dalma had said he’d go home when he woke up, he didn’t want to be found dead in his bed, covered with black swamp muck and wearing the I-Died-Stupid expression he’d seen on so many dead residents of Sunnydale.

He hadn’t walked far when the shadows began to lighten somewhat as the tree canopy overhead thinned, and soon the light was approximately the same hazy quality as early twilight with occasional patches of pitchy black shadow or filtered golden light.  He’d also started hearing something, a semi-rhythmic banging with an almost musical note to it.  Xander decided to follow it down a fork in the marked path, and soon found himself approaching a larger, drier clearing lit gray-gold but with flickers of a brighter, redder light coming from its center.

At the edge of the clearing he stopped, wondering if he’d just found the priestess’s lonely man.  Because a man was there, near the center of the clearing, pounding away at something on top of an anvil while a bed of red-hot coals in a crude rock pit sat seething beside it.  The man was about Xander’s size and coloring, maybe a little less broad across the shoulders and chest, and his dark, curling hair was pulled back at the nape of his neck with a leather thong.  A white shirt was hanging from a branch several feet away, obviously put there to keep it safe from sparks and soot and sweat.  The man’s entire attention appeared to be focused on his hammering, and Xander decided to just watch for a while instead of interrupting him – not to mention that he figured startling someone while they were swinging a hammer and standing next to hot coals probably wasn’t the best way in the world to introduce yourself.

Will was almost done shaping his dagger’s blade when a tickle ran up his spine and danced across the back of his scalp.  Someone was there – someone who wasn’t Tia Dalma, or any of her people.  That hadn’t happened in…well, since he’d been here.  Still, he continued to do what he was doing.  He wasn’t worried about being attacked.  Not here.  Never here. 

When he’d pounded his last stroke, he held the dagger up and examined it, then plunged the blade into the bucket of water he had sitting near the anvil.  The hot metal hissed, and when he drew the dagger back up through the resultant cloud of steam it was straight and cool and gleaming dully.  He would polish it and put a sharp edge to it later, for now he supposed he had best see who was watching him.

Will turned and found a man standing there, staring at him.  The man was perhaps a few years younger than Will, an inch or two taller, and had short-cut dark hair that fell in untidy curls around his face.  His shoulders were broad, as was his chest, and he looked strong in a casual, easy way.  He was dressed oddly in loose pants and a tunic-like shirt with short sleeves, and his feet were bare.  Will felt a stirring of something he hadn’t felt in a very long time: curiosity.  “Who are you?” he asked.

The strange man blinked.  “I’m Xander,” he said, his accent one that Will couldn’t identify.  “Who are you?”

It was Will’s turn to blink; it had also been a while since he’d had to introduce himself to anyone.  “Will,” he replied.  “What are you doing here?”

“I’m…not really sure.”  Xander took a few steps into the clearing, but not straight in; he moved at an angle, cautiously, and after a moment of confusion Will realized the other man was keeping a certain distance between himself and the firepit.  Wariness, something else he hadn’t needed or seen in a while.  “Tia Dalma said…you were lonely?”

“I am?”  It hadn’t occurred to Will that he might be, but now that it had been suggested he thought it likely that he was.  Especially if Tia Dalma thought to comment on it to someone; there was only one ‘she’ on the island who would have.  “I…suppose I might be, yes.”  He cocked his head, questioning.  “What about you?”

“Me?  You mean, am I…was I lonely?”  Xander sighed.  “Yeah, I guess I was, or I wouldn’t be here, right?  I hadn’t thought about it that way, though, not until she mentioned it.”

“I hadn’t thought about it either, until you mentioned it,” Will told him.  He wasn’t sure what to do.  Obviously Tia Dalma had brought the man here, but for what?  For him?  He took a moment to consider that.  He didn’t remember arriving on the island, had been lost in a killing fever when Jack had brought him to Tia Dalma and had remained insensible for uncounted days afterward.  It had taken him weeks to get his strength back even enough so that he could walk from one room of the house to another.  His one clear memory of all of it was of the witch-woman caring for him the way a mother cares for her child – in fact, being on the island was very like being a child again, for Will.  He was unquestionably safe, sheltered, and painstakingly looked after.  He might even go so far as to say he was, surprisingly, loved, although he hadn’t thought of it before.  Will’s memories of his childhood were non-existent before the age of ten, his memories beyond that mostly unpleasant and not at all childlike.

And the part of him that recalled being loved as an adult…was numb, cold, and dead.

“Hey, are you okay?”  The newcomer’s concerned tenor startled Will, coming as it did from so much closer to him than he’d realized the man had gotten.  Xander was only a few feet away now, and Will saw with a start that the other man’s eyes were the same rich brown as his own…and had some of the same shadows in them.  He saw death there, and pain, and betrayal.  How very like his own eyes indeed.  And the feeling in the pleasant voice was genuine, not put on for show.  “You sort of…phased out on me, there.”

So he had.  “Sorry,” Will told him, and came close enough to meaning it.  But for this stranger close apparently wasn’t close enough; concern deepened, and wariness returned.  Will dug down and found his disused emotions.  “I am sorry,” he said.  “I was just…”

“Lost in the memory?” the other man asked.  He shrugged off Will’s surprise.  “Happens to me too sometimes, it’s okay.  But are you?  Okay, I mean?”

“I believe so.”  Will looked at him again, assessing this time.  “Where did you come from?”

“Sunnydale,” Xander answered, quickly following up, “California, that is.”  He saw Will’s confusion and elaborated further.  “In the United State s, of America?”  Still nothing.  “Uh…you know, never mind.  It might not even exist here, wherever here is…could you tell me that?  Where here is, I mean?”

Will blinked.  The stranger might look like him, but he talked like Jack – in circles.  “This is…” he began, and then realized he actually didn’t know the name of the island he’d been living on.  “Um…well, it’s Tia Dalma’s island.”

Xander cocked his head.  “You don’t know either, do you?”

