Title: At Any Cost
Author: Paul aka Darth Pacula
Distribution: Knock yourself out, just ask first. ( That means yes if you're not sure )
Feedback: Go nuts. The more the merrier. Unless you're all wanting to roast me at the stake that is. Then, less is more. My email address is darthpacula@hotmail.com if you prefer.
Disclaimers: Needless to say, I do not own the Buffyverse, nor those who inhabit it. I only wish I did. Oh, the fun I would have ...
Summary: A powerful, ruthless and unstable figure begins to meddle in Willow and Tara's lives, with unforeseen consequences.
Rating: PG-13, maybe R at times for a touch of violence.
Timeline: Well now, it starts off just before the end of Seeing Red, but will contain elements of an altered Season 7.
Spoilers: Err ... pretty much the entire show. If you haven't seen any of it yet, and actually want to, you just aren't trying hard enough.
Thoughts are in italics.
What ravages of spirit
conjured this temptuous rage
created you a monster
broken by the rules of love
and fate has lead you through it
you do what you have to do
and fate has led you through it
you do what you have to do ...
– Sarah McLachlan, Do what you have to do.
Part 39.
“What did you call me?” asked Willow, whispering, as if to speak at a normal tone would make that awful statement true.
“Mother,” repeated Nameless flatly. “Or, if you prefer, Mom, Mommy, Momma, Mater ... just let me know when I hit something you understand.”
Willow shook her head desperately, denying Nameless' claims. “No!” she insisted. “You're lying!”
Now it was Nameless' turn to shake his head, through his movement was slow and filled with regret, whereas Willow's had been frantic and desperate. “No, I'm not.”
The warlock turned away slightly, gesturing at a nearby chair, and the piece of furniture obediently slid over to him. Gently lowering himself into the seat, Nameless wearily gestured for Willow and Tara to do likewise. “You might as well sit down,” he advised. “This is going to take a while.” Neither woman took his advice.
“What is?” demanded Tara, casting a glance at the closed door, calculating the odds of her reaching it and calling for help. But what Nameless said next put all thought of fleeing out of her mind.
“The truth. No more lies, no more manipulation. Like I said, I'm here to confess my sins.”
But Willow had other things on her mind. “I can't be your mother! You ... you ... you're Nathaniel Haust!” she spluttered.
That brought a sly grin to Nameless' face. “A fact you learned from a spell book delivered to you by Lickspittle, who was working for Timothy Garner, who was in fact ... me. So no, I am not, nor have I ever been, Nathaniel Haust.”
“Then who is he?” demanded Willow heatedly. “We know he's real! Is he just another another one of your victims, huh?”
Nameless shook his head. “I didn't kill him, he killed himself. Ran away and opened his veins in the basement of an abandoned, derelict factory, alone and insane. As for that insanity, well, that's not just my doing, it's yours too, Willow Rosenberg.”
Willow's eyes goggled. “Mine?! What did I do?! I never even met him!”
“Neither did I,” Nameless replied cooly. “But all the same, we drove him mad, you and I. You see, he saw what we did, what you started and what I finished ... and it drove him mad. He was a seer, you see, and on the day you two met, he saw the future, and what the both of us would do to it.”
“What are you ...” began Willow, but the warlock cut her off.
“All in due time, Mother. All in due time. But given the circumstances, when I need to assume a false identity, it tickled my fantasy to steal that of poor, mad Nate.”
Tara blinked, struggling to understand. “W.. why? Why w.. would you do that? Why did you need to assume an identity in the first place!”
“To muddy the waters, Tara,” replied the warlock. “If you control the flow of information, you can control what people think. If you control what people think, you're better able to predict what they're going to do.”
“That doesn't make any sense!” complained Willow. “Why give us anything at all?”
“It only doesn't make any sense to you because you are not a manipulative person, Willow. If I hadn't given you something, you would have kept looking on your own, and there's no telling what you might have found out. This was ... the more judicious path to take.”
“But you can't be my child!” Willow stubbornly insisted. “You're the one who made me pregnant!”
Nameless' eyebrows shot up, and he burst out laughing. “Me? I made you pregnant?!” He laughed again, long and hard, and jabbed a finger directed at Willow's torso. “Willow, I had nothing to do with you getting pregnant. In point of fact, that's me gestating there in your womb.”
“My child isn't even born yet, and you claim to be him? We don't even the sex of the baby yet!”
Nameless shrugged and stretched out in his chair. “Well, I guess now you do. Congratulations. It's me.”
“Lets say that's true,” Tara sceptically allowed. “How can you be here, fully grown, even older than us, when you haven't even been born yet? Time travel?”
Grinning, Nameless put one index finger on the tip of his nose. “Give the girl a prize!” he drawled in casual delight. “You got it in one. It took me twenty years, and a trip to a demon dimension, but I finally found a way to come back.”
“Why?!” snapped Willow. “Why did you come back? Just to make our lives sheer misery? Was I that bad a mother that you hate me that much?”
The warlock's mutilated face went still and blank. “I don't hate you, Mother. Well ... no, I do ... at times. You weren't the worlds best mother perhaps, but you did your best. You ... you tried to love me.”
“Tried to love you?” repeated Willow, her eyes catching with the spark of anger. “If you were my child, I'd have more than tried to love you! I would have!” Reaching out with her good arm, she took Tara's hand in her own. “We both would!”
Nameless' face twisted slightly, as if struck by an exceedingly bad memory. “Therein lies the rub. It wasn't your fault, Willow. It's just ... every time you saw me, every time you heard my voice, every time you even heard my name ... you hurt. Because it reminded you of what you'd lost, what had been stolen from you.”
“What are you ...” Willow began, heatedly.
“So soon they forget,” Nameless coldly interrupted. “If only I were so fortunate. Without my interference, Tara would have been murdered, remember?”
