"Cockroaches. Why'd it have to be cockroaches?" Buffy knew she was whining, but surely the super-sized dish of unfairness the universe had served her deserved some complaint. "I hate cockroaches. Give me giant Mayor snake demon anytime. I can't believe whoever-it-is pulled me back in time for giant bugs. Couldn't they have called on me for an apocalypse instead? Some end-of-the-world save-age? I do have three on my resume. I know I didn't put down 'special skills: exterminator: call for all your bug-eradication needs.'"

"Slayer," Spike said, his voice slightly strained at the edges as the roiling mass of insects approached at the rate of an avalanche tumbling down a mountain. Their eyes met. Fight or flight?

"If--" William croaked, cleared his throat urgently, and tried again: "If they continue on this path, they will destroy the town. We must warn them."

That decided it for Buffy. "You go," she ordered. "Spike, go with him. I'll take out as many of them here as I can."

"Bugger that," Spike growled. "'m not one of your little Scoobies. If I want to stay and pummel me some giant sodding bugs, then I'm stayin'."

"Why me?" Buffy sighed to no one in particular. Then, louder: "Fine, Spike, pummel away." To William, she said, "I can't let you go alone--there might be more of them out there, and they're moving faster than you can on foot. Stay behind us if you can. Run, take cover, climb a tree--your first priority is to keep yourself from getting hurt. Got that?" William nodded in automatic response to the absolute tone of command in her voice.

"And keep out of our way!" the vampire added without a look in his direction. He scowled and opened his mouth to respond, but thought better of it as the vibrations made by hundreds of clawed chitinous feet traveled through the ground beneath them to his soles and up his legs, and the air filled with a multitude of hisses and chirps. It was, in a word, terrifying.

He looked around quickly. The insect horde, if it continued on its present course, would clear the undergrowth, cut across the road, and swarm up the gentle slopes on the other side. Two farms, a mill, and the town lay directly in its path. The mill and farm hands typically went to bed early, and he hoped timber and stone would be enough to protect them, but the pub stayed open until the wee hours of the morning, and there was no telling who would be out in the streets. For the first time in his life he felt as if the title his father had passed to him signified something more than men tipping their hats to him out of mere convention and mothers bringing their daughters for tea from miles around...yet he was completely helpless. Dared he trust these strangers from a world he knew not of to save them all? What choice did he have?

"The Grimmal Mires!" he exclaimed as an idea occurred to him. "We can drive them into the bog!"

The Slayer's head spun toward him. "Which way?" she demanded.

"Northeast." He pointed out the direction, a sharp 45-degree angle between the road and the insects' current path.

The Vampire Slayer and the vampire exchanged another look and nodded at each other. And the pummeling began.

William could not think of any man--indeed, any mortal being--who could have stood before that hellish swarm and not quailed in terror and awe. And yet the tiny woman and his doppelgänger waited confidently--almost casually--for the first monstrous insects to reach them. When they finally moved, it was with a synchronized fluidity that mesmerized him. He caught his breath as they punched and whirled, ducked and leaped and kicked, keeping the entire first line of the swarm in check with savage grace and unflinching determination alone. He touched the wound at his neck. It was tingling, and his breaths came in short gasps. He felt light-headed and strange, feverish and chilled by turns. The fine hairs at the back of his neck stood on end, and his skin was covered with gooseflesh. Dear God, let me not disgrace myself again, he prayed.

Buffy cast a concerned glance at William as Spike kicked a flailing roach back, clearing a little space in front of them. He looked pale and shaken, his eyes a little glazed, but at least he was still on his feet, and he'd had the good sense to put an outcropping of rock between himself and the battle.

"You can't save him, you know," Spike said, catching the direction of her gaze before she turned and smacked a thick branch down on the carapace of two slow-moving, oddly singed-looking bugs. They went down and didn't get up again.

She refused to spare him even a glance. "I know that!" she gritted out, swinging the branch at another cockroach rushing them from behind.

"Not that ponce back there. Angel. Liam the prodigal son." Spike grunted as his fist went right through the huge black eyes of an insect which swerved too late to avoid him.

"What are you talking about, Spike?" Buffy kicked two into a tree, another into a rock.

"'s obvious, ain't it? Bet you've fantasized about it loads of times. 'Oh if only I could go back in time,'" Spike sing-songed in a high falsetto that Buffy was a hundred percent certain sounded nothing like her. "'Then I'd slay that bitch Darla before she ever laid a hand on my man, and we'll kiss to a crescendo of violins and flutes in a field of roses, and we'll spawn lots of little Angels'--oh wait, forgot a step--'we'll have lots of unsatisfying smelly shags' (hygiene wasn't really up to par back then, you know, and hell if Angelus ever was), 'spawn a horde of little Angels, and live happily ever after.' Or at least 'til your teeth fell out and the little beasties killed you in your sleep for their inheritance."

Buffy glared at Spike with absolute loathing. "Spike, there are no words in the English language that can possibly express how much you disgust me."

"Oh, come now, Slayer, that wasn't romantic enough for you?" Spike snickered. "Thought it was a right tear-jerker m'self. Bet they'd snatch it right up in Hollywood. 'Course, you'd be a perfectly devoted wife perfectly in love with your lout of a husband, so you'd look the other way when his gaze wandered, wouldn't you? Busty tavern wrenches were his whores of choice, if I recall--the lustier the better."

Buffy threw a decapitated roach head at him, its antennae still quivering forlornly. Spike ducked it easily. "Now, now, Slayer," he chuckled. "Just trying to help you to fill out your setting--wouldn't want your shaman to land you in the Stone Age, would you? Besides, what's love without a little drama to keep it spicy?"