“I should.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been here.”  Will distinctly recalled sailing to the island the first time and rowing to it the second, he had a vague remembrance of the navigation involved in getting there…but he honestly had no idea what island it actually was.  “Whenever we needed to get here, we just did,” he said, more to himself than to his visitor.  “I can’t recall ever seeing it on a chart.  Jack certainly didn’t use one getting us here the first time.”

“Jack?”

Will shook himself.  “Jack Sparrow, a…friend of mine.”  He slanted a look at Xander.  “He’s a pirate.”

Xander didn’t react in any way Will might have expected.  He merely looked curious, interested.  “Really?  That’s kind of cool.  What kind of pirate is he?”

The reference to temperature was confusing, but Will had been around Jack long enough to just ignore things that didn’t appear to make any sense.  “He was the captain of the Black Pearl, until he died,” he told the other man.  “Now he’s captain of the Flying Dutchman.”

Xander’s brown eyes widened, and Will almost winced when he sorted back through that and realized what he’d said.  A dead pirate friend, captaining a ghost ship.  Wonderful.  Before he could try to explain, though, Xander was already talking.  “I guess you’d have to be dead to be captain of a ghost ship,” he said, nodding.  A slight look of concern appeared on his face.  “He is just dead and not, like, undead, right?  Not a vampire or a zombie or anything?”

That was odd; the other man’s wariness had returned, a sort of tension as though he were anticipating being attacked. “No, he’s just dead,” Will assured him.  “Sort of – not like a ghost, not really.  The Dutchman and her crew are solid enough when they need to be, and other times not so much.  They transport those who die at sea to the other side.”

That didn’t ease Xander’s tension.  “Is this the other side?”

Oh.  Well, that was a reasonable conclusion to jump to, Will supposed.  “No, it isn’t.”  Xander still looked doubtful, and Will shook his head.  “No, truly, it isn’t.  I’ve been there, we went to fetch Jack from there once, and it’s nothing like this.  He wasn’t dead at the time,” he hastened to add.  “I don’t think you can bring someone back from there if they’re dead.”

Xander nodded his agreement with that idea.  “Probably not – or at least, you shouldn’t try to.”

Will nodded back.  “I’d say not.  Not that they’d want to come with you anyway, I’d think.”

The other man wasn’t sure about that, and the resulting discussion of what the dead might think or do lasted for quite a while.  Both of them, it turned out, had met various types of walking, talking dead men under equally unpleasant and dangerous circumstances, and by the time they gotten done comparing notes the shadows under the trees were starting to lengthen – it had been mid-afternoon when Xander had arrived.

Will had put his shirt back on, and the two of them were sitting under a tree not far from Will’s makeshift forge when an overpowering wave of drowsiness abruptly washed over Xander, and against his will his eyes slid shut.  He yawned widely, sinking back against the rough bark of the tree, only vaguely alarmed when he couldn’t convince his eyes to open again.  He thought he could hear Will’s voice, and Will sounded alarmed as well if not outright panicked…but then even that faded away into silent blackness.

Will, for his part, was completely panicked and wouldn’t have cared who knew it.  One minute they’d been sitting there talking, and the next his companion had dropped back against the tree trunk behind him with a jaw-cracking yawn and faded from view.  After a moment’s hesitation Will felt around the spot Xander had been sitting in, found nothing, and panicked some more.

He ran up the path toward the house, yelling for Tia Dalma at the top of his lungs.

Several hundred years and possibly a reality or two away, Xander woke up to the sound of his alarm going off and rolled over in bed with a protesting groan to slap the snooze button.  He levered himself out of bed, stretched, and headed for the shower, cursing the alarm and the fact that it wasn’t a weekend.  He’d have much rather stayed in his dream talking to Will the not-quite pirate instead of being forced to wake up and go to school so he could be not talked to by his not-quite friends.  Xander spared a moment to wish – silently, of course – that the dream had been real, and then he stepped into the shower and tried to let the hot water wash his loneliness away.  Good dreams never came twice, he knew that.

So he was incredibly surprised that night when he finally got into bed…and an indeterminate amount of time later found himself once again standing in Tia Dalma’s house.  “Welcome back, young Xander,” the witch-woman greeted him.  “Will was quite upset when you went back to your own place yesterday.  It was the first time in a long time he has cared about anyting, and it was good to see.  He is back at his forge, I tink you know the way.”

Xander stopped himself from bolting out the door and down the marked path through the swamp.  This was what he had wanted, he’d wanted to come back…but he’d lived on the Hellmouth all his life, and he knew that getting what you wanted was never about you and it never turned out well in the end.  “I…why am I here?  Not that I don’t want…I mean, I do want to be here, I just didn’t think…”  He threw his hands in the air, frustrated.  “There’s always something, you know?  I’d just…”  He took a deep breath, blowing out his irrelevant hopes along with it.  “Just this once, I’d like to know what it’s going to do to me in advance?  I’d like to be able to decide before it happens if I’m willing to pay whatever no doubt horrific and painful price you’re going to want for…this.”

Tia Dalma closed the distance between them in a quick rustle of ragged skirts, one stained hand coming up to cup his cheek; Xander started, but didn’t dare move away.  Black eyes bored into his brown ones, holding them, seeming to look right inside his head…and then an expression of deep sadness crossed the witch-woman’s face.  “Oh child,” she said, shaking her head.  “To be so young, so good, and so much hurt.  Very like young Will you are; ‘tis no wonder my spell found you for him.”  She patted his cheek and then withdrew, leaving the path to the door clear for him once more.  “No price, child.  And no pain for you, or for him.  Very precious to myself and to Jack Sparrow, Will is.  I wouldn’t be hurtin’ him for anyting.  And hurtin’ someone else wouldn’t buy his happiness.  If you were to stop wantin’ to visit dis island, you wouldn’t come here again.”

“What if I do want to?” Xander felt compelled to ask.  “Keep coming to visit, that is?”

The witch-woman smiled.  “You will always be welcome here, child.  Dis door will never be closed to you so long as you’re wantin’ to use it.”

Xander wasn’t sure if he should believe her, but the kind, welcoming words sounded so good after all of the crap he’d been putting up with back in the waking world that he couldn’t help himself.  “I…thank you,” he said with feeling, unable to keep the smile off his face.  “I’ll use it every night, if you’ll let me.”

