by Darth Pacula » Wed Dec 21, 2005 1:33 am
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.
Disclaimers: I still don't own squat. But then you guys know that, right?
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.
The story so far ... Tara has had her chance at a face to face encounter with Nameless, who has surprisingly requested her aid to teach Willow a so-called lesson. Despite her best efforts to locate her lost lover and her captor, Willow is beginning to get more than a little bit desperate when Nameless reappears and kidnaps her as well. Things aren't looking good for the remaining scoobies ...
Part 18.
“Was that who I think it was?” Xander demanded as he stumbled down the porch steps, narrowly avoiding tripping and impaling himself upon the broadsword he carried. Giles followed in his wake, eyes glittering like twin chips of flint behind his glasses.
“It was,” confirmed the Watcher in a voice that was disturbingly composed. “And now, he's got Willow as well.”
Xander rounded on the Englishman in a fury born of fear for his oldest friend. “How the hell can you be so calm, Giles! He's got Tara, and now he's got Will!”
Giles fixed Xander with a withering glare, even as he kept a close eye on Buffy, who hadn't moved an inch, but apparently remained fixated on the empty space where Willow had been.
“Now is no time to lose our heads, Xander. Panicking will be of no help whatsoever to Willow, or to Tara.”
“Yeah, well some of us don't have iced tea running through our veins,” Xander shot back angrily. “Some of us are stuck on the panic channel. All panic, all the time, 24-7!”
“Don't you dare try and imply that I don't care about Willow and Tara! I care for them, for all of you like you were my own children!” Giles was becoming frostier by the second, sucked in by Xander's angry tone.
The carpenter wasn't at all impressed by Giles' response, and the mounting tension of everything that had been happening of late, combined with the intense fear he was feeling for his friends was overwhelming Xander's better judgment.
“You've got a funny way of showing it then!” he countered, uncaring of the fact that he was now shouting. “Running away like a big scaredy-cat English guy!”
“What is that supposed to mean!” Giles demanded, eyes narrowed and lips pursed in displeasure.
“Stop it!” yelled a third voice, and the two men turned in surprise to face the porch where Dawn and Anya stood. “Just stop it!” Dawn continued, fighting off worry and annoyance at Giles and Xander's behavior. Anya, on the other hand, wasn't conflicted in the least about openly displaying her disgust.
“Dawn, I ...” Giles began apologetically, but Dawn censored the Watcher's attempt with a furious gesture.
“Is it true?” she demanded. “Was it Nameless? Did he take Willow?”
“I'm afraid so,” Giles regretfully advised her.
Dawn shifted her weight and crossed her arms, unconsciously mimicking the body language her sister typically adopted when she was angry. “And this is how you go about rescuing her? By bickering on the lawn? What is wrong with you both?”
Xander ducked his head and scuffed his feet on the lawn like the proverbial errant schoolboy, abashed by the teenager's richly deserved criticism. For his part, Giles awkwardly cleared his throat and looked mildly ashamed. Dawn noticed his hand twitching, and was sure that if she hadn't been glaring fit to cut glass, he would have been polishing his glasses.
“She's right.”
The others turned at the sound of Buffy's voice. The Slayer had apparently broken out of the trance she had been in, and rotated to face them with a look of unyielding determination on her face. After a moments surprise, Dawn visibly preened, her expression all but shouting 'Hah, I was right!' to the others. The teenager's jubilation was short lived when she realized that no-one else was paying attention. A disappointed pout struggled to make itself noticed on Dawn's face, but it was obvious that her heart wasn't in it, and the expression swiftly subsided.
“Willow and Tara need our help,” continued Buffy firmly. “Which we're not giving by squabbling in the front yard. We need to act, and we need to act now.”
A moments silence greeted Buffy's forceful pronouncement, broken only by the rasp of a cricket ignorant and uncaring of the tension pregnant in the air. Then the silence was broken by Anya's curious voice.
“So ... act how?”
Silence reigned once more.
“You don't have the first idea what to do, do you Buffy?” Anya queried suspiciously.
Buffy shrugged self-consciously. “Not so much, no. I was just trying to go for motivational.”
“Well, I don't think that freakishly tall man with the massive hands has anything to worry about,” the ex-demon noted clinically. “Honestly, who would be motivated by that?”
“Well, there goes my lifelong dream,” replied the Slayer sarcastically. “I guess I'll have to resign myself to a life of killing monsters and serving fried imitation meat substances. Now that we've got the sorry details of my future out of the way, does anyone have any useful suggestions?”
Yet again, there was silence, broken as the same cricket made a repeat performance. Finally, Xander offered his two cents to the discussion.
“We suck.”
