CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When Winston had completed his story about where and how… and why… he’d been sent back, as well as shared with Giles the information that he was not as young as he seemed and was a “fair hand at magic” himself, Spike’s snort had Giles sending him a sharp glance.

“Does that mean you agree or disagree with that assessment?”

“Means I think Winnie here is being a bit modest.”
 
Giles turned his attention to Winston. “Is that true? Are you more adept than just ‘a fair hand’? Strong enough to control Willow if necessary?”
 
“If necessary,” he said, sending Spike an irritated look. “But I am truly hoping it won’t come to that. In the future, my future, Willow and I are close friends and coworkers. I would prefer that she still be my friend when we get back to that year.”
 
“We would all prefer that she make the decision to rethink her aversion to training, but it is good to know there is an alternative if we need it.”
 
“In the meantime, I haven’t had a chance to give her the letter yet, so we don’t know if that might help.” Buffy did her best to seem hopeful.
 
Winston nodded and reached into his pocket. “Which reminds me….” He pulled out another envelope and handed it to Giles.  “This one’s for you.”
 
Giles took it with a suspicious frown and turned it over in his hand. “This appears to be my handwriting.”
 
“It is. I don’t believe your letter is as fraught with advice and drama as the one Willow wrote to herself, but you… future you… felt it would be useful to offer you some support when it comes to listening to Buffy… and to Spike.”
 
“Afraid I’d stake first and ask questions later?” Giles said with a grimace.
 
“Something like that, I guess. In my – our – timeline, there was an… incident… that we’d like to prevent, and it may require William-Spike to do something of which you disapprove.”
 
Giles frowned. “I already know he’s been sent back to kill Glory’s human host if that’s what is necessary to prevent her from opening the portal. That is more likely to be Buffy’s issue than mine.”
 
“Buffy’s planning to beat her to death with the magic troll hammer so that Ben doesn’t have to be killed by anybody.”
 
 Winston gave Buffy a quick nod before continuing.
 
 “This has nothing to do with dispensing with Glorificus in whatever manner possible. As of the time I left the future, that is still your priority.” He turned his attention back to Giles.  “I am here to offer assistance as needed to either work with Willow on her training – my first choice, obviously – or to control her if necessary. I hope to get her to accept the need to end her My Will Be Done spell. There is no way a practitioner of her age and inexperience could have successfully worked that spell without pulling a lot of power from the hellmouth. And with that power has come an unhealthy craving for more of it.”
 
Giles groaned and shook his said. “I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. Of course she’s pulling her power from the hellmouth. I was so busy being shocked at what she could do, I didn’t think to wonder how she was able to do it.  That’s a serious oversight on my part, and I apologize for it.”
 
Winston shrugged. “There’s probably not much you could do about it after the fact. Or before that.  As I understand it, she had begun to refuse training already.”
 
“She had, but it was primarily due to her unhappiness over the loss of her boyfriend. Had I – had we –  been more understanding about her emotional state, we might have been able to prevent her from working the spell. Now, we must deal with the consequences.”
 
“Giles, didn’t you say some of the books about time travel say that some things can’t be changed. That they have to happen? I mean, it’s not like we didn’t try to stop her. We just couldn’t. All we could do was change what happened after.”
 
“Which might have made it bloody worse,” Spike muttered, wincing when Buffy punched his thigh. “Ow, Slayer.”
 
Ignoring them, Giles nodded. “That is a theory or hypothesis that some scientists adhere to. They believe that while it is possible to make changes – often big ones – in a timeline, there are some events that, for whatever cosmic reason, must occur in some fashion or another.”
 
“So, Willow had to do that spell, even if it had very different results? Well that sucks.”
 
Winston nodded his head. “That is a strongly held hypothesis on time travel. It’s possible that our—” he gestured to himself and Buffy and Spike— “adventure in time will be used to contribute data to that hypothesis – perhaps enough to make it a theory.  Unfortunately, we will have no way of knowing what can and cannot be changed.”
 
“I guess if we try to change what we think we should, and leave alone the things that aren’t going to hurt anybody if they happen….”
 
“Prob’ly about the best we can do. What’s your take on it, mystery mage?”
 
Winston flinched. “I’m not really trying to be mysterious. Just sharing as little as possible so as to have a small an effect as possible.”  He sighed. “No doubt, by the time we reach the time we came from, we will all know each other to the point that there will be no secrets.”
 
“Not sure I want you to know all our secrets,” Spike said with leer that caused Buffy to hiss at him.  Her “Spike!” had no effect on his laughter at the expression on Giles’s face.
 
With a deep sigh, Giles tried to ignore Winston’s barely-smothered smile and said, “I don’t doubt there are many things I’m sure I have no desire to know about your relationship with Buffy. Please feel free not to share them.”
 
Her face bright red, Buffy tried to change the subject. “So what’s our plan?”
 
Winston glanced at Giles, then responded. “I think we shouldn’t do anything until we know she has seen the letter she wrote herself.”
 
“And how much she wants to be with Tara,” Buffy added. “She looked pretty happy today, and not so glad to see me, so if she falls in love with Tara again….”
 
“Between the two, perhaps she will willing give up the spell,” Giles finished for her. “If there were only something we could do to reduce the pull from the hellmouth….”
 
“I could pull it down around my ears, but all things considered, don’t think that’s the best choice.”
 
“Not my first choice, either,” Buffy said. “That’s not going to happen this time around.”
 
Giles stared at Spike, then at Buffy’s perfectly serious face.  “I presume it is too much to hope this is an exaggeration, rather than one of those things you wish to avoid this time?”
 
Winston said. “Have you not told him how you came to be here?”
 