“If dat be what you’re wantin’, den so it shall be,” was her reply.  “Now get on wit you, daylight be wastin’.”

He beamed at her, nodded, and darted out the door to hurry up the marked path.  The sound of Will’s hammer guided him, and once he arrived at the clearing that was serving as the other man’s forge he positioned himself where Will would be able to see him and waited, worrying a little.  He had left kind of abruptly the night/day before, even though it hadn’t been his choice to do it like that, and Tia Dalma had said that Will had been upset.  Xander’s wide experience with people who were frequently upset about one thing or another had led him to expect a less-than-welcoming reaction once Will noticed he was there, so he watched the hammer rise and fall and the sparks fly while bracing himself for anything.

Will felt the tickle of being watched again and almost dropped his hammer.  Tia Dalma had explained why his visitor from yesterday had disappeared the way he had, but she hadn’t been able to say one way or another if Xander would be back and Will had spent a good part of the night lying in bed wondering about it and a good part of his day trying not to remember how nice it had been to talk with Xander the day before.  He’d been so distracted that he’d finally given up on trying to do any good with the metal he was working and just started pounding on it; the rhythm and ring of the hammer against the anvil was soothing, and soothing was what he needed at the moment.  He kept it up even as he glanced off to the side to see if it was really the same person from yesterday, and then missed a strike and almost lost the hammer again when he took in the look of apprehension on Xander’s face.  Will immediately put the hammer down, understanding at once.  “Tia Dalma explained,” he called out to the worried man.  “You disappeared because you woke up, correct?”

Xander visibly wilted with relief, sagging against the tree trunk he was leaning on.  “Yeah,” he said.  “I woke up back in bed with my alarm going off.  I didn’t think I’d get to come back.”

“I’m glad you did – come back, that is,” Will said, wondering for just a moment at how sincerely he felt that.  It had been so long since he’d felt anything…he pushed the painful memories of Elizabeth aside in favor of concentrating on his very welcome returned visitor.  “Would you…I mean, I’m not actually doing anything here, if you’d rather…”

The other man moved cautiously closer to the forge.  “You’re not doing anything?  Then what is…” Will held up the shapeless piece of metal with the tongs and Xander’s eyes widened.  “Okay, yeah, that’s not anything.  Yet, I guess.  Can’t we make it into something?”

Will looked at the metal with assessing eyes, then back at Xander.  “I suppose, yes.  You want to help me?”

Xander grinned and didn’t quite bounce on the balls of his feet.  “Could I?  If you don’t mind showing me, I mean, because I’ve never...that would be so cool!”

“I don’t mind.”  Will set the tongs down next to his hammer and waved the other man over.  “I’ve never shown anyone how to work the forge before – you’re the first person who’s ever asked me.  Now the first thing we need to do is get the fire a bit hotter…” 

 Will spent the next two days’ visits showing Xander how to work his makeshift forge, and then the rough dagger they’d made led to a discussion of how the dagger could be used, which led to teaching Xander how to throw the dagger accurately.  Which turned out to be quite difficult, given that their rough dagger was very poorly balanced, so Will loaned Xander his and forged another set while his friend practiced.  Three days later, after a round of shared stories about fights they’d both been in, Will began to forge a short sword with the intention of teaching his friend that art as well.  Xander’s world was at least as dangerous as his own, it was about time someone taught him how to fight properly.  And Will Turner, a master swordsmith and swordsman in his own right, was just the person to do it.   

About a week later, Xander woke up back in his bed, slapped off his alarm and got up.  It wasn’t until he’d stripped off his sweats and t-shirt to get into the shower that he noticed the blood.  And the very familiar cut on his upper arm.

The cut he’d gotten from Will’s sword while they were sparring.

Xander tried to talk himself out of it all the way through his shower, through his hurried junk food breakfast, and all the way to school.  He kept trying through the first half of his day’s classes with no success.  There was a cut on his arm from a sword he’d encountered in his dreams.  Which meant they weren’t really dreams at all.

He’d been going to Tia Dalma’s island every night, a real place owned by a real priestess-witch.  He’d met Will, a real swordsmith who had been dropped off there by a real pirate named Jack.  And Will was teaching him to really fight using real daggers and a real sword.  He shifted just a little, feeling the bandage he’d taped over the cut.  A very real sword.

Xander went to bed extra early that night.  And every night after that.

A month went by.  Xander didn’t spend much time anymore with Buffy and the other Scoobies – forcing himself into meetings where he wasn’t even wanted couldn’t compete with visiting Tia Dalma’s island where he was.  Wanted, that was.  And his new friends’ concern for his safety was more of the what-can-we-do variety than Buffy’s get-out-of-our-way attitude, which was how he’d discovered that he could bring things back from the island with him.  The short sword Will had forged for him fit perfectly under his windbreaker, and he was good enough, fast enough with it now to hold his own if something attacked him.  And Tia Dalma had laid some sort of magic on the blade so that the vamps couldn’t take the sword away from him, which Xander had thought was a nice touch.

Something else that was nice was the new activity he and Will had found to occupy part of their time with on the island.  They’d found it during sword practice, pretty much by accident; Will had been trying to show Xander how he was leaving himself open with one particular move, so he’d waited for the opening and then darted through it and used his forward momentum to pin Xander against the nearest tree while using his own sword to keep Xander’s out of play.  Normally Will would have had a dagger in his other hand, held at his opponent’s throat, and he’d started to say as much…and then he’d stopped, lost.

In a pair of wide, surprised brown eyes.

The two men were standing chest to chest, pressed together, and the contact sparked a tingling wave of warmth that rushed through them and made Will’s eyes widen even as it brought a flush to Xander’s cheeks.  The dagger-hand Will had raised dropped, brushing lightly across the side of Xander’s neck before falling to his collarbone, and the question Will had been prepared to ask jokingly came out as a rough near-whisper.  “Do you yield?”

 Xander felt the words shiver through him, felt them stir something inside him that he hadn’t known was there.  The only answer he could find to give fell out of his mouth.  “Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”  And then Will closed the miniscule space between their bodies and captured Xander’s mouth with his own.  Two swords hit the ground shortly thereafter, because the hands that had been holding them had been found to have better things to do.