Willow's face bunched up, and she tensed in preparation to explode in furious denial, but Tara calmed the storm of her lover's fragile emotions with a touch. Though the thought of her own death left Tara queasy, when she spoke her voice was calm and measured.
“Even if that were the case,” she allowed, “why would you remind Willow about ... me?”
A melancholy half-smile twitched the corner of Nameless' mouth. “Because I'm your son too, Tara.”
There was a stunned silence as Tara was sent groping for words that simply refused to come. Willow filled the breech. “That's impossible!” she insisted.
“Says the bona fide monster-fighting, world-saving witch to her own time-traveling son who is chronologically older than her,” drawled Nameless in reply, crooking an eyebrow in a mirror image of Tara. “I am the product of a genetic match between the both of you, laws of nature not withstanding.”
Blinking, Tara finally managed to speak, even though her voice was weak. “How?”
Leaning backwards in his chair, Nameless steepled his fingers and shrugged. “Haven't the foggiest,” he casually admitted.
“You haven't ... you don't know?” replied Tara, disbelieving. “You don't even know how you came to be? Wasn't there ... oh, I don't know ... some sort of ....”
“What? Prophecy? Some ancient scroll predicting the event of my birth?” Nameless snorted in dark amusement. “Not bloody likely ... a fact that tended to give ol' Ripper fits of conniption. He never did like not knowing what's going on.”
“That doesn't worry you?” asked Willow, sounding as if she couldn't imagine a worse fate. “Not knowing the truth of your own origin.”
Nameless shrugged again, carelessly. “I am. I exist. What matter how that came to pass, it is enough for me that it did. Anything else ... it's superfluous.”
“But ...” Willow protested. Then she saw the bland look of disinterest on her self-proclaimed son's face and let the issue pass. For now. “Fine, whatever! You can claim to be he timmaculately conceived son of Tara and me ...”
Willow's voice momentarily trailed away as she entertained the thought that the child she was carrying could indeed be both her and Tara's. Physically impossible though it might be, it was a warming thought. Our child. Not just mine, but ours. Willow felt her heart swell, but then she looked at the scarred, savage man who claimed to be that selfsame child, and her thoughts were brutally yanked back to the situation at hand.
Shaking her head, Willow continued. “But why?! Why did you do any of this? Why did you get mixed up in dark magic, and travel back in time, just to make our lives a living hell! Why!”
Nameless surged to his feet, sending the chair clattering backwards to the floor, lips drawn back from his teeth and quivering. “Why!” he snarled in a terrible rage. “You ask me why! You wanna know, little witch! Do ya? Do ya!” His fists were clenched, and blood dripped slowly from his hand of flesh as his own nails gouged his palm. “Then by all means, let me illuminate your ignorance!”
Pausing, the warlock panted like a wild animal as the alarmed witches watched him with cautious and fearful eyes. “Why, you ask, did I do all of this? Any of this?” The terrible rage that had flared up guttered and died, leaving fear, pain and an agonizing sorrow in its wake. “Because you died, Mother! You died, and left me all alone.”
**********
June, 2018.
My name is ... was Timothy Rosenberg, and this is the day my world changed. This is the day my mother died.
We'd been living in London at the time; ever since the collapse of the Sunnydale Hellmouth Mom had never quite managed to settle down in one place. When pushed, she'd claim to be fulfilling a desire to see as much of the world as she could, but I knew that was a lie. Mom was always looking for something ... No. She was looking for someone, someone she knew, deep down, that she'd never be able to find.
Though she never knew that I knew, Mom was looking for a way to bring Tara back, something that she never gave up hope of achieving, even after she failed time and time again. Neither did she know that I was trying to do the same thing.
She was looking for Tara, my other mother, my murdered saint of an other mother. I won't say that we had a bad life; I learned a great deal, more than my Mom probably realized, and we were together. But that was part of the problem.
I was an empath, you see, and I knew what it was that she felt every single time she interacted with me. I could feel her pain, sharp and soul-crushing, though she would never admit it, not to me. I loved her more than anything or anyone on earth, more than I ever cared for myself. Can you have any idea what it feels like to bring constant pain to the person you love most in the world? It's agony, constant torture.
No-one else knew about my empathic abilities. They all just figured that I'd inherited my other mother's insight. And maybe I did. Maybe Tara had true empathic potential that just hadn't awakened in her the way it had in me. If so, I envy her.
So that's how we dwelled, the both of us in constant misery that we insisted on calling happiness, neither one of us brave enough to tell the other. But I wouldn't have had it any other way. Because I was with her.
I'd had my fifteenth birthday only a few weeks ago, which was part of the reason we were in England, so we could catch up with our whole extended family; the veterans of Sunnydale who called themselves the Scoobies.
Buffy and Dawn flew in from Rome, with more clothes than I'd ever believe one person could wear, and some of them were even for me. One-eyed Xander came from Africa, sun-browned and typically goofy, though even now grief for Anya still reared it's ugly head on occasion. Giles, of course, was already in England, where he fought a constant battle to prevent the new-formed Council of Watchers from reverting to its former hidebound ways. Spike and Angel arrived from Goddess-knows-where, taking a holiday from their self appointed war against Wolfram and Hart. Even Andrew turned up, to continue our long held argument over why Star Wars was better than Star Trek.
This was my family; dysfunctional, scattered across the globe, and unrelated by blood, but bound together by bonds stronger than the random vagaries of birth. They all loved me; I was the 'baby' of the family even though I knew something about me always made them feel on edge. I think they sensed the darkness in me, the darkness I fought against for every single waking second of my life.
For my part, I loved them all ... well, maybe not Andrew. But I would still betray all of them in the years to come.
It was the last member of my family who broke the news to me, the black sheep.
