Part Four  
Joan slept until well after 9 a.m.; then quietly dressed and, after leaving a light kiss on Randy’s sleepy face, she left the apartment and headed for the Magic Box. She paused on the way there to buy herself a frothy cup of caffeine, biting her lip as she calculated how low their funds were getting.  Randy had found several hundred dollars in his pockets, and since they’d had no idea where it had come from, they decided to assume he’d just cashed a paycheck.  That neither of them had any idea what sort of job a vampire might be holding down, nor whether Joan had a job (from which she’d no doubt been fired by now) she occasionally worried about whose money they were spending.  But she didn’t worry about enough to not spend it.  Memory or no memory, a girl had to eat – and have more than one outfit to wear.
 
Pushing open the door of the magic shop, she glanced around it for some sign that important events had happened there, but nothing seemed any more familiar than it had when she’d first woken up on the floor. She shrugged and called out for the older man they had all come to depend upon for guidance.
 
“Giles? Are you here?”
 
His voice drifted down from the book loft.  “I’m here, Joan… er… Buffy. I’ll be right down.”  He descended the ladder and looked at her curiously. “You’re out and about earlier than normal; is everything all right?”
 
“You’d better fix yourself a cup of tea and have a seat,” Joan said with wry grin. “I think ‘all right’ kinda left the building with our memories.”
 
He raised his eyebrows, but followed her advice, pouring himself a nice mug of strong tea from the ever-present teapot and then settling into a chair across the table from where she sat, toying with her coffee.
 
“Okay, here’s the sitch….” In as much detail as she could remember, she filled him in on what they’d learned from Dawn’s diaries.  His face paled visibly as she told him what they’d learned about the previous couple of years – and the past few months of this one.  Other than the occasional “Dear Lord” and getting up to pour himself a glass of something much stronger than tea, he didn’t interrupt until she paused and sank back in her chair. 
 
“So, that’s what we know.  Maybe Willow is a much stronger witch than she knows right now; Randy—Spike has been helping us for a long time and took care of Dawn while I was….” She raised her eyes to his; the haunted expression in them caused him to reach across the table and cover her hand with his.  “Dead. I was dead, Giles.  They brought me back from being dead.  From Heaven!  Who does that to a friend?”
 
“Someone very powerful, and very inexperienced in—” He shook himself. “You… we are all very fortunate that you seem to have come back … intact.”
 
Joan looked down at herself and frowned. “Intact?  You expected parts of me to be missing?”
 
“I meant,” he said gently, “that you seem to have come back complete with your soul.  That’s why you remember… remembered being… wherever you were. Your soul came back with you.  I suspect that does not always occur in resurrection situations…” He got up and went back up into the loft, returning quickly with two books and a frown.  “I found these two books on resurrection spells and their consequences.  There was an empty spot next to them.” He frowned. “I wonder if….”
 
“If Willow has the missing book?”  Joan’s expression indicated she would be happy to shake the witch until her teeth rattled or the book fell out, whichever he wanted.
 
“How have Dawn and… Randy… taken this news?”
 
“Better than I did,” she said with a sigh.  “Randy said he doesn’t need his memories to know that it took some serious dark magic to do something like that, and Dawn’s just pissed off that she wasn’t allowed in on it.”
 
“So, neither of them was involved? Are you sure?”
 
“Not according to Dawn’s diary. You’ll have to ask her for more details, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention past ‘you were dead, and then four months later you weren’t dead anymore’.”  She took a deep breath. “It sounds like I wasn’t very happy about being back. She didn’t tell me any details, but she said I was acting all weird and spending a lot of time with Spi—Randy. She was mad that he wasn’t taking care of her anymore after I came back.”
 
“Randy took care of Dawn?”
 
Joan shrugged. “I guess so. They didn’t tell me much about it.”
 
“Dear Lord.”
 
“You said that already.”
 
“And no doubt will do so again.”  He sighed and patted her hand again. “My dear, I can only imagine how you must have been feeling.  It’s no wonder you took up with a vampire.”
 
Joan chose to ignore his assumption that she wouldn’t have been dating Randy if she hadn’t died, and focused on the first part of his remarks.
 
“Do you think…” She wrinkled her brow and bit her lip.  “Did I do this? Was I so unhappy about being back that I tried to lose my memory so I’d be happier?”
 