Will was the one who pulled back first, by main force of…well, of will.  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever…”

Xander gasped for breath, shaking his head.  “Never really considered it before.  You?”  The other man made a face, and Xander grinned at him.  “Jack?”

Will nodded.  “Captain’s prerogative, he called it.  Of course, we were at sea and he had me too drunk to fend him off at the time…but in spite of that, it wasn’t a bad experience.  This, though…”  He lifted his hand again, ran his knuckles along the line of Xander’s jaw.  “I…I want this.”

Xander’s eyes darkened.  “Well, that makes two of us,” he didn’t quite growl, and used the loosened ties from Will’s shirt to reel him back in for a very thorough kiss before pulling back himself.  “You aren’t a demon, right?  Or a warlock, a bug, something undead…”

 “I’m a swordsmith whose father was a pirate.”  Will chuckled darkly.  “You aren’t a spoiled, heartless bitch, are you?”

“No, but I know where one lives,” was Xander’s answer.  “It’s shorter to just say ‘Slayer’, though.”

“I’d prefer to say this,” Will told him, and captured Xander’s mouth a second time.  And it turned out that he had quite a lot to say in that particular manner, which meant that by the time their conversation was over so was Xander’s nightly stay.

Not surprisingly, following this new development, Xander quickly found himself losing any remaining interest he may have had in the waking world.  He started going to bed earlier and earlier, and each morning he resented more and more the buzzing alarm that called him back from the island.  From Will.

For the first time in his life, he was actually glad he didn’t have normal parents, or a normal living situation.  No one ever came down into the basement – and he kept the door locked now in case someone thought to try it.  No one noticed when he came home, or when he left, or knew what he did while he was there.  Xander could go to bed at five o-clock and sleep until seven a.m. with no one the wiser.  He didn’t feel bad about this, because he wasn’t really sleeping.  He was actually there, on the island with Will, and since it was daytime on the island the two of them didn’t sleep while he was there.

What they did do made Xander wish the days in California were shorter.  It wasn’t just the sex, although he liked that a lot.  It was the way they talked, finding out everything about each other.  It was the way Will laughed when he told a joke, the way Will taught him how to use a sword, the intense look on Will’s face when he worked over his makeshift forge – the same intensely focused expression he wore when they made love.

It was love, Xander was sure.  He loved Will.  Will loved him.  Waking up now brought with it a sense of loss.  Sunnydale wasn’t home any more.  He wanted to stay on the island, with Will, forever.

Will was having a similar problem.  He insisted that his lover go to sleep in his arms at the end of each day, and then lay in bed staring at the ceiling with wet eyes when Xander faded into nothingness.  His sleep was disturbed by horrible dreams: Xander’s world was full of monsters to be fought, and in Will’s dreams sometimes the monsters won and no lover returned with the coming dawn.  Will lived for dawn now, and barely endured the night.  He wished there was a way to keep Xander with him forever.

Tia Dalma watched them with mingled approval and concern.  She had barely dared to hope that her magic would find a companion who could bring young Will back to himself, and that it had brought him such love was beyond imagining.  Young Xander, too, had found the other half of his soul in Will…and she was becoming afraid for them both.  If they lost each other, if the magical link which drew Xander out of his own time and place to her island each day were discovered and broken, the result would likely be death for both of them – they would pine themselves to death, slowly.

She would not allow that to happen.

Buffy was out on patrol, in fact she was almost done with patrol for the night and starting to slay her way towards home, when she heard what sounded like a fight going on somewhere ahead of her.  Great, just great.  She broke into a run, dodging around tombstones, and the fight came into view off near the edge of the cemetery.  She ran faster; it was someone fighting a vampire, swinging something at it.  Buffy leaped over the next three tombstones.  It was Xander.

But the time she got there, it was all over, the vamp was dust and Xander was wiping his sword – sword! – off on the grass.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” she demanded.  “Running around out here, trying to get yourself killed…give me that!”

Xander, to her surprise, evaded her grab and tucked his weapon under his jacket.  Then he picked up a plastic bag that had been laying beside a tombstone.  “I was on my way back from the grocery store, my folks sent me out to get some things,” he said, waving the bag.  “What are you, the graveyard police now?”

“Yeah, I’m here to keep Zeppos from getting eaten by demons,” Buffy shot back.  To her surprise, though, her words didn’t get the reaction she’d been hoping for; Xander just looked at her, one eyebrow raised as if to say ‘Is that all you’ve got?’.  She put her hands on her hips and scowled.  “You got lucky tonight…”

“Oh, yeah.  Right.”  Xander snorted and waved a dismissing hand at her as he turned and started to walk away.  “You just keep telling yourself that, Buf.”

He was walking away from her!  Outraged, Buffy jumped in front of him.  “Listen, mister, if it wasn’t for me…”

“If it wasn’t for me,” Xander interrupted her, “you wouldn’t even be here – at least not alive.”  His voice was cold.  “I’ve saved you how many times now?  And never even got an honest thank you for it – because you’re ‘The Slayer’, you don’t need any help, right?  Especially not from someone who’s ‘only’ human.”  He detoured around her, continuing on his way home without looking back.  “Thanks for rushing to the rescue…but I don’t need you.” 

Buffy just stood there, staring after him until he disappeared from view.  And then she started to run again.  Toward Giles, and Willow, and possibly a long night of research instead of the not-so-long night of homework she’d been planning.

Because something was very wrong with Xander Harris.

Several days went by, and Xander began to feel like a black cloud was growing above his head, like something bad was coming…and he was afraid he knew what it was.  Tia Dalma could see the fear growing on him and decided that her plans must be carried out sooner and not later.  So when Xander next appeared, her preparations were made and she stopped he and Will from leaving the house.  “You want to be together,” she said.  “But this will not last forever, I have seen it.  The magic can be broken.”