**********
Nameless rematerialized in the cave, a limp limbed Willow still enfolded in his arms. Loosening his grip, the warlock rotated the redhead so that she faced him and snapped his fingers, breaking the spell that had plunged her into slumber.
Consciousness returned just as swiftly as it had been stolen, hitting the somnolent witch with the speed and force of a runaway train. Emerald eyes snapped open, staring into Nameless' mismatched gaze in blank confusion. Realization swiftly dawned, and Willow's eyes narrowed. With that realization came determination, and with that determination came action.
Willow kicked Nameless hard in the shin. Lurching backwards as the warlock released her, Willow regained her balance and, consumed by fear and anger, swung with all her might at Nameless' head. Her attempt proved less than successful.
Nameless intercepted her blow with practiced ease, capturing Willow's arm by the wrist. With a startled 'eep', the redhead found herself spun around in a circle until one arm was twisted behind her back and a bony hand was clamped upon her throat.
“Don't let the scars fool you, little witch,” Nameless rasped into Willow's ear, his hot breath tickling her earlobe. “I'm not overly fond of being hit in the face.”
Willow proved to be less than concerned about her captors preferences however. “Where is she?” demanded the redhead shrilly, desperation overriding her sense of self preservation to the point where she struggled futilely in Nameless' iron grip. “Where's Tara? What did you do to her?”
Nameless sighed like the long suffering parent of a cantankerous youngster, pointed Willow in a different direction, and shoved the witch away. Willow staggered forwards, tripping and pitching head first to the ground, but quickly scrambled to her feet and rounded on the warlock once more.
“Where is she?!”
Nameless crooked one eyebrow in disappointment. “Here's a suggestion for you, Willow,” he snidely answered. “Try pulling your head out of your ass, turn back around, and look for yourself.”
“Just tell me where ... wait, what?”
The warlock's second sigh was rapidly nearing the level of a sullen teenager as he signaled for Willow to turn around. Keeping one eye suspiciously upon Nameless, Willow grudgingly did as he suggested. What she discovered made the redhead gasp and forget completely about her captor's presence, for the moment at least.
Across the length of the cave was Tara, hanging loosely in midair, her head slumped down upon her chest and her limbs limp. In a sick kind of way, the image made Willow recall that magical night last year on Tara's birthday, when they had danced together in the Bronze. Both women had been so happy and content that they had begun to spontaneously sway in midair, tightly wrapped in each other's embrace.
Now however, it was not Willow's gentle and loving arms wrapped around the blonde; rather it was a pulsing band of some gelatinous substance that was a particularly putrescent, sickly blue. It was as if Nameless had hocked up a gross phlegm wad of epic proportions, and wrapped it about Tara's waist, securing the blonde witch's arms to her sides.
“Tara!” Willow cried out, anguish flooding every aspect of her being. Unbeknownst to the redheaded witch, behind her back, Nameless physically winced at the note of pain in his captive's voice. For a single fleeting second, remorse and self-recrimination coursed across his ravaged face, before it was mercilessly quashed with coldly stark self-control.
Willow sprinted towards her everything, uncaring of whether or not the warlock would try to stop her. The only thought in her mind was reaching her mate's side. Nameless did not attempt to intervene however, perhaps realizing that to do so would be akin to trying to stop a herd of rampaging cattle by standing in their path and shouting boo.
What he did do was to clear his throat meaningfully. “You might want to slow down a bit ...”
Willow paid the warlock's mild advice no heed, and continued her headlong charge towards where Tara hung unconscious. So, when she slammed into the invisible barrier surrounding her partner, it was at full speed.
“... before something like that happens,” finished Nameless regretfully, as the speeding redhead's body ricocheted off the forcefield and staggered backwards, arms flailing gracelessly. Willow landed with a thump on her butt, eyes pinched half-closed and her mouth open in a silent 'O' of pain and embarrassment.
“Sometimes I wonder why I bother,” Nameless muttered beneath his breath as he limped over to Willow. Reaching down, he grabbed the witch by the scruff of her blouse and hauled her effortlessly to her feet.
Once Willow regained her equilibrium, she tried to shove Nameless away, but the warlock evaded her every attempt with serpentine grace and stepped back obligingly.
“Don't touch me!” Willow snapped, and Nameless obediently placed his hands together at the small of his back.
“What did you do to her, you ... you ...” Willow's voice trailed off as she discovered nothing suitably harsh enough in her admittedly sparse vocabulary of insults.
“Murdering bastard? Butt-ugly psycho?” Nameless offered with a dry, humorless smile. “They're both accurate.”
“What did you do to Tara?” Willow snapped, far too concerned with her partner's condition to do anything but ignore the warlock's words.