Mom had gone out to scour a rare bookshop ... and meet the demands of her mocha habit, so I hadn't expected her home for some time. On quite a few occasions I'd needed to ring her to remind her to come home, so caught up in the weight of knowledge she could become.
So I hadn't expected her for some time, and the sound of the doorbell caught me by surprise. When I'd answered its call, I got another surprise; it was Faith.
I always liked Faith. Unlike the others, I didn't have the emotional baggage with her that the rest of the family did, even though I knew full well everything she'd done. I think I saw a kindred soul of sorts in Faith Lehane, the both of us bound partially in darkness. For her part, I think she got off on being the 'fun' aunt, the one you'd go to when you wanted to get a fake ID.
But this wasn't the 'fun' aunt at my door this day. Even if I hadn't felt the grief and anger roiling from her like a menacing storm cloud as she stood wordlessly in my doorway, the expression on her face would have been enough to tell me something bad had happened.
“Faith?” I asked, my initial greeting dying on my lips.
“Timmy ... I ... your mom ...”
Normally, it would annoy me when she used the diminutive of my name; that's why she did it, for the same reason that I insisted on calling Giles Ripper more often than not, because it got a rise. But Faith being lost for words was troubling enough that, this time, I didn't care.
I got a feeling then, deep in my stomach, like a painful hollow gnawing, as if my innards were consuming themselves. I had to force myself to speak. “What about Mom? What's wrong, Faith?”
Faith licked her lips, looking as if she was about to be ill. “She ... I ... Timmy ... she's dead.”
Those two little words fell into place like the closing of a coffin lid, and all my hopes and dreams withered and died. I wanted to deny it, argue that Faith was wrong, she was lying. My mom wasn't dead, she couldn't be. But I didn't. Because I knew that she wasn't lying, she wasn't wrong.
My mother was dead.
I was on my knees, bent over, as if the pain was about to split me open, and Faith's arms were around me. I knew she was speaking to me, trying to console me, the story of what had happened trickling out in dribs and drabs.
She'd been on her way home, my mother, my rock, my morning star. She'd been stopped at a traffic light, and when it changed she driven out into the intersection just in time for another car to run a red light and smash straight into her. Willow Rosenberg had died instantly.
And now, her son was dying too.
All my life, the darkness had been there inside me, hiding, waiting, whispering in my ear for me to let it out. Let it out to roar and rampage, tear and rip, to make the heavens scream with the full force of my pain.
It was her darkness you see. When my other mother was murdered, when Willow lost herself to rage and grief and dark magic, it affected me in ways more profound than anyone but me could know. Eventually, Xander had reached my mother, cracking his way through her armor of self-righteous fury and vengeance before she could end the world, and she'd let that darkness go. It had flown out of her ... and in to me.
Children are supposed to be born innocent, a blank slate untouched by any of life's cruelties. I never was. Even though I had been nothing but an embryo quickening in my mother's womb, I knew what had happened. I remembered it, had seen it ... I'd lived it. I'd been born knowing what it was to know perfect love, and knowing what it was to lose that love, to have it stolen away. I was born knowing what it was to hate. I was born knowing what it was to commit murder. I was born knowing true darkness.
And it knew me in turn.
All my life, I'd fought it, denied it. For her, for my mother. She was my reason to fight, my reason to be a better person, my reason to fight against my instincts that told me to destroy where others would nurture, to hate where others would love.
She was my torch, my only glimpse of light in the endless darkness. And that light had just gone out.
It was then, at my darkest moment, when grief and pain ripped through me like a rusty knife that Faith said the worst thing that she ever could have said. She said that the other driver, that man that had extinguished the light of my mother's life was still alive.
I stopped fighting.
I didn't surrender, I didn't give up. I embraced. The darkness roared free. And my scream was both death-knell of the person I had wanted to be, and the birthing cries of the monster I would become.
**********
“I died?” croaked Willow, and Tara's hand tightened in support on her partner's.
Nameless' face twitched convulsively as he fought for control, and an icy mask slowly reformed on his ravaged face.
“Yes,” he finally grunted, “in a car accident. A drunk driver. I ... didn't take it well.”
**********
When Faith finally caught up with me, I had already reached the hospital and found the man responsible for my mother's death. In the basement of the same hospital lay my mother's body, growing stiffer and colder with each passing minute.
It wasn't a thought that promoted mercy.
When I'd let the darkness out, power had come with it, knocking the brunette slayer unconscious and shattering every inch of glass in the house where Mom and I lived ... where we used to live. I'd used that inadvertent advantage to gain a lead on Faith, because I knew that she would try to stop me. Unfortunately, that damn Slayer resilience and speed meant that I only just beat her there.
He was asleep when I got there, this fat, drunken bastard who killed my mother. Why does he get to sleep, when my mother would never wake up again? Why did he get to escape with bruises and broken limbs, when my mother's life had been snuffed out? Why did he get to live?
The method by which I woke him wasn't kind. I grabbed hold of his nearest broken leg, and yanked. Hard. He came awake with a shout of pain, tears in his eyes that I promptly slapped away. Flinching, he cried out again, this time in alarm and fumbled for the call button that would summon a nurse. I snatched it away from him, and ripped the cord out of the wall.
“Timothy!” Faith's cry announced her arrival, and signaled the seriousness of the situation. She only used my full name when things were serious.
I didn't look away from the man I meant to kill. I think that exact moment was the first time I admitted to myself what I planned to do, and it meant ... nothing to me. I remember being surprised; I was going to murder someone and I didn't care.
“Kinda busy here, Faith. Can you come back later?” My voice didn't agree with my inner equanimity, cracking with anxiety. Or maybe it just one of those embarrassing events that puberty is so determined to inflict upon all of us. I was only just fifteen at the time.