Xander turned so pale she feared for him.  “The girls,” he all but whispered.  “They’ve been…they know something’s going on, they’ve been watching me.  And Giles is acting really weird too.  I just know they’re going to find out…and find a way to keep me from coming back.”  He looked at Will with his heart in his eyes.  “I don’t want to lose you, Will.  But I can’t do magic, I can’t…I won’t be able to stop them.”

Will pulled his shaking lover into his arms, looking stricken.  “Every time you leave, I’m afraid you won’t come back,” he replied.  “If I could just go back with you…”

“I don’t want you to come back with me,” Xander interrupted him, his face all but buried in Will’s dark hair.  “They wouldn’t…they’d take you away from me.  Or the Hellmouth would.  I don’t want you anywhere near the Hellmouth.”

“I don’t want you there either.”  Will’s eyes were suspiciously wet.  “But I’d rather take my chances with the demons and vampires and bad magic than spend another night wondering if you’re still alive.”

“I know.”  Xander’s arms wrapped even more tightly around his waist.  “Oh god, Will, I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry,” was Will’s reply.  “I want you happy – with me, forever.”

Tia Dalma’s voice, although low and quiet, startled them both.  “Forever is in my power, if it is what you both want.”

The both stared at her.  “You can…” Will stammered.  “How?”

“The spell to bind you is witin my power,” she told him.  “Heart’s blood to heart’s blood, and your souls be joined for all eternity.”

“Where?” Xander wanted to know.

“Here, child,” she reassured him.  “I have seen your world, I know it.  Will is right to fear for you.  But if you would have forever, here you can stay and never go back again.  We cannot wait, though; you are also right to fear your friends, and what they may do.  We must complete the blood bond now, witout delay.”

The two young men looked at each other, and then back at her; they remained in a close embrace.  “What do we need to do?” Will asked.       

“What I tell you,” was the answer.  Once they’d given their agreement, Tia Dalma didn’t waste any time.  She made them each strip to the waist, then produced a pot of chalky white goo and started marking symbols on their skin, muttering under her breath as she worked.  Xander could feel the tingle of magic happening with each word and stroke.  Herbs had been dropped on hot coals to smolder, filling the room with a heady haze of smoke that twisted in the light of a dozen flickering, misshapen candles and seemed to ooze directly into Xander’s brain.  He felt hyperaware, every touch and sound and color magnified, but at the same time the world seemed to have slowed down around him until he and Will, Tia Dalma and the room itself were somehow outside of time all together.

She made them sit on top of her worktable, cross-legged, knees touching as they faced each other, and Xander’s world narrowed to the universe in Will’s brown eyes.  He barely felt Tia Dalma take his hand, but when she pressed it, palm flat, against Will’s chest right over his heart a bolt of some wild, nameless power raced through him; he only vaguely realized that Will was having the same reaction to having his hand pressed over the identical spot on Xander’s chest.  Both young men vaguely registered the witch-woman holding something between them, something that touched both  hands at once, and then the wildness returned and all but drove their mouths together.

When their bodies followed suit, pressing close, the touch proved to be the point of a knife, a silver blade so fine that it slid through flesh as easily as it might have cut through water.  Double-bladed, it slid through blocking hands and into the flesh below, oddly curved blade channeling blood downward, from one hand to one heart with not a drop lost in between.  It joined the two lovers in a bond of blood, eternal, unbreakable.

Forever.

Once they separated, each man bore a crescent-shaped scar on the back of his right hand, and a matching one over his heart.  And then Tia Dalma explained to them what would need to be done in order for Xander to remain with Will permanently.  Xander needed to cut all ties with his own world, and then it would be done.

But in order to do that, he was going to have to go back to Sunnydale one last time.

Buffy and Willow caught up with him late in the afternoon, and were insistent – Buffy physically, Willow with her resolve face – that he needed to come to the library to talk to Giles.  Xander went along with them with a shrug, not responding to much of anything they said along the way, and once at the library he focused his attention on the waiting Watcher and ignored the two girls completely.  “You wanted to see me?” he asked.  “Why Giles, I didn’t know you cared.”

The Watcher frowned at him.  “Something is going on, and I want you to tell me what it is at once,” he insisted.  “With everything else that is currently happening, we cannot afford any extraneous distractions.”

“You could have said please, but I’ll let it slide this time,”  Xander quipped, rolling his eyes.  So now he was a ‘distraction,’ joy.  He was still going to tell them, though, since it was Giles who was asking; he’d talked this over with Will and Tia Dalma, and they had been in agreement that telling the truth was the best course to take with the older man.  “It happened around two months ago, when some spell you guys cast nicked me on its way by; I’m not sure which spell it was that did it,” he began without hesitation.  “But that little bit of spell connected with another spell that was floating around looking for someone, and I ended up spending the night on an island keeping a guy named Will company.  It happened every time I went to sleep, and the two of us got to be friends.  And after a while I realized it wasn’t a dream.”

Giles was still frowning – thoughtfully now, though, not angrily.  “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“Will was teaching me how to swordfight and I got nicked.  When I woke up, the cut was still there.”

A snort came from Buffy, drowning out Willow’s gasp.  “Well I guess that explains why you thought you could use a sword.”

Xander flicked an irritated glance at her.  “I don’t think I can, I know I can,” he rebutted quietly.  “Will is a master swordsman, and a swordsmith besides.  He made that short sword you saw me carrying and the two daggers I carry too, and he taught me to use them.”  A smile ghosted across his face.  “He’s still teaching me, actually, and he will be for a long time.  It takes years to become a master, and neither of us will settle for anything less.”

Willow started to say something, but Giles spoke before she could.  “You were able to bring physical objects with you?”

“Yeah.”  Xander pulled out one of his daggers, flipped it in his palm and held it out to the older man.  “Careful, it’s sharp.”

“It would hardly be useful if it weren’t,” Giles replied, leaning closer to look but not touching the elegant little weapon.  He could feel the otherness of it, not the hum and jangle of magic but more a sense of their current reality flowing around the space it occupied to make room for it.  The Watcher observed a faint scratch near the blade tip and couldn’t help but smile at the younger man as he straightened.  “He’s been teaching you to throw them, has he?”