“You mean after I saved her life and stole her away from you?” Nameless asked merrily, as if he considered the entire situation one big joke. “I cleaned her wound, engaged in a little light banter, complete with the obligatory insults and threats ... and then I put her into an enchanted sleep.” He leaned forward and winked conspiratorially. “I couldn't leave the little minx to roam free while I went and fetched you, now could I?”
“Let her go!”
“Hmm, let me think,” Nameless replied, scratching idly at his jaw. “Er ... no.”
“Let her go, now!” Willow repeated, giving her infamous resolve face a try. “Or else!”
But the warlock proved immune to the most powerful weapon in the redhead's expression arsenal. “Or else what, Willow?” he scoffed. “Didn't we have this discussion earlier? Without your magic, you're about as much of a threat to me as a newborn kitten.”
“What is wrong with you?” Willow demanded furiously. “Do you think this is a game? This is my ... our life you're screwing with!”
“Life is a game, little witch,” Nameless rasped, suddenly bleak. “The only difference between it and any other ... is the stakes.”
“Fine, all of life is a game, woo hoo. Now, why don't you go play with yourself instead of us?”
Witch and warlock stared at each other in mortified silence as the unintended connotation hidden in Willow's statement worked through their equally complex minds. Despite her best efforts, Willow's cheeks blossomed with embarrassment, while Nameless awkwardly cleared his throat.
“Can we just ... forgot that I ever said that?” Willow pleaded, and the warlock nodded his head eagerly, only too happy to acquiesce.
“Works for me,” he muttered gratefully. “Now, where were we?”
“You were being a big mean jerk,” Willow responded with uncharacteristic spite.
“That's pretty much a given, little witch,” Nameless observed mildly. “So it doesn't exactly narrow things down much.”
The redhead glared at him with gritted teeth, a hairs breadth away from losing control and hurling herself physically at the warlock. After what she had seen Nameless was capable of, Willow knew such an action was about as likely to succeed as Xander was to become a nuclear physicist, but as always when Tara's safety was on the line, clear headed thinking proved almost beyond the redhead's capacities.
Willow took a deep, shaky breath and exhaled, trying to expel off of her fear and panic with it. If I'm going to get Tara and I out of this alive, I've got to stop reacting. I have to play to my strengths. Which means I have to keep a cool head. Willow gulped instinctively at the prospect of trying to outwit her ruthless and mercurial opponent. Tara needs me. I have to be strong now. Strong like an amazon.
“What do you want?” she finally asked, feeling a twinge of pride at how calm and collected her expression was. Too bad my voice is so shaky.
“What do I want?” Nameless repeated Willow's words as if considering the question for the first time, before posing a question on his own. “What do any of us want?”
“Sorry, but I'm not really in the mood for a philosophical discussion,” Willow ground out, her hard won composure already slipping.
“As you wish,” replied Nameless with a shrug and another of those painfully familiar half-smiles. “You ask what I want. Well, I'm not going to tell you my details of my scheme in full. I am not so much of a fool as to make such a clichéd mistake. So you will have to make do with what I want right now, in regards to you.”
“Fine, whatever. Now, how about you stop stalling and actually tell me already!”
The warlock shook his head, and waved his index finger chidingly. “Tut tut, Ms Rosenberg. Temper temper. Have you no appreciation for theatrics?” Cocking his head to one side, his grin grew even wider. “Still, I shouldn't be surprised. I am speaking to a woman fled the stage without a word rather than perform her part in her High School talent show.”
How did he ...?
“Still, I suppose I should get to the point. We might be here all night otherwise, and I'm sure all of us have better things to do,” he acknowledged with a wry smirk. “So, what do I want? That's simple. I want you to start using magic again.”
Willow stared at her tormentor, mouth open and slack with shock. All that kept the redhead from performing a prize winning imitation of a goldfish was the fact that her mouth wasn't mindlessly opening and closing. “You what?” she finally mumbled, mind whirling with confusion.
“I'm sorry, did I stutter?” he asked solicitously, before adopting a cruel grin. “No ... wait, you'd be used to that, w.. wouldn't y.. you?”
“Hey, don't you dare make fun of Tara!” Willow demanded, her emerald eyes fiery, infuriated by his mockery of her mate.
“Then don't ask stupid questions, Willow,” he snidely suggested, “and I won't feel so inclined to indulge my acid tongue.”
Grinding her teeth together in frustration, Willow tried to regain her earlier illusion of calm before continuing. Why does this ... big jerk push my buttons so much? Why do I let him get to me so easily?
“Fine,” she snapped. “Maybe then you'd like to explain why you want to make me a greater threat to you, huh Mr Smarty-pants?”