Faith came into the room slowly, cautiously, barely coming past the threshold of the door. She was striving for calm, and succeeding on the visible front, but I could feel the conflict bubbling away beneath her surface. She knew what I was about ... and part of her agreed with me.
“Timothy, you don't want to do this,” was what she said aloud instead.
“Actually, I really do want to do this.”
“What's going on?” demanded my mother's killer anxiously. “Who are you people? What are you doing in my room?!”
His voice was a petulant whine in my ears, and the darkness whispered for me to rip off his lips for offending my ears with his caterwauling. I settled for slapping him again, the sound of my hand against his cheek loud like a gunshot. I sensed Faith momentarily tensing, caught by surprise by the speed of my movement. But she didn't charge; Faith seemed determined to settle this with words if she could.
Words weren't going to cut it in this situation though.
I answered my mother's killer. “Who am I? I'm the person you orphaned today. Coincidentally, I'm also the person who's going to kill you.” He blanched at that, and the obvious fear in his eyes both sickened and excited me. He started babbling at me, useless words of regret and apology, but I ignored them. Would they return my mother to me? No.
“Timothy, I can't let you do this,” Faith continued, likewise ignoring the soon-to-be-dead man's words. “You know I can't ... Willow ... your mother wouldn't want this.”
Reminding me of what I'd lost wasn't the best idea. It just made me angrier. “Well, since Mom's kinda come down with a bad case of being dead, what she wants hardly fucking matters, does it!”
“Timothy ... don't make me do this ...” Even without my empathy, I can hear the regret in her voice. She's tensing up for the charge, ready to take me down, and I can't let her do that. No-one else will seek justice for my mother, not her friends and certainly not her family, the grandparents I've barely seen in my entire life.
I know that thought is a lie as soon as I've thought it. This has nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with revenge. Maybe not even that; the darkness just wants to destroy, to inflict pain on the universe that birthed it. I'm just choosing to focus all those destructive urges on this one man.
And they need to be set loose. For my entire life, I've lived with this darkness, but in all that time I've never dared to let the monster inside me off its leash. Now, it's loose and it demands to be fed. If I won't feed it, it will feed itself, and something tells me that will be worse than anything I can think of.
And to tell the truth ... part of me wants to let go.
“I don't want to fight you Faith,” I replied, and I meant it. In a physical fight, she'd kick my ass easily. I've received training from Buffy, Giles and Faith herself, and I can handle myself reasonably well, but she's a Slayer and I'm a scrawny fifteen year old kid. You do the math.
“But I can't let you stop me, either.” What happens next feels as if I'm lost inside a dream ... no. A nightmare. I act before I even know what I'm doing as the darkness boils up, overwhelming my better nature in a tidal wave of rage and hatred. It wants blood, now, and it doesn't care who it belongs to.
There is a large machine sitting against the opposite wall of the room, but I neither know nor care what its purpose is. I know it's heavy, and that's all I need to know. Magic boils through my veins in amounts that I've never before dared to call, and the machine is ripped free from the wall and hurled directly at Faith.
It happens too fast for her to react, even with a slayer's enhanced reflexes, all five hundred pounds of metal smashing into her chest with all the force of a speeding train. She buckles beneath the impact with a ghastly, wet sound as both victim and weapon are both propelled into the wall beyond the doorway.
Faith vanishes from my senses in a supernova of shock, pain and betrayal; it cuts me like a knife coated in sandpaper and dipped in acid. My breakfast threatens to come burning back up my throat as I realize what I've done, and all I want to do is scream. It wasn't supposed to be this way! Faith wasn't supposed to be dead, this fat son of a bitch in the bed was!
My hands are shaking, and I feel as cold as ice. I can't even turn around, because I'm afraid of what I'll see. It's the basest kind of cowardice; I killed her, no-one else. My friend, my family, is dead because of me. I killed her.
“Oh Jesus!” whimpers my mother's killer, and I'm perversely grateful to him, for it gives me the opportunity of hiding from the enormity of my sin by unleashing my anger against him. It was an opportunity I grabbed with both hands.
**********
“You killed him?” whispered Willow, appalled.
“No,” Nameless drawled sarcastically, “I kissed his boo-boos better. Of course I bloody well killed the bastard. That's why I went there in the first place, expressly to murder him. I would have thought you'd be more concerned about the fact that I killed Faith.”
Willow flushed, taking Nameless' comment as a criticism. “Of course I'm concerned about that! But it was just an accident, you didn't mean to kill her!”
Nameless stared intently at Willow for a short while, before favoring her with a melancholy smile. “Actually, I did mean to kill her. I might have regretted it when the deed was done, but it was no accident.”
“But ...” Willow began to protest.
“But what?” he calmly asked. “She was my friend, a member of my family? She was in my way, Mother, and at that time, killing her was my only method of removing her.”
“Removing her?” repeated Tara disapprovingly. “You didn't move a piece of furniture. You killed someone, Nameless, Nathaniel, Timothy ... whatever your name is!”
“I've slaughtered thousands, Mother dearest. The murder of Faith Lehane is hardly the worst of my crimes.”
**********
June, 2013
I stood staring at the crater that marked the resting place of the town where I'd been born, and where one of my mothers had been buried. That grave was long lost of course; I'd never even had the chance to visit Tara Maclay's grave, at least not so as I remember. Willow may well have taken me before the battle against the First turned Sunnydale into California's largest crater, but I would have been too young to remember.
Now? Now it was a just a big hole in the ground, and not the pretty kind either. Twenty odd years hadn't made that much of a difference either, despite several failed attempts to turn the site into a tourist attraction.
The surrounding terrain was a wasteland, dry and barren, the only sources of color the glimpse of ocean to one side, and the cornflower blue of the sky above. If the sky had been a burning orange, and raining fire, I might have even felt at home. Which was ironic, considering that I actually was home.
