Willow opened her eyes to total and complete darkness. She lay as still as she could, breathing shallowly, staring blindly as she stretched out all her senses into the lightless space around her. Beneath her was a hard surface--stone, she guessed, or packed earth. The air around her was cool, musky, damp, and she could hear the distant trickling of water. A cave, maybe. She spread the fingers of her right hand gingerly, then moved her arm inch by inch to her throat. It was still sticky with blood, and she bit back a gasp of pain as she touched the jagged edges of the barely-closed wound. The spell that sustained her life was holding. Only just, but holding. She smiled a little and closed her eyes, allowing herself to drift a little. She was still alive.

Suddenly she heard a sound quite near her: a skittering, as of chitinous feet. But it was too big, too heavy, surely, to be an insect? She froze, and could not hold back a moan as pain wracked her body. The sound stopped. Willow held her breath, counting the thundering beat of her racing heart. At two hundred thirty-seven, the sound repeated itself, closer. At four hundred forty-three, she put its steady advance right at her stomach. Four hundred forty-four. She tried to stave off panic. Four hundred forty-five, four hundred forty-six. Something soft and feathery brushed against her arm, and she could keep the terror back no longer. The air around her burst into incandescent light, and the two cockroaches looming over her, their frantic mandibles bent to the blood around her stomach, instantly scurried away. Willow retched helplessly as the light faded to leave her blind once more.

"Oh goddess," she whispered, though she had long ago renounced any belief in the divine. The skittering started again, and she screamed and instinctively sent fire arcing away from her in great scarlet and gold curtains, crying as the torrent of magic rushed through the scarred channels of her mind and set them aflame. When unconsciousness swooped down on her once more, she welcomed it with relief.

William Pratt, 4th Viscount of Wincott, awoke from a most unusual dream to the sound of arguing. He was lying on the hardest, lumpiest bed he had ever had the misfortune to encounter, and he had the uncomfortable impression that he had gone to sleep in his necktie and riding boots. Whatever had possessed him to do so? Edith would certainly give him her most reproachful look when she came up to straighten his room, and if his mother should hear of it, she'd...

A woman's voice shouting quite close to his ear saved him from his mother's imagined reproofs. "And just what is a 'manage a trot' supposed to be, anyway?" He winced.

"You hit me without even knowing what it means?" a man's incredulous voice retorted at precisely the same volume. He groaned softly. His head was beginning to throb, and tiny pricks of pain stabbed into his neck when he tried to move.

"Right, like I'm supposed to know every stupid demon language in existence? Knowing you, you were probably talking about some sort of virgin sacrifice!"

"It's French," William supplied helpfully without opening his eyes. "It means 'household of three.'" He was beginning to suspect that it would be more pleasant to stay asleep, strange as his dreams may be. That impression might have been aided by the fact that he was also beginning to suspect that they were talking about him.

They ignored him. "Oh, I was talking about a virgin sacrifice all right," the man's voice practically purred. There was a pause. "Hey, what do you mean 'virgin'?"

"Dorky hair, round glasses, last year's jacket. You do the math."

"You don't even know when 'last year' was!" the man scoffed.

"10,000 BC?" the woman responded sweetly.

The man sputtered. "I'll have you know people call me 'my lord' around here! I can have anyone I wanted!"

"Oh, I'm sure you could," the woman snickered, the condescension dripping from her voice, "'my lord.'"

Someone kicked his foot. "Stop lying about all day and defend your own honor, you prat!" the man's voice said.

"You mean he was awake?" said the woman, sounding horrified.

He opened his eyes to see the angel from his dream peering anxiously down at him. "Um, William...?" she smiled nervously. "Just so you know, I wasn't talking about you, okay?" She tugged helpfully on his wrist as he tried to sit up, and he grimaced as she nearly jerked his arm out of its socket. "I mean, your hair is very...curly and the glasses are cute and the jacket looks a bit outdated--but it's supposed to, right? I am in the past, after all, so you're outdated by definition. Or am I in-dated? Post-dated?"

Odd. His dreams were usually soft shapeless things, never this vivid, never tangible enough to make him question the boundary between them and reality. What, indeed, if this wasn't a dream? The continued uncomfortable prickling in his neck would seem to support that theory. Perhaps she wasn't an angel after all, just a lovely stranger who had somehow lost her way and wandered onto his path. Who might now require his assistance to find her way home. He found himself hoping that she would.

"Anyway," she was saying, "I'm sure you're a nice lord and a great guy and all--totally unlike that jerk over there, even if he is your post-dated self."

He looked over at 'that jerk over there,' bracing himself for the sight of that hideously deformed face. Instead, he saw... His vision swam.

"Woah!" Quick hands caught him as he tilted. They righted him and began rubbing his back. "Breathe. Just breathe. Don't faint on me again, okay?"

He nodded, hanging his head, feeling as if all the strength had left his body and mortified beyond expression to display such weakness in front of a lady.

"Leave him alone, Slayer," growled the demon--the evil creature who wore his face. "He's a milk-fed nancy boy! The dickless son of a whore never lived until he died. But my Full-Blooded Peach will fix him. Oh, just you wa--"

The next thing William knew, he was on his feet, the pointed piece of wood he had seen the woman drop earlier in his left hand, his right clenched in the demon's collar. "Take that back, you vile thing!" he spat. "I will allow no one to speak about my mother that way, certainly not filth like you!"