Lips twitching in the ghost of a conspiratory smile, Nameless just shook his head.
“No?” Willow asked in disappointment. “Are you sure you don't want to gloat, just a little? Rub my face in how superior you are, how brilliant your evil scheme is?” she cajoled hopefully.
“Nope,” the warlock replied nonchalantly. “I'm good. Except, ya know, for the whole evil thing.”
“Drat,” Willow grumbled. “You suck.”
Nameless shrugged, unable or unwilling to argue with Willow's diagnosis. Hands still cupped at the small of his back, Nameless stalked away and to one side, so that he, Willow and Tara formed three points of an invisible triangle. Looking back at the redhead from the corner of his eye, he grinned at the sulking expression Willow wore.
“Well, all this pointless bickering is fun and all, don't get me wrong. But do you have a answer for me?”
“Um ... about what?” Willow asked, mildly confused as she was forcibly snapped out of her pout. From the pinched expression on his scarred face, Nameless was only just managing to avoid slapping himself in the face in exasperation.
“About rethinking this idiotic decision to forgo magic, you ... you ... infuriating little idiot!” he growled through gritted teeth.
Willow set her lips in a thin line of determined resistance. “No,” she declared flatly.
Nameless sighed, his shoulders slumping in disappointment. “No what, Willow? No, you don't have an answer for me? Or just plain, flat-out, get bent, no?”
Willow's only answer was an angry glare, and the warlock sighed again regretfully. “Is that your final answer, little witch?”
“Oh well, let me think,” Willow replied, her voice dripping with fake earnestness. “Should I start doing that thing again that hurt my friends, and drove away the woman I love. Gee, that's a hard decision. Then there's the fact that it's what you, Mr Prince-of-Darkness-type-evil-guy, want me to do it!” Willow scoffed derisively. “That's pretty much gonna guarantee that I won't!”
Nameless fixed the redhead with a gaze that was suddenly glacial, and a shiver ran down Willow's spine. “So be it,” he intoned like a judge pronouncing sentence. “Then your girlfriend dies.”
Nameless flung out one arm in Tara's direction, and the air grew thick with the acrid tang of burnt ozone as lightning flared from his fingers and leapt unerringly at the blonde witch's helpless form.
**********
“We so totally suck!” Xander moaned, dropping his head into his hands.
“Doesn't anyone have an idea?” Dawn pleaded hopefully. “Anything? Anyone?”
Giles looked up from polishing his glasses, a habit that he had hoped would somehow inspire a plan. “Buffy, are you sure that Willy ...”
Buffy shook her head definitively. “No go, Giles. He's terrified of Nameless, to the point where even Will's resolve face didn't move him.”
“Perhaps if I ...” Giles began to offer, but Buffy cut him off despondently.
“Sorry, Giles. I don't care how scary you can get when you go all 'Ripper' on someone, I don't think it'd work. This Nameless ... he tortured Willy simply to prove a point. I don't think you can match that.”
“We have to do something!” Xander blurted. “This is Will and Tara we're talking about!”
“Do you think we don't know that, Xander?” snapped the Slayer as she rounded angrily on her friend.
“No! I know that you ... it's just ... it's Willow, Buff. She's my best friend. If anything happens to her, or to Tara ...”
Buffy's expression softened as she witnessed the anguish in Xander's open face, and she enfolded her friend in a comforting hug. “I know, Xander. I know.”
“Yes ... well,” Giles muttered, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Be that as it may, perhaps we should review what we know?”
“Which is?” Anya asked curiously. “I thought we didn't know much? Isn't that why we don't know what to do?”
Giles appeared understandably off put by Anya's characteristic bluntness. “Um ... well ... er, yes I suppose so, but ...”
“Anya, I think you broke Giles again,” interjected Xander as he disengaged from Buffy's embrace. “What I want to know is what the hell that bell sound was. Did Nameless make that, cause if so, he's not so much with the stealth these days.”
“Oh no, that was Tara's ward spell. Nameless tripped it,” Anya explained matter of factly. Then she seemed to realize who she was talking to and continued in a much more antagonistic tone of voice. “I would have thought that was obvious, even to you, Xander Harris.”
“Well, it's good to know my stupidity can still exceed your expectations, Ahn,” Xander shot back in what could only be imagined was supposed to be a brilliant comeback. The pained expression that quickly followed his declaration made it all too apparent that even Xander himself recognized its shortcomings.
In the meantime, Buffy was too concerned to lend the antics of her bickering friends too much attention. Instead, she turned to Giles, an expression of hope on her face.
“Giles, could you do a locater spell?” she asked. “That's what Willow was going to do, just before he took her.”