Or was I? Or was this Timothy Rosenberg's home world, while Nameless was a creature of Hyriault? I felt more comfortable in the demon dimension than on Earth now, even though Hyriault was war-torn and devastated. Though, to be fair, I was responsible for a lot of that.
But that was neither here nor there; my personal comfort matters not a whit. It wasn't the crater that brought me here, or the town that used to lie here. It was something else entirely.
A familiar voice sounded behind me, a voice I hadn't heard for the past twenty years. It would have only been five years or so to them, but that's temporal distortions for you.
“It's been a while, Timothy,” says Buffy Summers, unofficial queen of the Slayers, and the longest living member of her profession. Or should it be calling?
“That it has, Buffy,” I reply without turning around.
“How you been, Timmy?” asks Xander with studied casualness that's patently fake. I can feel his anger towards me, but he doesn't know that. His next comment doesn't make any secret of the fact though. “Killed anyone else lately? Or are you trying to cut down on the homicide?”
“Xander!” a third person exclaims, thick with disapproving censorship. That would be Dawn then, so the only person left would be ...
Giles obligingly makes his presence known. “Xander's isn't saying anything that isn't accurate, Dawn,” he points out. The Englishman's voice is mild, and takes neither side, but his emotions lean towards Xander's side. Ripper always did know how to hold a grudge.
“So ... the gang's all here then,” I state. “What about Captain Forehead and the Peroxide Pest? I know the sun's up and all, but are they nearby too?”
“Angel and Spike were busy, but I'm sure they send their best,” replies Buffy calmly. And she is calm too, surprisingly so, confident in her own abilities. But then again, she doesn't know what I've become since we last met. None of them do.
“I would have thought Angel might have been holding a grudge,” I mused idly, sensing as they shifted into a loose semi-circle around me. I had no doubt they were armed, but I figured they would try and do this peacefully if they could. I was still family as far as they were concerned anyway. “After all, I did kill his pet project.”
“Her name was Faith!” shouted Xander angrily, oh-so self righteous as usual. “The woman you murdered was called Faith! You could at least have the decency to use her name! Or are you afraid to?!”
“Faith Lehane was hardly the only person I murdered that day, Harris,” I pointed out maliciously. “Or have you forgotten that?”
He forces himself to subside with effort, left with no comeback. Xander doesn't mourn the death of the man who was responsible for the death of his oldest and best friend, and he feels guilty for that. Which is why I brought it up.
“I take it you all go my invitation?” I ask slyly.
Anger blossoms in Buffy now, but it's soon smothered by iron self control. “You left your 'invitation' in foot-high letters written on the wall in Andrew's blood. Not to mention killing the entire coven at Devon. So yeah, we got it!”
Giles cleared his throat. “What do you want, Timothy? What's brought you out of hiding in such a ... dramatic fashion?”
“Hiding?” I repeat, slightly offended.
“We founds traces of your trail, here and there, for the first three years, but after that ... you disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“You have no idea how right you are ...” I turned around then, grinning as I saw their reactions to my current appearance. The last time any of them had seen me, I'd been a callow, scrawny teenager. Now, I was in my mid thirties, heavily scarred and tattooed, and marked by the excessive use of dark magic.
Buffy was the first to react. “What the ... who are you?! You're not Timothy!” That's what she said, but I could feel a sickened sense of recognition coming from her. In my current state, I reminded her all too much of my mother in the full force of her grief-induced madness.
“Well, actually I am,” I drawled. “While the last two years have passed for you, I've experienced seventeen years in a demon dimension. It ... left its mark on me.”
Giles appeared to be impressed despite himself. “You survived seventeen years in a demon dimension?”
“I didn't just survive,” I countered with a predator's grin. “I thrived.”
Xander scoffed. “Yeah. That's why you look like you've been fed through a blender.”
“Well, you pull off the one-eyed look so well that I thought I'd give it a try,” I taunted back, and Harris flushed. Even twenty years later, Xander remained self conscious about the eye he'd lost.
“If you two are quite finished bickering? Somehow, Timothy, I don't believe you called us here just to reminisce, or to give yourself up,” said Giles.
“Good guess, Ripper,” I replied, fighting the impulse to grin at the spark of annoyance I always sensed from Giles whenever I used his old nickname. “I figured that since you've all spent so much effort trying to stop the world from ending, you might like to be here when it actually does.”
Xander raised an eyebrow sceptically.“The world's going to end? Again? Boy, that sure does get old real fast. What is it this time? Oh wait, let me guess ... the President is actually a demon wannabe, and he's trying to kick off a world war?”
With the ease of long practice, Buffy ignored Xander's diatribe in favor of spearing me with an intense gaze. Buffy was no longer the brash, and sometimes self-involved young woman I knew she had once been; the weight of more than two decades as an active slayer weighed heavily upon her. She knew this was no joking matter.
“What are you up to, Timothy,” she asked with quiet force. “What are you planning?”
“What, you can't guess?” I shot back, with a cold, mocking smirk. “Even given the location for our current reunion?”
“You're going to open the Hellmouth?” Buffy's jaw dropped for a moment, before she laughed. “What's the matter, Timothy? Forget your history? The Sunnydale Hellmouth is gone! We destroyed it!”
Her mockery didn't phase me in the least, and the cold certainty with which I met her statement soon made her laughter falter and die. “Au contraire, Buffy,” I finally responded, after letting the uncomfortable silence grow to a skin-pricking pitch. “A Hellmouth is a weakness in the dimensional walls, not a traditional door. It can't be destroyed. All you did, Slayer, is jam it shut. And what can be jammed shut ... can be forced open.”
