One year later;

She’s going out, he can feel her getting ‘antsy.’ He’s down the stairs, and Willow is there, in his mind, tearing through him like a cold wind.

Joking Xander is there, with a quip, ‘Jeez Will, let a guy actually get a word in why doncha?’ She sees his smile, feels the humor in his mind, misses the deeper resentment that he keeps hidden away from her, the fear of how long it will be before she decides that she has no use for him, for love, for the trappings of humanity and its’ Kingman’s Bluff all over again.

And so they walk out into the night, as they do every night. She likes to ‘take a stroll’ every evening, to remind the ‘creepy-crawlies’ that Sunnydale is now her town, that this Hellmouth is closed for business. Rarely, they see a vampire, or other demon, skulking about. They burn. Only the dumbest of them, or the most powerful, come here now, so much that it is actually more dangerous for her than it was in the early days, since it is hard to tell which vampire is going to be something that just crawled out of the ground, or something old that is looking to add a Hellmouth to its territory, something that has a reputation to establish, and thinks that taking Sunnydale back for the forces of Hell would look good on its resume…

They pass the Bronze on the way to their target, and Xander sees the young people, full of life, full of drink and self-deception and manufactured courage. One of them staggers out, and to anyone else, he might seem to have a girl in his arms. He sees Xander’s cane and Xander can see the pity, the guilt that a healthy man sees upon seeing a cripple, and he puts a 20 dollar bill into Xander’s shirt pocket as he passes. He tries to be cool about it, like it’s no big deal, and Xander isn’t even offended. He can feel that Willow is angry, and about to say something, but Xander’s attention isn’t even on the young drunk, it’s on his date.

To sightless eyes, she is a void of darkness, with clotted strings of blood lying cold under withered gray skin. Her fangs are razors of moonlight and her eyes are golden embers, flaring into red. He tenses ever so slightly, and feels Willow become aware of her. In his mind he feels her touch, like little spiders skittering about in his thoughts, and knows that she no longer feels the need to wait for him to point the vampires out. She no longer has the patience to even pretend to be listening to his words.

She’s going beyond words, and he wonders how long it will be before she has moved completely beyond his reach. The vampire falls to the ground, thrashing, and Xander can see the things inside of her, dead things, moving around on their own. She crumbles to ash in the arms of her horrified date, and Willow is already moving on, cruising like a shark though dark waters. Xander pauses over the cowering man and smoothly puts the 20 in his shirt-pocket. “Call a cab buddy. It’s not safe out here.”

He turns back to Willow and can feel her smiling. It’s about the only thing that makes her smile these days, little acts of cruelty.

****************************************************

“Whatcha doin’ black-eyed girl?” Xander quips as he walks into Willow’s ‘laboratory.’ The haze of magic is thick, dark forces roiling around her slender figure as she gestures and chants in a language that sounds remarkably like fingernails down a chalkboard.

She doesn’t turn, “Magick. Kinda busy, can this wait?”

“Yeah, I could feel it. The whole house is shaking from whatever you’re doing in here…” he crosses behind her, books lie scattered around the floor, but he can ‘see’ that they are empty, whatever magicks they contained torn from their pages.

He can sense the impatience surging into anger. She’s tired of humoring him, and she has no idea that he can see the struggle she goes through before she finally calms herself to say, “I’m dealing with the Hellmouth, once and for all.”

“I thought it was closed, for good?” he’s behind her now, tense and shivering, as he can feel the evil pouring into the room, like a cold wind scouring his soul from his body as it whirls past him into Willow’s all-consuming blackness.

“It will be.” Willow grunts out, “If it’s making you uncomfortable, you might want to go to a movie or something. I left some money in the cookie jar.”

It’s at this moment that Xander reaches out, with everything inside of him, trying to find some trace of the girl he’s loved since before he knew what love was, but the images keep coming, and in his mind’s eye he can see Willow shuddering and twisting as the darkness flows into her. She’s already changed forever, and soon her body will swell to contain these forces.

He remembers what happens next, from graduation. She’ll need to feed.

He never makes the decision, he just feels the shock travel up his arm, and looks down to see that he has shoved that damned knife up to its hilt into her back. She pulls away, lashing out with her arm, but he barely feels it. Her body has been fueled by magic for so long now that she couldn’t fight off a kitten without it. He spins her around, and crushes her to his chest and she drops to her knees with him.

“Xander? Why is it so cold…” and she’s gone. So fast, like someone switching off a light.

The darkness is flooding out of her like a waterfall, and it feels like he is walking into a wind-tunnel just holding onto her. He won’t let go, even as it feels like it’s slicing the flesh from his body, and he’s slammed to his knees. Currents of dark power slither through him, and it feels like they are coiling around inside of him and trying to rip him apart from within. It’s all he can do to remain conscious under the onslaught, and yet he can *hear* it, whispering seductively. He knows that he could seize it, control it, use it to make the world over in his own image, make everything right again…

He can feel Willow’s body, like something distant and light as a feather, miles away from him in the sea of blackness that now engulfs him. For a second he’s proud of her, for holding out against this for so long and he laughs suddenly, aware that he’s got all this dark magic running around inside of him, burning to do *something,* whispering him to scorch the sky and turn the seas to blood and crack the earth like a china plate, and he doesn’t have the slightest fucking clue what to do with it.

His sightless eyes brush across the room and fall upon the spent tomes of dark magick littering the floor, and he laughs again. The only spell he ever actually cast, all by himself…

“Librum Incendiere.”

He rubs his fingers through Willow’s hair, and knows that it must be so beautiful in the firelight. Soon, she won’t be cold. Soon they both will be warm.