Xander and Dawn both glanced at the Slayer sharply, but their questions were pre-empted by an even sharper glance from Buffy that promised they would be discussed later.
“I'd be extremely surprised if a warlock of Nameless' power didn't have some kind of cloaking device shielding himself from such spells, Buffy,” Anya interrupted. “Especially given his habits with glamors. He'd have to know we'd be looking for him, especially after he kidnapped Tara, and then Willow.”
Despite Anya's words, which had driven the brief flicker of hope from Buffy's face, Giles' eyes lit up with the first glimmers of a plan. “But ... he might not have increased the scope of any such spell to include either Willow or Tara,” he muttered.
“So, does that mean if we use a locater spell to find them, instead of Nameless himself ...?” Dawn asked, the faces of both of the Summers sisters lighting up with hope once more.
“It might just work!” Giles announced triumphantly.
“We should probably go the Magic Box,” Dawn suggested. “I don't think Tara kept too much in the way of supplies in the house since she moved back in.”
“We can discuss a payment plan later,” Anya added, in a grand display of magnanimous charity. As she gradually became aware of the aghast stares she was receiving from the other scoobies, a look of perplexity washed over the ex-demon. “What?”
**********
This time, there was no hesitation, no conflict over what the right thing to do was. Willow simply acted, without hesitation, without compunction. Without even pausing, the redhead reached inside of her, tapping the ever present thread of power running through her very being that had, until this very moment, made resisting the magic's sultry call so difficult.
Once again, power coursed through her veins, almost as heady and seductive as Willow found Tara's presence. But the siren song of power had lost it's luster for Willow Rosenberg. Here and now, nothing mattered to the redhead beyond saving the woman who made her heart and soul sing with pure love and joy.
Even though her skills were rusty and atrophied from self-enforced disuse, Willow acted instinctively. She spoke no spell, wove no gestures in the air, performed no ritual. Instead, she poured every scrap of power she could muster into her will, and somehow thrust it between the helpless body of her beloved and the lightning that threatened Tara's life.
The lightning bolt shattered against the invisible wall that Willow wove in desperation, exploding in a shower of sparks that that hissed and spat as they inevitably died in the unpacked soil of the cave's floor. With that threat averted, Willow turned the attention of her suddenly black and menacing eyes upon the form of the cruel, sadistic son of a bitch who had dared to threaten Tara. Nameless simply stood there, arms hanging loose at his sides, his face a cold and inscrutable mask.
Willow screamed at him, a wordless cry of unreasoning fury, and struck. Reaching inside once more, the witch harnessed every scrap of hate, pain, fury, and most of all, fear. Fear of being alone once more, fear of losing Tara, fear of losing the light that her blonde goddess brought to both the world and Willow's own life, fear of what Willow herself might become. The redhead seized that churning maelstrom of emotion swirling within her, and hurled it directly at her foe.
That raging storm of power hit the warlock with a force unparalleled by anything in nature, and hurled him backwards and up like a leaf in the midst of a storm, and slammed him into the cave wall. The gristly sound of tender flesh impacting against unyielding stone, and bones snapping beneath brutal force, made Willow wince, even in her current condition.
A shower of blood sprayed from Nameless' lips as he lay pinned to the wall for a moment, before falling to the floor. Despite what Willow had expected to be a crushing blow, the warlock landed in a crouch and staggered to his feet. Ignoring the strings of tacky blood dripping from his mouth, Nameless laughed.
“There's the black-eyed girl I know and love!” he crowed triumphantly.
“You tried to murder Tara,” Willow growled flatly. “Allow me to return the favor.”
This time, it was Willow's turn for lightning to flare from her outstretched fingertips. The bolts of electricity she hurled were brighter than those she had used with limited success against the hellgod Glory, but they were still dwarfed by the raging intensity of that which Nameless had unleashed earlier.
Sneering contemptuously, Nameless batted aside Willow's attack with one bare hand, and Willow blinked in surprise. How'd he do that? she wondered enviously for a brief moment.
“If I tried to kill your precious Tara, little witch,” the warlock rasped, “You'd be picking chunks of her out of your hair.”
Willow's eyes and nostrils flared in sudden rage. “You sonofa ...”
She drew back one arm to hurl lightning once more at her tormentor, but Nameless wagged his index finger chidingly. “Not again, Willow.” A tiny bolt of incandescent light was flicked underarmed from the warlock's other hand, and Willow reeled backwards as it caught her full in the forehead.
Lurching back upright, Willow felt her forehead feverishly for any trace of a wound. Once her probing digits had finished their panicked inspection, and found no trace that Nameless' counterstrike had any effect on her whatsoever, Willow returned her attention to her opponent and tried again to attack.