Xander looked startled for a moment, and then he smiled back.  “Yeah, he has.  I’ve got more throwing power than he does, but he’s got better aim.”  He tucked the dagger back into its sheath on his belt, not seeing the Watcher’s eyes widen when the man saw the crescent-shaped scar on the back of his hand.  “It’s too bad I can’t introduce the two of you, I think you’d like him.”

“I wouldn’t like him.”  Willow’s voice was petulant, with a hint of anger.  “He’s doing something to you with magic, pulling you away from everyone.  And we’re going to stop him.”

“Yeah, this guy has to be up to something,” Buffy agreed.  “So lets get with the research and get this done.”

Giles shook his head.  “There’s no need to search through the books any further,” he told her.  “I know what this is.”  He ignored the shock on the girls’ faces and the sudden wariness in Xander’s eyes.  “You’ve been ‘visiting’ this island each night for more than two months; if you had not been willing, even eager to return, your first visit would have been your last.  Do you know how the seeking spell found you?”

Xander nodded.  “I was lonely,” he said simply.

“Oh Xander,” Willow admonished him, shaking her head.   “You know better!  Messing around with magic because you’re feeling sorry for yourself…”

Giles saw the young man’s jaw set.  “It wasn’t my spell, Willow – neither one of them was.  I didn’t set this up, it just happened.”

“But you’re the one who’s let it go on this long,” the young witch persisted.  “You heard Giles, you wanted to let it go on.  And now we’re going to have to fix it, just like last time.”

“Yeah, and we’ve got better things to do than clean up your messes,” Buffy tossed in.  “Right, Giles?”

The Watcher realized his charge was expecting him to castigate the young man, the same way he’d done after the love spell incident.  He hadn’t intended to do anything of the sort, but Xander spoke up again before he could say anything.  “It isn’t a mess, Buffy, no cleaning needed.  Nobody needs to do anything.”

“Oh yeah, right.  I’m sure this Will guy just mojoed you because he wanted some company,” the Slayer snorted.  “That’s the dumbest…”

“Buffy, enough,” Giles broke in with a sigh.  He fished a book out of the pile on the table and flipped it open.  “This ritual,” he said, tapping the page with his finger, “could sever the connection.  If you were willing.”  Xander shook his head, and Giles put the book down.  “I thought you might feel that way.”

“It’s the spell that’s making him feel that way,” Willow said, reaching for the book herself.  “Once we do the ritual…”

“It is not a spell, and the ritual won’t be performed unless he consents,” Giles told her, moving the book out of her reach.  He returned his attention to Xander.  “We can speak about this again tomorrow, if you so choose.  Have a pleasant evening, and do tell Will that I was impressed with his craftsmanship; your dagger is a lovely piece of work.”

Xander agreed to pass that along, and then he left; Giles followed him to the door and prevented either of the shocked, angry girls from following or stopping him.  “You can’t just let him go!” Willow nearly wailed.

“I most certainly won’t keep him here against his will, and I forbid you to interfere,” the Watcher countered.  “I repeat: I know what this is, it is not a spell and neither is it harmful to anyone, and whether or not to end it is Xander’s decision to make.  Now if there is nothing else, I believe we should all go home and get some sleep.  I’ll see you tomorrow and we can discuss this further then.”

The two girls left, although not happily, and after locking up the library Giles followed in his car to make sure they didn’t try to go by Xander’s house.  He turned his car toward home after he’d ascertained that they had in fact gone to Willow’s house, looking forward to relaxing with a good book and a stiff drink before he went to bed – early, because tomorrow was most likely going to be a very long, tiring day.      

Xander couldn’t express how relieved he was that Giles had taken his side against the girls, but he also knew that the Watcher’s support didn’t mean he could afford delay his plans.  Not that he wanted to anyway.  So he went home and slipped into the basement without encountering his parents, locking the door behind him.  He fixed up his bed, plumping pillows and straightening the sheets and the comforter, and then he picked up the dirty clothes that were lying in the floor and put them in the hamper.  He cleaned his room, doing a much better job than he normally would have, and then went in and took a nice, long shower.

Padding out in clean sweats and a t-shirt, his dark head full of damp curls, Xander went to a box beside his bed and started pulling things out.  Candles.  Salt.  A little incense.  It took him about half an hour to get things set up the way he’d been instructed, and when he was done the lights were out, there were candles flickering warmly on every available flat surface, and his bed was surrounded by a protective ring of white granules; he wasn’t taking any chances, he didn’t trust Willow not to try putting some sort of spell on him to change his mind about the ritual.  Sitting on the bed, he took a brown pharmacy bottle with his mother’s name on it off his nightstand and shook out two capsules into his palm, washing the Valium down with a swallow of water before going back to the bottle for two more.  It wasn’t the herb and alcohol mixture Tia Dalma had suggested, but it would have the same effect.  And Xander had done his research, he knew exactly how many pills it would take to put someone of his body mass to sleep, and exactly how many more than that would be required to help him slip beyond sleep and guarantee that a still-breathing body couldn’t be used to drag him back to Sunnydale.  He took the exact amount necessary, then recapped the still nearly full bottle and set it aside.  He’d been too keyed up to eat for most of the day, and on an empty stomach, he knew, the drug’s effects were going to be almost immediate.

With that thought in mind, Xander got under the covers and got comfortable.  He was going back to Will, for good.  No more sanctimonious Buffy-bitch, no more disdainful, distant Willow-witch.  No more sulking vampires in black leather.  And no more Zeppo, ever again.  He looped his arm through the straps of his backpack and wrapped his other hand around one of them for good measure; his sword and daggers were inside, along with a few other things he’d wanted to take with him.  He took one last look around the clean, candlelit room and then let his eyes close.  In a few more minutes, he’d be with Will.  Forever.  The smile remained on his lips even as they formed the last words he needed to make his dream come true.  “I wish…”

When the portal dumped him out in Tia Dalma’s house, however, it wasn’t the same easy, gentle transition Xander was used to; this time it had spit him out with a wrench that he felt all the way from his head to his feet and everywhere in between.  He fell hard, stomach twisting, and heard a familiar voice yell for Will even as it demanded to know what he’d used.  Something about herbs…oh.  “Couldn’t…get them,” he gasped out, trying to push himself up to his feet.  He did not want to be sick here, on the floor.  “Had to use…some of my mom’s…pills…”

The voice growled, although he sensed that Tia Dalma wasn’t angry with him, and then familiar hands were there, steadying him while Will’s frightened voice demanded, “What’s happening?!”