I let that thought stew in their heads for a few moments before continuing. “Besides, I'm not going to open the Sunnydale Hellmouth ... I'm going to open all of them. Simultaneously.”
“What?” gaped Buffy, her composure shot to threads.
“All of them?” Giles repeated weakly. “Simultaneously?”
“You can't do that!” exploded Dawn as her elders dithered in shock. “Thousands ... millions of people will die!”
“I rather expect all of them will die, Dawn,” I countered, as cold, harsh and unfeeling as the rocks beneath my feet. “And what makes you think I care?”
“Because you're Willow's son!” screamed Buffy. “How could you even think of something like this? What would your mother say!”
“You mean if she wasn't dead!” I roared the last word, spitting the word out in fury, my shoulders hunching and my fingers curving into claws, as if I were a wild animal about to pounce. The scoobies recoiled from the sheer virulence of my sudden burst of anger; when they knew me I had always kept a tight reign on my emotions.
Banking the furnace fire of my rage, I forced my ire down, choked it down so that I could continue a conversation that was at least marginally civil. “What would Willow say? She would hate me, revile me, and fight to her last breath to stop me. Which is ironic, considering that this is nothing that she herself hasn't done herself.”
“Willow was mad with grief!” snapped Xander defensively. “What's your excuse? Why are you trying to destroy the world.”
“I'm not trying to destroy the world.”
“You're not?” Buffy questioned, understandably dubious given my earlier claim.
“Oh certainly, I will be destroying the world, but that is an unavoidable side-effect, rather than the ultimate aim of this ... little exercise, as it were.”
“Assuming for the moment that any of that is remotely true,” Giles asked, as ever the soul of British practicality, “then what are you trying to do?”
I shrugged. “I'm trying to change things.”
“Well yeah! Everyone being dead would be a change,” grated Xander darkly. “But I don't see how that's gonna help anyone!”
“I'm changing the past, you idiot,” I snapped, rolling my eyes.
“Changing the ... time travel?” Giles blinked owlishly. “You think you can travel in time? Timothy ... that's impossible!”
“And you're the ultimate authority on magic, aren't you Ripper,” I sneered contemptuously. “Care to remind me how it is that I exist in the first place? Oh no, that's right, you couldn't find out! How about you leave what is and is not possible with magic to me, okay? Why the hell do you think I went to Hyriault in the first place?! I went to find the Key!”
Dawn coughed and raised her hand as if she were back in school. “Umm ... I'm right here.”
I'm pretty sure that she's joking, but I'm not much of a one for jokes these days, so my response is biting and severe. “Not you, you self-involved twit. The Key of Rahmon, the key to time travel.”
“So what's that got to do with opening Hellmouths?” demanded Buffy. “Or is that just for kicks?”
The corners of my lips turned down in a scowl; this was still an understandably sore point with me, and with every word I spoke, my fury grew. “What does that have to do with what I'm doing? Because after seventeen years of hardship, pain and suffering, after initiating a civil war that turned Hyriault into a charnel house, after forging myself into a monster, just to win that war and find the Key ... do you know what I found out?! That the fucking Key vanished from existence more than an a hundred and fifty years before I fucking well even got there!”
“So ... what?” Buffy shot back sharply. “This is a temper tantrum because you couldn't find your little magic thingy?”
“No, this is my MacGyver moment,” I countered, grinning at the resulting expressions of bewilderment. “By which I mean I'm improvising. The theory behind the Key is still perfectly sound, but without the artifact to power the spell, I need to find an alternative power source.”
“And the world destroying angle comes in where?” asked Xander, his voice dripping with disdain. I let Harris' dislike of me roll away like water off a duck's back. If I cared what people thought of me, I'd never have been able to do half of what I've done.
He was almost vibrating with tension, and it was only Buffy's presence that kept Xander from attacking me straight out. Anya's death years ago had left him more than a touch bitter and reckless, and at times over the years it had seemed as if part of Xander was seeking an early reunion with his dead love. The deaths of Willow and Faith on top of that seemed to have pushed him even further down a dark path.
“Opening a dimensional portal creates an immense amount of mystical energy,” I explained, my tone that of a bored schoolteacher. “Most of this energy is wasted, burnt off into the atmosphere. Instead, I'm going to trap that wasted energy from the opening hellmouths and use it to power my spell.”
“Great ... you're the man with the plan alright,” said Buffy, forcing lightness into her tone, trying to play the dumb blonde act. As if I, of all people, didn't know better. “But how do you plan on pulling off this master plan of yours? If it was that easy to do, someone would have already done it.”
Smiling lazily, I raised an eyebrow in a motion calculated to remind them of Tara. Though I can't imagine she ever pulled it off with as much menace as I could. “True enough, Buffy. But you see ... I have something no-one else has. After all, what's better to use to open a locked door ... than a key.”
I looked pointedly at Dawn, who is staring at me wide-eyed and open mouthed. “And this time I do mean you, Dawnie. Thanks ever so much for bringing her to me, Slayer. You've made my job so much easier.”
“But ... but I'm not the key anymore!” Dawn protests, and I snort at the absurdity of the statement; not ten minutes ago, she was thinking that I was talking about her when I spoke of a Key.
I educated Dawn as to her ignorance. “You can't be used to drop all the dimensional walls at once, as Glory attempted, true. That was a one time deal, and the one time is done. And yes, you are human through and through. But the energy potential of the Key is still locked within you. It just needs to be unlocked. And, pardon the pun, I'm the man with the key. Unfortunately, this will kill you Dawn, but I'm afraid there's no other option.”
One moment, Buffy is relatively calm and at ease; the next she is charging forward, and I have no doubt that she means to use the sword she holds in her hand on me. The rest of the Scoobies aren't far behind, only restricted by their slower reaction times.