Nothing happened. A sliver of panic slipped into one of the many cracks in the redhead's confidence as she reached out again to the magic she could still feel pulsing through her. Again nothing happened. The power was still there, Willow could feel it thrumming in time to her pulse. But every time that Willow tried to touch it, to tap into it, the redhead ran into a barrier, invisible and inviolate to her best efforts to penetrate it. She skittered across the barrier's surface like a cat scrabbling across the slick surface of an iced over lake, trying desperately to find a way through.
When she could not, she stared at Nameless as she balanced precariously upon the precipice of a pit filled with panic and fear. “What did you do to me?” she whispered.
Nameless' answering smile was faint, but utterly predatory in nature. “Nifty little trick, innit?” he announced gleefully, like a small child who'd succeeded in pulling off an intricate prank. “That little light show I hit you with? Not quite as harmless as it seemed, in point of fact. Basically, it rewired the electro-chemical balance of your brain in a minuscule, but oh so important way. To put it simply, I turned off the part of your brain that lets you use magic.”
Oh goddess. I've failed. I let Tara down. I used magic again, and it was for nothing. He's going to kill me. He's going to kill Tara!
Willow stared at Nameless with such an expression of shock and anguish that the warlock's own look of triumph faltered briefly. “Oh, don't be so worried. The effects are temporary,” he muttered with a sullen shrug.
“Why?” Willow breathed painfully. “Why are you doing this to us?”
“Because I need you alive, little witch,” Nameless replied quietly. “I need you alive, and a Willow Rosenberg who uses magic is infinitely better at defending herself than a Willow Rosenberg without magic.”
Willow stared wide-eyed at the warlock, with a face like she had just seen Xander run over Miss Kitty Fantastico in front of her. Repeatedly. With a steamroller.
“You want me to be able to protect myself better? And to do that, you try and kill Tara? Are you insane?”
Nameless scowled and limped towards her, ignoring Willow's inadvertent yelp and backwards jump. Grabbing the startled redhead by the scruff of her neck, he forcibly pointed Willow in Tara's direction.
“Is she dead?” he demanded.
“No ...” Willow mumbled cautiously.
“Then I didn't try to kill her!” he snarled. With blood still staining his teeth, it wasn't a pretty sight. “When I try to kill someone, you'll know it, little witch.”
“You threw lightning at her!” Willow exclaimed incredulously. “What was that supposed to do? Make her hair stand on end?”
Nameless leaned in close so that he could rasp directly into the redhead's ear. “No, I didn't.” Raising one arm, the warlock gestured imperiously in Tara's direction, and as Willow gaped in amazement, the image of the blonde faded into thin air. “I threw lightning at an illusion.”
“You ... you ...”
“I played you, little witch. I knew exactly what buttons to press to get you to do exactly what I wanted you to. I know your strengths. I know your weaknesses. I know what it is you desire, I know your innermost secrets. I. Know. You.”
Willow shook her head in vehement denial. “You don't know the first thing about me! Now ...”
His grip still firm about her neck, Nameless turned Willow once more so that she faced the nearest section of cave wall. A second wave, and the section of wall in front of them vanished into nothingness, revealing a small alcove. Neatly arranged upon the floor, with her hands crossed across her chest below the swell of her breasts, lay Tara.
Willow's heart ached at the sight of her beloved, after what felt like an eternity away from her side. “What did you do ...” she started to blurt before Nameless clamped his free hand over her mouth in annoyance.
“Didn't we do this dance already, Willow?” he grumbled sourly. “She's just asleep. Now, how about we do this the old fashioned way, huh?”
Since she couldn't move her head or speak, Willow had to settle for rolling her eyes and signaling her confusion by means of a complicated series of blinks. Nameless just grinned, and nodded in Tara's direction.
“Now go wake your princess with a kiss,” he suggested, and shoved Willow in the necessary direction. Stumbling forward a few steps, Willow regained her balance and shot a suspicious glance back at Nameless. The warlock bowed with an elaborate flourish, despite never taking his eyes off Willow, and obligingly retreated to the far wall of the cave.
Once he was far enough away, Willow succumbed to her temptation and rushed to Tara's side. Dropping to her knees, Willow hovered over the body of her partner, one hand frozen in midair above Tara's face. She hesitated, almost unwilling to touch her lover for fear that Tara wouldn't be real, that this would be just another cruel deception.
But in the end, the call of physical touch proved too much for her fears, and Willow bent to gently brush her lips against Tara's own. The kiss was chaste and gentle, the barest touch of lip against lip. Then Tara began to kiss her back, and Nameless, the cave, the vampire attack, all of it vanished. The only thing in the world for Willow was the swell and movement of Tara's lips against her own.