“What he took, we have to get rid of it – now!”  Something touched Xander’s mouth and foul, fiery liquid ran down his throat.  He gagged, stomach turning inside out, and doubled over, his eyes opening just enough to see that there was a bucket already there for him and two sets of hands were holding him in place to use it.  “Let it go, child, quickly!”

Xander threw up until his throat burned and his eyes were streaming, and shook his head blindly when she insisted he keep going.  “I…don’t have…anything left…”

“You do – enough to kill you.”  Hard, pointed fingers jabbed into his abdomen, and Xander found a part of his stomach that he hadn’t known was there.  By the time he was completely empty the hands on him were the only thing keeping him upright, and when something new touched his mouth he tried to turn away from it.  Tia Dalma chuckled, all the growl gone from her voice if not all the urgency.  “Don’t swallow, just spit.”

“It’s seawater, just seawater,” Will’s voice told him shakily.  “Don’t swallow it, just rinse your mouth.”

Xander could do that, and he did.  The seawater quickly joined everything else that was in the bucket…but when he cracked his eyes open again, the bucket had nothing in it except seawater.  “What…”

“It went back – would have torn you apart,” the witch woman told him.  She pushed him back into Will’s arms and in the same movement ripped his t-shirt down the front.  “These came from there as well.”

“Bloody hell.”  Will’s hands – and then his knife – joined in, and in moments Xander was stripped and shivering.  He heard what was left of his clothes being fed into the fire across the room, guided to their annihilation by arcane words that hummed with power.  A clank, metal on metal; Will drawing his sword and knives out of the bag and laying them up on the table.  And then a blanket dropped on him and Will wrapped it around him.  “Xander, it’s all right,” his lover whispered.  “I’ve got you, it’s all right.”

“I’m just…cold,” Xander whispered back.  His stomach was still clenched, and it felt like something was pulling on his skin, his hair.  “I don’t understand, what…”

“Little witch has too much power, not enough sense,” Tia Dalma clucked from the other side of the room.  “Hold him tight, William.  Hold him with your heart.  I will make tings right.”

Will pulled Xander even tighter against his chest.  “I won’t let him go.” 

Brown eyes met brown eyes, but when Will leaned in to kiss him he found Xander’s shaking hand covering his mouth.  “No way, I just got sick.”

Will smiled behind the protecting fingers.  “Seawater,” he said, moving the hand away and claiming his lover’s lips, mumbling through the kiss, “It’s an old seaman’s trick.  Trust me.”

“With my life.”  Xander returned the kiss, focused on it through the shivering and the pulling and the twisting pain in his gut and in his head.  He could feel the blood bond come alive between them, pumping warmth through him…but he could also tell that it might not be enough.  And then Tia Dalma was back once more, pulling him out of Will’s arms to lie flat on the floor and rubbing something oily and herbal-smelling into every inch of his skin.  That seemed to lessen the pulling sensation somewhat.  And he trusted her, as did Will, so when he felt her push a cup up to his lips he drank – or rather, he let her pour it down his throat.  Whatever it was tasted oddly of milk, herbs and blood, and it tingled as it went down.  He could feel the tingling spreading through his body…and then it reached the twisting in the pit of his stomach.  A wave of pain erupted from the collision, exploding through him like lightning, and Xander screamed.

Several hundred years and possibly a reality or two away, a scaly bluish-green demon popped into the Sunnydale High School library, literally fuming.  “What in the nine hells do you think you’re doing, kid?” it demanded in a near-roar that made Willow flinch.  A clawed hand lashed out, knocking over two candles in a splatter of wax and scattering a few items to various parts of the room.  “Where’s that Ripper gone to?”  The clawed hand waved again, in the air this time, and a very surprised Rupert Giles suddenly appeared in the room in his sock feet with a paperback book in his hand.  “How the hell could you let this happen?!” the demon wanted to know.

Giles took one look at the remains of the spell implements in front of the two girls and paled behind his glasses.  “Willow, I told you this wasn’t to be done without Xander’s agreement!  We needed to wait…”

The red-headed witch’s chin came up.  “It couldn’t wait!  We need to rescue Xander from that…that Will person!”  She scowled at him.  “You let him go home, to bed.  To sleep!”

The older man scowled back.  “I let him go home because his participation in the ritual has to be voluntary for it to work, you stupid child – if you’d read more of the book than just the part you thought was a spell, you’d have known that.”

“You’re stupid too – you should have been watching her better,” the demon scolded him.  “You let a novice paw around in your spellbooks, you think she actually knows enough to find out what the hell she’s doing before she does it?  She damn near ripped him apart!”

Willow gasped.  Buffy, however, rose slowly to her feet, a stake in her hand.  “Where is he?”

“He’s home, Slayer.”  The demon didn’t look impressed, or even concerned, and he was still steaming.  “He made his decision, and it all would have been fine if that one,” he flicked a contemptuous claw in Willow’s direction, “hadn’t done another big no-no and smashed through the wards he’d set up to keep her out.  Now are you gonna take responsibility for this, Rip, or do I have to get someone in here to watch these two for you?”

“Both options might be advisable,” Giles answered, his light blue eyes hard.  “I shall certainly put a stop to this, but perhaps my books need another guardian for the times when I am not within stopping distance.”  One of his eyebrows went up.  “That particular book was warded too, you know.”

Willow looked up at Buffy, who shook her head.  “You were doing the right thing,” she told the worried young witch.  “We have to get Xander away from whoever’s got him, no matter what it takes.”

Giles narrowed his eyes.  “And if he didn’t want to be gotten away, what then?”

His Slayer’s chin went up, defiance in every line of her body.  “Xander doesn’t know what’s good for him.  And the zeppo’s a demon magnet; nothing and no one that’s any good could possibly be involved with him.”