But I am nothing if not prepared. As they breach an invisible perimeter, the scoobies trip the dormant spell awaiting that exact eventuality, and the hard packed soil they're moving on is abruptly transformed into a gooey mess. All four of the Scoobies sink at least a foot into the ground almost instantly, and just as quickly, the dirt solidifies once again, harder than before, stopping them all dead in their tracks.
Buffy doesn't give up there; if there's one thing you can say about her, it's that she never gives up easily. Flipping her sword, the slayer hurls her weapon at me like a spear, but it ricochets off the invisible wall of sheer force that was my secondary line of defense. Left unarmed, Buffy can do nothing but glare at me.
“You are not touching my sister,” she hisses, flat and cold.
“No,” I reply sadly, dropping into a couch so that I could stare into each of the Scoobies eyes, one at a time. “I'm not going to touch her, I'm just going to kill her. Just as I will be responsible for the deaths of each and every one of you when I rip open the Hellmouth. And I will regret it, but do it regardless. Because there is no depth to which I will not sink, no line I will not cross, no sin I will not commit, and no-one and nothing I will not sacrifice.”
Rising to my feet, I pointed at Dawn and beckoned, ignoring the pleas, threats and curses they all threw at me; they couldn't say anything worse to me than I was already saying to myself. Magic bound Dawn's limbs in solidified air, and plucked her free from her earthen prison, lifting her into the air and floating her close.
Holding her in midair before me, I half ripped open her blouse, revealing an expanse of tanned flesh. The fusillade of protests from behind me grew stronger, but it was Dawn's emotions, rolling over me in a tidal wave of fear and sorrow that captured my attentions.
I wish I could say that I hesitated before taking my knife to Dawn's vulnerable flesh, but that would be a lie, and I rarely allow myself to hide from the depths of my own misdeeds. The truth of it is that I began carving the necessary rune in the skin of her chest without pause. Even if Dawn's gasps, whimpers and screams hadn't been confirmation of the pain I was inflicting, my empathic talents made it impossible to ignore, for I was deliberately keeping that ability unfurled.
Was it some sense of remorse about what I was doing that drove me to this, my own personal form of self-flagellation? I wasn't a fool, I knew what I was doing was the highest order of wrongdoing; not only was I bringing about the probable death of my entire world, but I was murdering one of the remaining people I cared about to do so.
Because I still did care, no matter how much I'd tried to burn and rip all the milk of human kindness from out of my personality. How could I not? They were the only family I had left. If I had any other choice; I would have taken it, even if it cost me my own life. But there wasn't. I had looked everywhere I could think to, and this was my only option. This was the only way to set things right. This was the only way I could give my mother the fate that she so richly deserved.
No-one who isn't an empath themselves can't begin to imagine what it is to murder someone. My gift, or curse, depending on your point of view, means that unless I shut it out, I feel everything that my victim does. I feel their pain, their terror, their panic as if it were my own. The death that I inflict others can feel as if it was were my very own, and I am feeling this exact sensation at this very moment.
I'm so caught up in the moment that I left my defenses down, assuming that the Scoobies can't pose a threat any longer. Even as I torture myself with Dawn's pain, I need to focus on what I'm doing. I can't afford any mistakes. The only heed I pay the rest of my family is to maintain the barest touch of power to sustain the spell holding them.
I should never have turned my back on Buffy Summers. I should have known better.
The knife caught me in the shoulder, completely unawares, and the web of spells I was maintaining crumbled. Staggering, I bit back an oath as pain lanced through me, and Dawn dropped to the ground where she hunched over and clutched at her bleeding chest. I spun around to see Buffy wrenching her feet free from the crumbling dirt that had been holding her in place. She charged at me, with bloody murder in her eyes.
She should had made her knife throw count. I don't know why she hit me in the shoulder; her aim is better than that. Perhaps it was a desire not to kill the only child of her best friend? Whatever her reason was, it was a mistake.
As Buffy closed in on me, I didn't see Buffy Summers, the woman who had baby sat me as a child, the woman who'd taught me to fight. I didn't see a member of my family who, even know, after all I've done, still loves me.
I saw an enemy, and I reacted as such.
I called lightning before I even knew what I was doing, and the tang of burned ozone filled the air. Buffy staggered a handful of steps closer, carried forward by both momentum and stubbornness before her body finally acknowledged the inevitable. The foot wide hole burnt clean through her chest left no question.
Buffy Summers was dead. And I had killed her.
Dawn's scream was a primal thing, a grief-fueled keening that hadn't changed in nature since humanity first climbed down out of the trees. It came from deep inside her, a place that we never want to touch or acknowledge, the place where dwells the knowledge that our own demise awaits. Her scream was so strong it was almost liquid, a vocal manifestation of pain and loss and grief. Part of me, the smallest fragment that was left of Timothy Rosenberg wanted to scream alongside her, as I had screamed for my mother. But the majority of me, that part that now called itself Nameless, simply didn't care.
Xander and Giles were staring in disbelief at Buffy's corpse, but I knew a violent reaction couldn't be far away. They both loved Buffy too much, in their own way. I turned, cold, numb and inhuman, and called the lightning again. I don't think they even had a chance to realize their doom was upon them before they died, charred and burnt, and as they too died, so did another fragment of a scared little boy named Timothy.
I turned to the last surviving Scooby, the last living member of my family, and Dawn looks up at me with eyes wet with tears.
“Please,” she asks with a quiet dignity, “Don't do this.” She will not beg, despite the terrible fear that threatens to consume her, and I admire her for that.
It is almost with regret that I shake my head. “Sorry Dawnie. I don't know any other way.” I sigh, and bind her once more magic. She tries to claw at my eyes, and I'm glad; she should go down fighting, as the rest of them did. There is a certain ... poetic balance to it.