Willow felt Tara's mouth open, and the blonde's tongue brush against her lips in a wordless request for entry. Willow was only too happy to comply, and was opening her mouth when Nameless' harsh voice shattered her euphoric state.
“Before you two start exploring each others lungs with your tongues, might we conclude our business together?”
Willow's eyes flared open as the full import of her situation slammed back into her consciousness, and she found herself staring into Tara's equally startled gaze. Reluctantly, Willow slowly drew away, and despite the circumstances in which she found herself, she smiled warmly at her lover.
“Hi,” she whispered, as Tara smiled back.
“Hi yourself,” Tara whispered in reply.
“Wow,” interjected Nameless snidely. “You know, you two are just ... so damn cute together that I may well be physically sick.”
Willow scrambled indignantly to her feet, glaring angrily at the warlock, even as she admired the quiet grace with which Tara returned to a standing position. Holding out her hand, Willow instantly felt better when Tara took it firmly with one of her own. Together, hand in hand, the two witches stepped forward to confront Nameless, who greeted them with a crooked grin. Willow felt Tara's hand tighten upon her own, and realized that the blonde was also seeing disturbing shades of her own facial expressions in the warlock.
“You know, if I didn't already know that I'd put the whammy on your mojo, I might think you two were thinking of throwing down the gauntlet,” Nameless observed blasély.
Willow puffed up with pride and bravado. “Got you worried, huh?” she crowed. “You should be. Me and Tara, together? We are going to kick ... your ... ass.”
Nameless' only reaction was to burst out laughing, and Willow visibly wilted before fixing him with a self-righteous glare.
“What's so funny?” she demanded. “You think we couldn't do it? I wasn't the one getting bounced off the walls a few minutes ago!”
Nameless bit off his laughter with a savage snap of his blood stained teeth, like a wolf tearing flesh from the corpse of a fallen victim. Leaping forward as if pouncing upon prey, Nameless sneered at the two witches in apparent contempt as they jumped at his sudden movement.
“You think that is anywhere near sufficient to stop me, little witch?” he growled. Then his voice raised to a deafening roar as he tore open the plain button-up shirt he wore. “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I AM ANY STRANGER TO PAIN!”
Both Willow and Tara gasped at what was revealed. Every last square inch of visible skin from the neck down was covered in scars, burn marks, tattoos and brands. No scrap of Nameless' flesh had appeared to have escaped the touch of violence. His entire body was a road map of violence, hardship and agony.
“Goddess,” Tara whispered painfully, and Willow knew that evidence of such suffering tugged at the heartstrings of her partner's gentle nature. Willow herself felt a similar pity, but it was still contaminated by her anger at Nameless' treatment of the both of them, so she gritted her teeth and steeled her heart against her innate compassion.
“Whatever it is that you're trying to do, Nameless, we will stop you,” Willow fervently declared, and the warlock fixed both women with a baleful eye.
“The only way to stop me, little witches, is to kill me,” he rasped, his earlier incandescent fury vanishing once more behind a cold mask. “And that is not an easy task to accomplish.”
“Then we'll find another way,” Tara countered quietly. “We don't kill humans.”
“I do.”
Nameless' statement reverberated from the caves stone walls, hanging in the air like an oppressive fog. Suddenly whirling about, the tail of his trench coat swinging out dramatically, Nameless pointed at the far end of the cave. A shimmering ripple in the air signaled the demise of yet another illusion, this time revealing a large, roughly rectangular, flat topped rock. It bore a large number of disturbing, rust colored stains upon it, and Willow knew with absolute certainty that she wasn't going to like what Nameless was about to reveal.
“In point of fact,” Nameless continued in his disconcerting rasp of a voice, “I killed someone right there.”
Nameless turned back to face the two witches with a beatific smile, gesturing at the rough alter as if he was presenting a prize upon a deranged and macabre game show.
“I spent my first week in Sunnydale, torturing Warren Mears to death,” he recounted as if recalling a pleasant memory. “It ... was not an easy passing, but it was so much less than what I desired to do to him. But alas, time waits for no man nor beast, so I had to cut my play short.”
“So you did kill Warren,” Tara confirmed shakily, and Nameless inclined his head in a kind of solemn, murderous glee.
“He was my masterpiece. I turned the useless wretch into a symphony of suffering, an opera of agony.” Nameless half closed his eyes, tilting his head back as if listening to something only he could hear. “Even now, I can still hear his screams. They were like ... a fine wine to me, thick and rich.”
“Great, you're a murdering freak,” blurted Willow, hoping to stop the warlock from going into more a detailed description. “What do you want from us? Congratulations?”