Buffy clenched her teeth and punched a bug so hard it actually went splat against a tree. Didn't he ever shut up? And why was it that he, out of all people, could read her so well? You can't save him...

"You know, Spike," she said brightly, "I think I've finally figured it out. Somebody out there must hate you as much as I do, because they've come up with the perfect plan to make sure you never exist; if I can save William and keep him out of Drusilla's clutches, then poof: no more Spike. Painless and completely humane. Doesn't even require any dustage, unless Drusilla gets too pushy."

Buffy had never seen Spike move so fast: one moment he was three cockroaches away, the next they were skewered by a single long branch and his elbow was pressing her painfully against a tree.

"Leave. Him. Alone," he snarled at her, fangs inches from her face and all trace of mockery gone from his voice.

"Hah!" she smiled triumphantly. Then she gave him a curious look. "Really? You actually think he needs to be protected from me?"

He backed off quickly, scowling. "Just stay away from him. I don't want you messing with his mind before my Black Goddess gets to him." Bugs flew in all directions as he waded back into the middle of the oncoming flow.

Buffy stared at his back, a little thrown. What was all that about? "Mess with his mind? Me?" Had Spike actually believed her? More to the point, was it really possible for her to alter history? She thought back to the first time she'd seen Spike in the alley behind the Bronze. What would her life have been like if he had never existed? Could she have defeated Angelus if he had not offered to help her, or would she have died for a second and final time trying to save Giles and fight both Angelus and Drusilla? Then again, would Drusilla have been there at all if Spike had not brought her?

"Argh! This is insane!" She backpedaled frantically before the churning mandibles of a bug already missing its lower half before braining it with a rock. "One fight at a time," she muttered to herself.

She surveyed the battlefield. The ground around them was filled with dead and dying insects, but still the giant roaches kept coming. William had been right: they needed a better strategy before they were overrun. And his plan certainly sounded workable...if Spike would stop tossing bug parts in the wrong direction. She whacked him in the back of the head with a long piece of spiny foreleg and used it as pointer when he turned to glare at her. "That way."

In response, he picked her up, spiny foreleg and all, and drove her point-first into the chest of a hissing airborne insect leaping straight for them. She emerged from the hole in the twitching cockroach's trachea covered in gunk and quivering with fury. She took two steps toward Spike, fists clenching around the imaginary feel of her stake. Spike merely smirked and pointed behind her. "That way, Slayer. Think we've got 'em turned about."

That was the only reason he wasn't roach food, Buffy told herself as she spat things out of her mouth that she would pay Willow a month's allowance to wipe from her mind so she would never, ever have to recall them again. At least she'd stopped gagging from the smell, if only because her disgust reactors had been completely overwhelmed fifteen minutes, three headless still-walking torsos ago. She allowed herself a long exhalation as the insect swarm finally swerved away from the field of their dead in the direction William had indicated.

The rest, thankfully, was relatively easy. Clouds from the west flitted across the moon and cast moving patterns of shadow across the dark rolling earth, but they had more than enough light to see by as they herded the horde over a mile of increasingly wild moorland until they reached the mire, a vast expanse of bog filled with decaying vegetation and treacherous solid-looking ground that could suck an unwary traveler to the bottom of the foul waste in seconds. The giant cockroaches fared no better; they sank, legs churning helplessly, into the muck en mass. The few that attempted to fly back to safety, thin wings whirring desperately to keep their bulky bodies in the air, were knocked on the head and tossed back in by Buffy and Spike.

All three breathed ragged sighs of relief as the last stragglers disappeared from sight into the black murky waters. "That was the absolutely the grossest thing I have ever done," Buffy declared, wiping her face with her hands, then wiping her hands on her jeans and staunchly telling herself that it made her feel a little better, even if did nothing for the overall amount of insect guts covering her. "If I never see another cockroach, it'll be too so--"

William shoved her to the side just as something flashed overhead in her peripheral vision. "William!" she cried, off-balance, already knowing that she would not be able to get to him in time. A blur shot past her, and Spike spat out a pained curse as the flashing thing snapped down. The fickle light of the moon showed her glimpses of a glistening black-armored torso, huge nightmarish claws, four pairs of quick-moving legs, and a long curved and barbed tail waving high in the air. Spike was down on the ground next to William, clutching his shoulder, fresh black blood oozing out of a tear in his coat. Buffy jerked both of them back by the collars before the giant scorpion could strike again and stood facing it with arms akimbo.

"You guys just don't know when to quit, do you?" She leapt aside as the scorpion's tail snapped down at her, sinking into the soft earth with a whomp. She grabbed the tail and heaved, throwing the scorpion upside-down onto the ground next to her. "If I get wrinkles because I didn't have enough time to recover from my time-travel-lag, I am coming back--" she snapped off the tail at the mid-joint, "--and taking it out of your ass!" and drove it straight into the scorpion's head. It lay there twitching, its legs clawing the air frantically at first, then moving slower and slower until they stopped altogether. Buffy collapsed onto the ground beside William and Spike. "Or maybe we settle it here and now."

William's dazed stare moved from her to the deadly deceased arachnid to Spike and back again. He looked like a man who'd taken about all he could of having his world turned back to front and sideways for one day. She sat up and smiled at him, holding out her hand. "Thank you for saving my life. I'm Buffy, by the way."

He took it after a moment, gently turned it palm-down, and touched his lips to the back of it. "And my thanks for saving mine. William Pratt, at your service. It is my very great pleasure to meet you, Miss Buffy."