“Prepare yourself, Dawn,” I advise, my voice as gentle as I can make it. “This is really going to hurt.”
**********
“You did all that?” Tara breathed softly, as if to speak it any louder would confirm Nameless' tale beyond a shadow of a doubt. Both of the witches were staring at their self proclaimed son with unreserved horror, and for a moment, Tara thought Nameless would flinch away from their gaze.
Instead, the warlock returned their gaze flatly, without denial. He didn't argue with the unspoken condemnation inherent in their eyes, but instead both accepted and agreed with their judgment. Tara stared at him, this man that claimed to be both her son as well as Willow's, riven by conflict.
Nameless' tale had left her horrified and disgusted, but she also felt ... sorry for him. Nameless was a terrible figure, yes, but also a tragic one, so consumed by his mother's death ... by Willow's death, that his entire system of values had been subsumed in his efforts to ... what?
Tara realized that she still didn't know why. Why Nameless had gone to such extreme lengths to come back to this time. “Why?” she asked quietly, but with a desperate need to know, to understand. “Why did you do it? Why did you do any of it ...” Tara paused, hesitating as to whether or not to use his name, “... Nameless?”
His eyes, mismatched and inhuman, flicked to Tara. “Why?” he repeated in a voice that was tired and emotionally drained. “To give Willow what she deserved, nothing less.”
“What I deserve?!” erupted Willow. During Nameless' tale, she'd slumped back onto her bed, but now she surged upright, her pale face flushed with anger. “I deserve to be scared and tormented? To be treated like a madman's plaything?!”
Nameless slowly shook his head. “No. What you deserve, mother, is to be happy and safe.”
Willow gaped, and Tara gaped right alongside her. “Happy and ... what the frilly heck is wrong with you!” blurted Willow after a moments pause to digest this latest claim. “What part of me seems happy and safe right now!”
The warlock looked almost apologetic at this. “ Happiness was never something I could bring you when you were alive, but you were never so happy as you were when you were with her. So I gave her back to you, I kept her from dying. As for safe ... why do you think I've been slaughtering anything that could ever pose a threat to either of you!”
“But ... but ... if that's true, then didn't you just tell us that! If you just wanted to protect us, then why did you pretend to be our enemy?!”
“Because you aren't capable of doing what needed to be done!” Nameless snarled in another of his lightning-fast changes of mood. “You, all of you, you're so bound up by rules and morals and ethical strictures that you're paralyzed! I ... am not. I will do whatever is necessary, no matter the cost, to me or to anyone else.”
He paused, visibly reining in his temper. “And I didn't want you to know who I was, or what I'd done. Because you would blame yourselves. You'd feel guilty for the multitude of cardinal sins I have committed, just because I committed them to save you! What was I supposed to do? Just turn up on your doorstep and say; Hi! I'm your son who's traveled back in time. Oh, and by the way, I'm a mass murderer!”
“Timothy ...” Willow began, taken aback, but Tara knew that it had been a mistake even as Willow was saying it.
“DON'T CALL ME THAT!” bellowed the warlock, spittle flecking his lips. “Timothy's dead, damn you! He died, with you, twenty years ago!” His gaunt chest was heaving from the force of his anger, fists clenched so tight that the knuckles of his flesh hand was bloodless and white.
Tara interjected, hoping that a distraction would improve the unstable warlock's mood. “If that's true, then why are you here, now, telling us this? If you didn't want us to know ... why are you telling us all of this?”
Nameless' attention switched to the blonde, and as Tara had hoped, he seemed to calm slightly, narrow lips twitching back down to sheathe his snarl. A kind of proud smile curved the ends of his lips, ever so slightly, as if pleased by Tara's insight.
“Exactly!” he hissed, after taking a moment to regain his tenuous composure. “I was supposed to remain unseen and unheard. When that failed, I played the villain rather that inflict the knowledge of what I was on you. And now I stand before you, naked and vulnerable. Why, is the question.”
Licking her lips, Willow hesitated before responding, reluctant to chance setting Nameless off again. “Then what's the answer?”
The warlock started to pace, shoulders hunched and head bowed, and for a moment it seemed that he would not respond. “I have done so much that I ... regret. My sins weigh heavily upon me, more so with every passing day, now that I'm here. In the past ... I could ignore it, focus on my goal. But now that I'm here ... I find myself defenseless.”
“And ... what?” asked Tara cautiously. “You want us to help you?”
“I want it to stop,” Nameless replied bluntly. “Part of what sustained me was the knowledge that one day, it would be over. That it would be enough, that I could stop. That I could rest.”
“And?” Willow carefully pressed.
Nameless stopped pacing, standing with his back to his mothers. “And I realized that's never going to happen. I'll never be able to stop, never be able to rest. You won't let me.”
Willow blinked, confused. “We won't let you?”
“I don't blame you,” Nameless continued. “How could I? It's who you are, and that's why I love you so much. But it's also why you won't ever let me stop. Because you won't stop. It's not in you, any more than it is in me.”
“What is?” asked Tara, as equally confused as her lover by their son's words. “What are you talking about?”
“You'll never stop fighting the good fight. You'll never stop doing 'the right thing', putting your lives on the line to protect a world that will never give you with the appreciation you deserve. You'll never stop putting yourselves in danger, which means that I will never be able to stop killing to protect you. It. Will. Never. End.”
Neither woman knew how to respond to that, and could only share helpless glances. Was he right?, wondered Tara. Will we ever stop this? Can we ever stop, when we know what's out there, lurking in the shadows? When Buffy died, did we stop?
In the end, it turned out that Nameless didn't expect or want a response. He spun around to face them, and his eyes were burning with a frantic insanity. “But I'll make it stop. I'll make you stop. I'll make everything stop.”
To be continued.