“How about a thank you?”
As Willow once more gaped open-mouthed at the warlock, Tara noticed the tension in her lover's posture, and knew that the redhead was on the verge of exploding. Figuring that adding Willow's temper to the already strained atmosphere wouldn't help, Tara slipped closer to her lover, and started rubbing her thumb along the surface of Willow's hand in the hope that closer physical contact would soothe the almost vibrating redhead.
Tara's ploy seemed to work, for Willow turned to her with an apologetic smile, and subtly pressed for Tara's cooler head to take point in their confrontation. Despite her insecure reservations about her suitability for such a task, Willow's obvious belief in her allowed Tara to do so.
“What are we s... supposed to thank you for, Nameless?” Tara asked, silently cursing the reappearance of her stutter.
“Your life,” he replied bluntly, and Tara felt Willow stiffen beside her.
“What, you expect us to thank you for not killing us?” Willow asked in infuriated disbelief, but Nameless just shook his head and sighed.
“Tara Maclay,” began the warlock as if lecturing an especially stupid student. “Born October the 16th, 1980. Died ... May the 7th, 2002.” Willow shook her head in denial, even as a palpable sense of physical dread settled upon her. But Nameless did not stop; he continued on, relentlessly, every word cutting like a knife. “Shot through the heart from behind by a stray bullet. A bullet fired by one Warren Mears, in his attempt to murder Buffy Summers. The little wretch wasn't even looking when he killed her. He lacked even the decency to realize that he had snuffed out her life.”
“T... that's not t... true,” Tara stammered in denial. “That d... didn't h.. happen.”
Nameless cocked his head, and studied the discomforted features of both women with a small, sly and mysterious smile. “No, it didn't. Because I stopped it from happening.”
“You can't claim that!” Willow objected vociferously, taking a set forward and slightly in front of Tara as if to protect the blonde. “What do you think you are, some kind of seer?”
“Something like that,” the warlock replied quietly, leaning forward as if to share a secret. “Didn't ol' Ripper return to suburban splendor of Sunnydale expecting to find you dead? Who did you think had upset fate's design?”
Tara was white-faced and nauseous as the full import of Nameless' words settled upon her suddenly burdened shoulders. “You ...” she began, but had no idea of how to finish.
“Think upon it, my little witches. You owe Tara's life, and any future happiness you might share ... to me.” With that final statement, the warlock straightened and beamed as benevolently as if he were Santa Claus. A Santa Claus who was thin to the point of emaciation, disfigured, homicidal, and down-right scary.
“Well, now that little revelation is out of the way, I think it's probably time I sent you two lovebirds home, don't you?” he cheerfully stated. “I imagine your friends are starting to fret by now, and we wouldn't want them to do something stupider than usual, now would we?”
With that, Nameless raised a cupped hand and blew the powder concealed there at the startled lovers. His breath increased exponentially as it carried the strangely glittering powder, until by the time it reached Willow and Tara it seemed as strong as a hurricane, and yet it was utterly silent.
The arcane winds seemed to bend reality, stretching and twisting the visual spectrum until it was distorted beyond recognition. Somehow frozen in place, neither witch could do anything beyond stand there and watch wide-eyed, still hand in hand, as the winds grew stronger still and they too began to rotate.
Nameless' voice somehow trickled through the winds. “Fare thee well, ladies. We will meet again.”
Then Willow and Tara were gone, as if they had never been there. Nameless sagged to his knees and fell forward onto his hands, retching fiercely and coughing up blood. Once the fit had passed, he gingerly rocked backwards onto his haunches, and probed carefully at his lower back.
“I think the little minx cracked three of my ribs,” he muttered to himself. “I see she's still one heck of a firecracker when she gets her gander up.” Then he started to a dry laugh that swiftly turned hysterical. Before long, anyone who would have heard him would have been unsure if Nameless was laughing, or weeping.
To be continued.
That’s right: In order to make this event LESS popular, the female activists take off their tops and jog in front of onlookers. - Scott Adams, regarding the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.
. If it was indeed the Sarge who was carrying the fake child, he must have had a reason to stun Buffy. At that close-range the effects would be shattered ear-drums and optical nerve damage, flashbangs are NOT harmless at such close-range (i.e. don't try this at home;-)
.
) I know that there were a few questions....but because it's 3:30am... I just can't reemmber it.... 
it might be that your parent pissed you off so much that you blame them for everything they've done to you in your life (especially that crazy thing they did that actually....you know...brought you to life) or it might be that your (well his) parent was so pissed off at Willow that it made his life a living hell... I don't know.... 
So happy for the update.I mean I liike it so much.
...