He shook his head. “I quite doubt it. Although without knowing more about you, I have no idea if you have any latent magic talents. I suspect it would be more likely to be Randy or Dawn in an attempt to make you happier by causing you to forget where you’d been.  Clearly, whatever the original intent, it has gone very wrong for all of us.”
 
Saying that he needed to spend the day researching all he could about resurrections and memory spells, he shooed her out the door with instructions to bring everyone back that evening.  Joan didn’t argue, just nodded and walked out the door, turning toward her “home” on Revello Drive rather than back to the apartment.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
By the time they had all arrived that evening, Giles had a small stack of books beside his place at the table, all with bookmarks protruding from the passages he might want to consult.  He watched with narrowed eyes as Willow gave a small start at seeing which books were on the top of the stack.  Tara looked at the titles with curiosity, but gave no sign that she recognized them.  Alex, wearing the letter jacket that Willow had long since returned to him with a stammered explanation that she was sure she’d only been wearing it to stay warm, stood around uncomfortably while everyone sorted out where to sit.
 
Joan, Randy and Dawn pulled up three chairs and sat by themselves a small distance from everyone else, the vampire between the two girls. Willow and Tara sat together across from Giles, who had a vacant seat near him. Anya leaned down to kiss the top of his head, saying, “I’ll be at the cash register. Just let me know when it’s time to sit down.”
 
He gave her a tight smile and nodded, still not sure how he was going to tell her that not only were they not engaged to be married, but she was, apparently, involved with the man she blithely referred to as “that boy that hangs around Willow.”
 
When everyone had settled in, and Giles had gently removed Anya’s hand from his thigh, he said without preamble, “Dawn has found her journals covering the past several years. In the interest of preserving her privacy, we will not be passing them around; we will, however, be quoting from them quite liberally as needed.  There are some important things that we need to know, both about our own relationships….” He cast an eye to his side where Anya’s pout over his having moved her hand was turning to narrowed eyes and a suspicious glare. “…and about Joan’s… situation.”
 
He turned to the small group huddled away from the table saying, “Which of you would care to go first?”  Dawn leaned against Randy’s shoulder, ignoring the looks on the faces of the rest of the group.  She glanced over at Joan, who was leaning on the other shoulder and staring around the table with eyes that contained no warmth.
 
“Okay. Guess it’s me,” she said, sitting up straighter and taking a deep breath. “I didn’t exist—as me—until just over a year ago.” She hurried on past the “What?” “How?” questions.  “I was something called “the Key”, a kind of ancient energy that could open dimensions—”
 
She paused to glare when Willow sat up with sudden interest. Tara’s gentle hand on Willow’s arm stopped her from asking more about Dawn’s ability to open dimensions, and she subsided with poorly disguised impatience.
 
“As I was saying,” Dawn continued, “I was this Key thing and I was put into this body, which has something to do with being made from Buffy—I dunno, and sent to the Slayer to be protected from a Hellgod who wanted to use me to open the gate to her home dimension. Don’t ask me how the monks did that, or how they put me into everybody’s memories, they just did.”
 
“So, you’re not… not real?” Alex looked as confused as everyone else. Randy’s snarl as he put an arm around Dawn’s shoulders, and Joan’s icy glare made it very clear he should not follow that line of thought.
 
Dawn seemed unsure how to respond, so Joan cleared her throat and stood up.  “Okay. Long story short: Dawn is my sister, doesn’t matter how she got here, she’s mine to love and take care of. Hence, fighting a Hellgod to keep her safe.  Randy–Spike helped me do it because he....” She visibly stumbled for some way to say why the vampire had chosen to join their fight.
 
“Because I apparently have a soft spot for the Summers women, and I fell in love with one of them.”
 
“Yeah, that. For an evil, unsoulled vamp, it turns out he’s pretty much a pussycat.”
 
She ignored the growl from Randy and Dawn’s whispered, “She’s right, you know. You should see my diary from when I first met you.”
 
“Anyway, there was this whole Hellgod, alter ego Doctor, medieval knights trying to kill Dawn, apocalypsy kinda thing and…” She stared around the room, clutching the supporting hand Randy extended to her.  “And I died.  We don’t know how or why—”
 
“Savin’ the bloody world,” Randy growled. “Is there any doubt?”
 