The demon smirked at the Watcher’s dumbfounded expression.  “Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”

“No, I’m sorry to say I did not.  I should have, however.  No wonder he was so amenable to what was happening, and chose the way he did.”  Giles made a visible, obvious effort to control himself.  “He’s happy?”

“Got a lover who’d die for him and a mom who’d kill for him – blood bonded, both of them.”  The demon shrugged.  “That’s about as good as it gets, whether you’re human or not.  He’s where he belongs.”

“He belongs here!”  Willow’s voice was almost a wail.  “Xander wouldn’t leave us!”

“He set up his own wards to keep you off him,” the demon pointed out.  “Sounds like your ‘zeppo’ didn’t trust you too much, little slut.”  He leered at her look of openmouthed shock.  “Got to hand it to ya, you betrayed him in the worst way and he still stuck around to look out for you – way to screw the most loyal friend you’re ever gonna have six ways to Sunday, bitch.”

Willow turned red, then white.  When her voice emerged it was a shocked, horrified whisper.  “How did you…”

“News flash – I’m a demon,” the horned being said.  “We keep track of shit like that, especially when it’s you supposed ‘white hat’ guys involved.”  His leer widened.  “You gonna tell them or should I, witchy-poo?  I’ll have more fun doing it.”

Buffy gave him a murderous look, putting her hand on her friend’s shoulder.  “Yeah, your kind does like to lie,” she said.  “I’m sure you can spin some really good…”  The shoulder under her hand shivered, and her blue eyes widened when she looked down at Willow.  “Wills…?”

“It’s not…he wouldn’t be…”  The young witch bit her lip.  “When Spike kidnapped me and Xander, I asked him…I begged him to…and he did, and then Oz and Cordelia…”  She buried her face in her hands.  “Oh god, Xander, I’m so sorry…”

“Dear lord.”  Giles was even more shocked.  “Willow, the two of you had been friends all your lives!  And you let everyone think he…you allowed everyone to believe that situation was all his fault?”

“He could have said something,” Buffy snapped, although the venom in her voice had an undercurrent of uncertainty in it.  “He could have told everyone what really happened.”

“No, he couldn’t.”  Surprisingly, that came from Willow.  She lifted sickened eyes up to the Slayer’s, then dropped them to the remains of her spellcasting.  “He…wouldn’t have done that to me.”

“Not to mention that none of the other players in this little soap opera would have believed him even if he had said something.”  Giles’ voice was as hard as his eyes.  “After all, they all followed Buffy’s lead in ostracizing him, despite the fact that they all had various reasons to know her low opinion of the boy was baseless.”

Buffy started to object to that…and then stopped in the face of her Watcher’s disgusted glare and the demon’s knowing gaze.  Her chin lifted again.  “We can’t apologize if he’s not here,” she pointed out.

“Then I guess you missed your shot,” the demon told her.  He was not quite snickering, and with another wave of his hand the remains of the spellcasting on the table vanished in a flash of green flame.  A hard look and a snap of his fingers, and Willow cried out as something clutched in her hand was flamed away as well.  “Okay, I’m done here.  Rip, I’m setting a guard your stake-happy little bitch over there can’t kill on those books, and I’d advise you to keep a leash on Witchy-poo if you don’t want one of us to put one on for you.  I mean it, they try to hurt that kid again and there’ll be hell to pay with a capital H – his mom ain’t someone who’ll stop once she starts, if you get my meaning.  Are we clear?”

“As crystal.”  Giles nodded to him.  “Thank you for intervening.  I would have hated for anything to have happened to Xander.”

The demon nodded back.  “He’s fine now, and he’ll stay fine – he’s where he belongs and he’s got it good.  Just make sure you explain to Witchy-poo what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped her, okay?”

Giles nodded again, and the demon vanished.  He then fixed a hard eye on his Slayer, ignoring the quietly sobbing young witch beside her; he would talk to Willow later, once he had calmed down enough to make a thorough job of it and not just throttle her with his bare hands.  “Buffy, I suspect that you had a hand in convincing Willow to disobey me with regards to the ritual.”

Her jaw set, mulishly, and it was all he could do not to roll his eyes.  “We needed to get him back.”

“You hadn’t had him in a long time, I think,” the Watcher told her.  “Was it so unforgivable of him to keep proving that one need not be the Chosen One to successfully fight evil, hmm?  You know he never gave it a thought.”  Something ugly came into the blue eyes, darkening them; the shadow of Ripper, who was never truly as far away as some people thought he might be.  “Or was the truly unforgivable sin his oh-so obvious unrequited attraction to you…and the fact that of late it has been nowhere in evidence?  Perhaps you should think about that tonight.  We can discuss it in the morning; I expect the two of you here bright and early, and prepared to work.  Now go home, both of you.”

He was already turning toward the door when Willow asked, “But what about…”

Giles didn’t turn around.  “You heard the demon.  He’s home, he’s happy, he has a lover and a parent with him.”  He started walking again, feeling in his pocket for his keys.  “Not to mention, he must already be dead in this reality.  Just think what your ‘spell’ might have created had you completed it.”

He left the library sincerely hoping that thought would fill the girl’s head with bad movie nightmares of shambling, mindless walking corpses wearing a betrayed friend’s face.  That wasn’t what her interference truly would have accomplished, of course, but he saw no need to explain to her about the blood-bond mark on Xander’s hand and what it meant.  Not that he thought he could have gotten either she or Buffy to accept the truth anyway. 

Xander wasn’t sure when they’d moved him off the floor and into bed, but he was warm and the pulling, twisting pain had stopped and Will was with him…he was happy, sick or not.  Tia Dalma was there too, stroking his hair, crooning softly to him, and her touch made him feel contented all over.  Another bond, different from the one he had with Will.  It felt like…he opened his eyes and blinked up at her.  “M-mom?”

The witch-woman kissed his forehead.  “Yes, I be your mother now, child – your mother for here and for always.  And what a fine strong son you be for me, eh?  I be so proud I be like to burst from havin’ a son like you.”

Xander smiled at her, smiled at Will…and then went to sleep.  He was happy, and he was home. 

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