The explosion stunned both Spike and Buffy, and for a moment silence returned to the little stretch of country road, stirred only by the sound of William's panting breaths. Buffy saw an odd expression flash through Spike's eyes--in anyone else she might have said they looked stricken. She shook her head a little and walked up to the pair, moving as slowly and carefully as if she were approaching a wild creature.

"Look, William," she said calmly, not touching him. "If you're going to stake him, I'll be the first in line to do a cheer. But there are a few things you need to know about vampires, okay? Take it from a professional: vampires are hard to kill. You have to be focused, and you can't hesitate, because you probably won't get a second chance. To kill a vampire, you have to get him right here." She pointed to Spike's heart.

"Slayer..." Spike gritted out.

She ignored him. "The other thing you should know? Vampires don't have consciences. They'll crash your parent-teacher night and spill all your lemonade, kidnap your best friend, and insult your mother just to put you off your guard. That's because they don't have souls. The demon kills the person inside and steals their body. So a vampire may look like you and sound like you and have all your memories, but it's still just a demon inside the shell. The demon's pretty strong, though, so it's usually a good idea to leave them to people with 'the Vampire Slayer' attached to their names." She closed a gentle hand over William's, giving him a bright smile. "People like me."

William's shoulders slumped, and he allowed Buffy to take the stake away from him without protest. He released Spike's collar and turned away. Buffy gave Spike a warning look, and he held up both hands in the universal gesture of good will. She shot him a hard glare that told him she didn't believe in any good will whatsoever from him for a second, and he would be dust the instant he tried anything fishy. He rolled his eyes to let her know what he thought of her definition of fishiness, her threats, herself, and Slayers in general, and deliberately turned his back on them, feeling in his sticky pockets for his fags and lighter.

Buffy refrained from rolling her eyes back at him, instead taking one of William's shaking hands in hers and leading him to a seat at the base of a tree by the road. "Here, sit," she said softly, kneeling next to him. "I know it's a lot to take in..." He winced, and his hand went up to touch the wound in his neck. She batted it away. "Let me look at that." She tilted his head up and examined the tiny punctures critically. "It doesn't look too bad, and it's not bleeding anymore, but you should probably put some Betadine...er...antiseptic on it. Who knows where he's been?"

"I can hear you, Slayer!" Spike shouted from the other side of the road.

"Shut up, Spike!" Buffy shouted back.

"So he...I...he really is a-a vampire?" William asked haltingly.

"He is," Buffy nodded.

"Bloody right I am," Spike muttered, holding his lighter up to the equally bloody, half-crumbled cigarette in his mouth.

"And you..." William said, not looking at her. "You're not...a..."

"I'm not a...?" Buffy echoed, a little confused.

"An angel?" William finished shyly, darting a glance at her.

"An angel? Her?!" Spike interjected incredulously. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it dubiously, and tossed it away before reaching for another.

"Shut up, Spike!" Buffy said again, before smiling at William. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just a girl with a mandate from the Powers That Be to kick demon ass."

"So you...protect people from monsters," William ventured.

"Oh, spare me the boring sodding expositions!" Spike impatiently cut in again. "Everybody skips those during the re-runs." He pulled the second unlightable cigarette from his mouth and threw it to the ground with a snarl before stomping over. "Right, listen up then. About a year from now, you get your heart torn out by some vapid bint named Cecily, and then you get your throat torn out by a vampire named Drusilla. Turns out to be the best thing to ever happen to you. She takes your dull crawling life and shreds apart your cocoon--gives you wings to fly over the other wriggling worms and fangs to rip a great sodding red hole into the side of your new unlife. And what an unlife it is! For the next hundred years you cut a swath through Europe and America--no place barred to you, doing what you please, no master but pleasure--with your Black Goddess at your side. And, of course, along the way you take on a couple of Slayers (them's the girls Chosen to throw themselves into the teeth of the monsters for old men sitting around in their tweeds drinking tea)--" he shot a smirk at Buffy, who gave him a disgusted look. "--and you win. Oh, those were the nights. There might be a few fights between you and your Dark Princess--lighting each other on fire, that sort of thing--ordinary domestic disputes, nothing serious. Then there's Prague. And then there's her." He jerked his chin at Buffy, who raised an eyebrow back at him.

"California bird, Generation X, Y--maybe Z too, thinks she's the second coming of Joan of Arc, hell of a right hook but the worst taste in men in the history of the world. She slept with Angelus, can you imagine? Bet that was over in thirty seconds. Poof's the vampire who made Drusilla," he added at William's uncomprehending look. At Buffy's murderous one, he continued quickly, "Got her heart broken (no surprise there), made a pact with yours truly to save the world from her ex, sent him straight to Hell (would've stayed for the show if I'd known that was going to happen), got her heart broken again when he came back and left her (yeah, who would've seen that coming?), and here we are."

"Not that we know why we're here," Buffy added gloomily. Spike's recounting of her history--the part without all the asides--though humiliatingly bald, was also essentially true. It was depressing.

"Perhaps," William suggested, staring with wide eyes at something over their shoulders, "that is why."

Both of them whirled. Coming straight for them through the tangled undergrowth was a line--a stream--a flood of cockroaches the size of small cars, their agile mandibles wriggling, their long antennae waving madly.

"Bloody. Buggering. Hell," Spike swore vehemently.

For once, Buffy completely agreed with him.