Joan waited for the babble to subside, then held up her hand for silence. “That’s not really the biggie. Slayers die. I’ve read enough of Giles’ books about them to know that. I was probably past my expiration date anyway.  Here’s the big stuff….” She waited again while they murmured about how impossible it was that she was dead and so on.
 
“Got to say, Joan–Buffy, you look pretty healthy to me. And you’re a lot prettier than the other corpse in this room.”
 
“Yeah. About that… I’m not dead anymore.  It seems like someone…” Her eyes involuntarily shifted to Willow, who shrank into her chair and away from Tara who gasped.  “Someone, brought me back to life. Pulled me right out of Heaven, according to what I sang.”
 
“Sang?” 
 
Joan waved her hand dismissively. “Not important. The point is, I’d been in Heaven – or my soul was, anyway. My body was in a grave and I had to dig my way out when my soul got yanked back into my body.  So,” she said, gazing around the table, “I was really, really unhappy about being back in my crappy life, and we don’t know if that has anything to do with losing our memories or not.”  She frowned. “I don’t think I’d have known how to do a forgetting spell, but maybe I did.”
 
“Maybe the evil undead thing that had the hots for you brought you back from the grave and then did a spell to make you forget he’d done it so you would go out with him.”  Alex looked more than satisfied with his explanation, especially when Willow chimed in with, “I’ll bet that’s what happened! It’s all Randy’s fault!”
 
Joan’s glare brought the speculation to an abrupt halt. “We already know that isn’t true.  Dawn’s diaries are pretty clear on what Ran—Spike did while I was… gone.  He kept a promise he’d made to me to keep Dawn safe, and he stayed with her the whole time. He helped you guys patrol, and he and Dawn were the only ones… well, and Giles, but he was in England…  Anyway, he and Dawn were the only ones who didn’t seem to know anything about the plan to resurrect me.  And he was the only one I wanted to be around when I came back. He didn’t need to make me forget about anything. I wanted to be with him.”
 
Giles let the full import of Joan’s revelations sink in for a few minutes, then broke into the shocked silence, and tapped the pile of books at his side. “There seems to be a volume missing from this series on resurrections. I don’t suppose any of you might have seen it around…?”
 
Willow shrank back even more, while Tara said softly, “We have it on a shelf in our room. I wondered where it came from.”
 
“I should like it returned to me, if you don’t mind,” Giles said stiffly. “I intend to do some deep research in order to help Joan–Buffy adjust if and when she gets her memory back, and to understand how it was done in case that had any impact on our memory losses. It’s possible the answer to this dilemma lies within that book and the side effects of using that sort of dark magic.”
 
“I’m sure there’s no connection,” Willow said meekly. “But I’ll get it back to you right away.  Let’s go, Tara. We’ll run home and grab the book and be right back. Alex, can you drive us?”
 
“Sure,” he agreed, standing up and swinging his jacket around to put it on. There was a slight thump as something fell from the pocket and rolled across the floor. “Oops! I forgot that thing was in there.” He picked it up and held it out to Willow. “I guess it’s yours. I found it in there when you gave the coat back. Looks like witchy stuff to me.”
 
They all stared at the crystal in his outstretched hand. Anya was the first to find her voice. “We have those here in the shop. They’re often used in memory spells…”
 
“It’s not mine,” Willow said in a small voice. “I don’t remember it.”
 
Dawn’s “Duh!” was acknowledged with snorts of agreement from almost everyone. Only Tara tried to stand up for Willow.
 
“I know Willow would never do anything like that.  She would never use the kind of magics it takes to bring a dead person back to life, or mess with our minds by making us forget who we are.  She just wouldn’t. It has to be someone else. Someone evil…”
 
All eyes turned to Randy, who snarled back even as Dawn and Joan moved closer to him.  Giles had been thumbing through the diaries Dawn had brought with her, pausing at the pages she’d dogeared for him.  He shook his head as he closed them and handed them back to her.
 
“I disagree. It is quite plain, even allowing for a certain amount of hero-worshipping on Dawn’s part, that Spike had nothing to do with either bringing Buffy back, or with causing her to lose her memory. If anything, I would have expected him to want her to remain grateful for his company and to remember his assistance before she died.”  He looked around the table and took a deep breath.
“There was more,” he said. “We seem to have misinterpreted some of the other relationships that existed before.” His eyes shifted to Anya and from her to Alex.
 