Spike and Buffy exchanged glances, then shrugged. “We told him as much as we needed to for him to know why it’s important that I don’t get resurrected—”
 
‘That you don’t need to fucking die!” Spike growled, subsiding when she patted him on the leg. 
 
“Well, yeah, that too.  But anyway…” She turned to face Winston. “I didn’t think we needed to share all the details…. I’m mean we weren’t even going to tell him that Willow did the spell. He guessed that part.”
 
“Don’t you think sharing that William the Bloody sacrificed himself to shut down a hellmouth bursting with Turok-han might have made him a bit less dubious about having Spike in his home?”
 
Giles’s “Dear lord!” was almost drowned out by Spike’s quick response.
 
“Was the Slayer’s idea of sharing her power and taking the fight to the First that got the ball rollin’ and won the battle. All I did was use a piece of ugly jewelry for the cleanup.” He gave a small smile as his mind clearly went elsewhere. “It was a bit of alright,” he said. “Watching my soul rain destruction down all around me. If you’ve got to out, pullin’ a city down around your ears is the way to do it…. If you’re a vampire, I mean,” he added as he saw all three humans staring at him. “That's prob’ly more of a demon thing….”
 
“Stop while you’re ahead, Spike,” Buffy said, nudging him.
 
“Actually,” Giles said, clearing his throat. “I would quite like to hear more about… did you say shared her power? And… am I to understand that you destroyed Sunnydale?”
 
Buffy glared at Winston. “Now look what you’ve done. He’s going to know all kinds of things that might not matter because we’re going to prevent the First from getting that strong and opening the hellmouth to let those ugly things out!”
 
Winston shrugged his apology. “I understand your reluctance to put Mr. Giles into a position of knowing what could be coming, but in all fairness to him, I believe having a trained watcher aware of how important you both are to the world, as well as how you got to that point, could only benefit the effort to avoid any potentially harmful events this time.”
 
Buffy sighed and looked at Spike. “What do you think?”
 
“Your call, love. You know the man better than I do.”
 
Buffy chewed her lip for a second then shrugged. “Okay. Why don’t you tell him what you think he needs to know. If he has questions, or if there’s something you don’t know because it was different in your time, we can fill in the blanks later.” She stood up and stretched. “Right now, I think we’ll go back to our apartment and figure out what other stuff we need to buy, then do a quick patrol once it gets dark.”
 
“I have a couple of questions before you go,” Giles said, his expression grim. “If you don’t mind.”
 
Buffy cocked her head at him and waited. Spike stood behind her, his gaze on Giles as the man raised his eyes to glare at him.
 
“The first one concerns Spike’s sudden ability to walk around without catching fire. I am assuming he is now in possession of the Gem of Amara?” His expression made it very clear what he thought of that idea.
 
“Yes, he is. That’s why I kept it instead of sending it to Angel like I did in our time.” She shot Spike a glance. “Not that he didn’t try to get it from Angel anyway, the big jerk!” 
 
“And yet, you are comfortable that this ‘big jerk’ is now invulnerable?”  Giles glared at her in a way that made her stand up straighter and glare right back.
 
“Yes. I felt like it was important – in case somebody in this timeline thought it would be okay to go behind my back and have him killed.”
 
Giles paled at both the expression on her face and her words, but summoned the courage to continue. “And if, as he just said, for the second time I might add, he used his soul to close the hellmouth, what then leads you to believe he is safe?”  He transferred his gaze to Spike. “Is the soul gone? You no longer have it?”
 
Spike frowned and seemed to be thinking. “Um… nope, not gone” He felt around his chest, then nodded. “Yep, still here.” He stared back at Giles. “If it wasn’t, that overfed soldier wouldn’t have—”
 
Buffy’s grip on his arm stopped him. “A simple yes will do.”
 
He shook her off. “Think it’s time for us to go, Slayer.  Leave the watchers here to talk about us.”
 
“Yeah. Okay. We need to hit a grocery store and a butcher’s. Do you still have some money left?”
 
He patted his pocket. “We’re good. I’ll pick up some more dosh tomorrow if it looks like we’ll need it.”
 
Without any other sort of communication with Giles or Winston, they walked out into the late afternoon sun.
 
XXXXX
 
“Well,” Winston said, settling back in his chair.
 
“Well, indeed.  Are they that arrogant in your time?” Giles drained his glass and got up to refill it, not noticing the frown on Winston’s face.
 
“I didn’t know them,” Winston said quietly. “They’d already been sent back before I came on the scene. But I heard nothing but good things about them — individually as well as together.  William—Spike, seems to have started helping Buffy to some extent very early on, and by this time next year he had fallen in love with her. Once that happened, he changed his entire life.  Would that have happened if he had not been captured and incapacitated? I truly have no idea.”
 
He held out his own glass for a refill. “However, that’s not really relevant to this current version of William the Bloody. He is, and has been for several years, very much in love with Ms Summers, and very much a part of all her efforts to prevent potential apocalypses. And his record for assisting her, in spite of his obviously much-rued inability to prevent her from jumping off that tower, is very strong.”
 
“She trusts him too much,” Giles sighed. “She trusted another vampire and it didn’t go well for the rest of us. Her heart leads her astray.”
 
“If I understand them correctly, and what I’ve been told by others – including your future self – she was trusting him well before her heart became involved in their relationship. And he has proven himself to be worthy of that trust. Long before he got the soul….”
 
Giles sighed. “I suppose I should read my message from my future self, before I bollix something up by acting upon my instincts.”
 
“That would be my suggestion,” Winston said, his expression not giving away whether he was speaking sarcastically or not. Giles gave him a narrow-eyed glance, but didn’t speak, only picking up the envelope and studying it. With a final glance at Winston, he opened it, took out the folded paper within, and began to read.