“You,” he said, pointing to the boy who was still holding the crystal, “are actually known as Xander, and you apparently are in a relationship with… “ He gazed wistfully at Anya, who was already shaking her head no.  “…with Anya. I am apparently her employer, not her fiancé.” He waited, his head bowed and his expression sad for those words to sink in. There were gasps all around the room as they understood what he was saying. Anya ran back into the stock room and slammed the door, leaving Giles with his eyes squeezed shut and Xander in confused anger.
 
“You’ve been… with my girl?” 
 
Dawn spoke to Willow. “You and Tara were together, but you fight sometimes about magic and how much you use it.”
 
“And Joan and Randy?”  Willow’s voice was bitter, although she clutched Tara’s hand tightly.
 
They all shrugged almost in unison, before Dawn spoke. “He’s been in love with her for a long time, and she was already spending a lot of time with him before the spell, so I think they’re a couple.  It’s probably why they fell in love so fast – they were already in love, they just didn’t remember that they were.” Dawn beamed, proud of her assessment of the situation.
 
Behind them, Xander, who had not received a satisfactory answer from Giles, other than a soft, “I’m sorry. I thought we were engaged. That we were in love.” stood up and glared.
 
“She was in love with me!” Whirling around, Xander threw the crystal he was still holding against the wall, where it hit a granite sconce and shattered into hundreds of small pieces, each one catching the light and sparkling on its way to the floor. 
 
Giles was the first to recover both his senses and his voice. “Oh, Dear Lord,” he breathed, staring around the room at the shocked faces.  Before anyone else could speak, Anya burst out of the back room and stomped up to Willow. “You are an idiot!” she yelled. “If I ever get my powers back…” She turned around and ran back to the stockroom. Xander made a slight movement in her direction, then saw Giles staring at him with regret and pity on his face. Without speaking to anyone, he left the shop, letting the door slam shut behind him.
 
“Oops?” Dawn appeared more entertained than concerned as she watched the adults in the room coping with the events of the past few weeks, as well as absorbing all the memories of what had come before.  Then she glanced at Buffy and Spike and her face fell.
 
Spike had moved away from them and was standing against the wall, his hands shoved down into his pockets, his shoulders hunched.
 
Buffy was staring at the table, afraid to look anyone in the eye.  Only Tara, who had also stood up and moved away from Willow, bothered to send a sympathetic smile to Buffy.
 
But Tara’s attention was soon back on her girlfriend who was trying to explain without actually admitting that she’d done the spell. “I just wanted you to forget that you were mad at me,” she protested, looking around the room for support that was not forthcoming. Going on the attack, she glared at Spike.
 
“You took advantage of Buffy!  She should stake you now.”
 
“Shut up, Willow,” Buffy said, still staring at the table. “He didn’t know either. I’m not staking anybody.”
 
Spike stared at her bowed head for long minutes, then sighed and turned away. He walked to the door and left the building, never noticing the quick glance she sent after him, or the way she started to get out of her seat, only to sit back, drop her head against the back of the chair, and shut her eyes.  Dawn moved closer to her and whispered in her ear, getting nothing but a headshake in reply.
 
There was silence in the room for several minutes, Tara staring at Willow with a combination of determination and grief.  “I’ll just get my things,” she said, holding up a hand when Willow tried to protest. “No, don’t even try. This is so much worse than what you did before.”
 
“I didn’t mean to—”
 
Giles interrupted her. “You didn’t mean to rob us all of our memories,” he said flatly. “Just the woman you claim to love. We understand that, Willow. Unfortunately, we all now have to live with the consequences of your very selfish action. You’ll forgive me if I can’t be properly sympathetic.”
 
He stood up and turned to Buffy, his mouth open but no words coming out. “We’ll talk later,” he finally said.
 
“Are you still leaving?” Buffy’s voice was flat and expressionless, as was her face. All the animation and contentment that had been part of Joan’s persona had vanished.
 
“I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I will have to think about this in some depth. Clearly things are not as under control here as I had thought they were.” No one asked which things he thought were not under control.