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Future Sins Past by DreamsofSpike
 
Holding Out
 
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A/N: Thanks to my wonderful beta, Eowyn315!!!!



A numb, seeping horror came over Buffy at the sight before her. She was barely aware of Willow’s cruel giggle beside her, and Spike’s broken sobs behind her. It was more than she could do to even process the sight of her Watcher, ravaged and torn apart in front of her…and Spike’s hands and mouth stained with his blood.

“I…I didn’t…” the shaken vampire began.

Willow cut him off with a snarl, extending her hand behind her in a burst of magic that released him from the invisible bonds that held him to the floor, and simultaneously hit him with a blast so hard that it knocked him into the far wall.

“I said *shut up*!”

When Spike desperately tried to speak again, his voice was muffled, unable to form words. In a daze, Buffy turned to face him, and her eyes went wide when she saw what Willow’s casual magic had done to him. Where his mouth had been, there was now nothing but flat, smooth flesh. Panicked, Spike struggled to talk anyway, with no success.

“What do you think of him now, seeing what he did to Giles?” Willow demanded of Buffy in a triumphant tone. “Still think he’s worth your time? Worth helping?”

Buffy was silent, blinking back tears that welled in her eyes as her gaze was unwillingly drawn back to the scene of carnage in front of her. She shook her head slowly, though the gesture was more in desperate denial of what she was seeing than in answer to Willow’s question.

She didn’t realize she was moving until she was kneeling on the floor at her dead Watcher’s side. She reached out a trembling hand toward him, cringing as it passed ineffectually through his still form, and she remembered what Willow had told her…that this was not real, not now, but a vision of things that had already happened in this world.

*This world that Willow imagined,* a small voice in the back of her head reminded her. *It wasn’t supposed to be like this…Spike maybe wouldn’t have done this…*

But at the moment, those thoughts were nothing more than background noise, as her full attention could focus on nothing but her Watcher.

“Giles,” she whispered brokenly, raising a hand to cover her eyes as her shoulders shook with sobs. “No…”

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

With Buffy distracted by the horror she had been shown, Willow quietly slipped away from her, across the room to Spike, who was shaking, kneeling on the ground where her last blow had knocked him, sobbing softly in despair.

“Think she’ll have anything to do with you now?” she sneered in quiet, cruel triumph. “Think she’ll want to do anything but stake you, after seeing this?”

Spike did not respond – couldn’t – but he turned his head away, refusing to acknowledge her taunting words.

Willow’s eyes narrowed in rage, and she struck out with a lightning-fast hand, gripping the back of his head in talon-like claws and jerking it backward, forcing him to face her as she smiled, inches from his face.

“You’ll listen when I speak to you, Spike,” she hissed. “Or you’ll be missing more than your mouth.”

Spike swallowed hard, but remained still in her grasp, knowing better than to struggle.

“Okay,” Willow continued, once she was sure he was paying attention. “She’s not going to forget this, even if she *does* manage to get her world back – which she won’t, anyway. Even if the spell *could* be broken, she’ll never figure out how to stop me in time…and she’ll never forgive you, Spike. You can never have her…never be happy, there, now.”

Spike closed his eyes in a vain attempt to shut out her painful words, but he could not deny the truth of what she was saying. If such a thought even occurred to her, Buffy could tell herself a hundred times that this wasn’t real, wasn’t his fault…but she’d never be able to strike the ghastly images from her mind.

Either way this went…she was lost to him.

“Why don’t you just do the smart thing,” Willow went on in a low, enticing voice next to his ear, her free hand caressing across the place where his mouth had been. “I’ll even give you your mouth back,” she promised, in the teasing tone of one offering some great privilege or prize. “That is…if you’re willing to use it the way I want you to.”

Spike jerked his head away from her, refusing to give in to her sadistic tactics. She had deliberately shattered his hopes of ever getting Buffy to love him, showing her an incident he had begged her on his knees not to reveal, in an attempt to break his will; and he was determined that she would take nothing more from him…not now, anyway.

“Or,” the witch continued, her voice cooled by her anger as she yanked his head back, hard, “I could take other things as well…just keep taking them…until you have nothing left…” Her hand slid up his cheek to brush across his eyes, and Spike felt his heart lurch with fear at her subtle threat. “How would you like to be deaf and blind, as well as dumb, Spike?”

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

“Come on…come on…”

Jenny hissed under her breath as she waited for the results of her search to come up on her computer screen. She had entered the dimensions and a detailed description of the globe into a special search engine at a magic website she frequented, and was now impatiently awaiting what she hoped would be a list of the various rituals and spells in which such a globe might be used.

“They haven’t got much time, come on,” she muttered to herself as the tiny hourglass on the screen turned slowly over and over. “Willow’s gonna kill them…”

She sighed when the list finally came up on her screen, and she saw with dismay that it was hundreds of items long.

“This is gonna take all night.” She stared at the screen in grim realization, before drawing in a deep breath and letting it out in a sigh of resignation. “Spike and Buffy don’t *have* all night.”

She entered a few extra words in the search line to narrow down the search.

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

*Tell me where it is, Spike.*

The menacing voice was in his head, not in his ear, and Spike knew that Willow had opened a mental link between them, allowing them to communicate outside the hearing of the shell-shocked Slayer across the room, and allowing him to answer her questions without the use of his currently non-existent mouth.

*Tell me what you did with the globe.*

Willow persisted, her mental voice soft and coaxing now, as she ran her hands lightly up his arms, guiding them up over his head and crossing his wrists against the wall behind him. Once she had him in the position in which she wanted him, Willow snapped her fingers in front of Spike, and he found to his dismay that he was once again magically pinned in place, unable to move.

And in a far more vulnerable, unsettling position this time.

Still, Spike refused to give her what she wanted. If he did, he knew that he and Buffy were both dead.

*Not telling you anything,* he insisted. *Not a thing in that deal that’ll work in my favor, love. Don’t think I’m too stupid to see that.*

*Well, there’s not a thing in your favor either way, sweetie,* Willow reminded him with a smirk, trailing her hands slowly, invasively down his exposed, trembling sides, then back up again, sliding his shirt up so that her long fingernails scored his flesh as she leaned in closer to him in a suggestive way.

*I’ll be honest with you, Spike,* she admitted casually. *I’m going to kill you, either way. You know that; I know that. No sense in lying about it.*

Spike frowned in apprehension, uncertain what her game was, and surprised that she would admit the truth. Suddenly, however, his thoughts were consumed with a searing agony as Willow’s nails dug painfully into his flesh on either side, dragging around to his stomach as she murmured a Latin word under her breath.

An instant later, the searing pain flared higher, until it was nearly unbearable. It was as if she was using her magical power to slowly cook his insides. Spike writhed against her hands, a moan of anguish silenced by his lack of a mouth to express it.

*Since I’m going to kill you anyway, you’ve left me only one option, Spikey…* Willow sneered, loosening her grip on his sides and trailing her fingertips lightly around to his stomach, magically dragging the pain with them.

*…to make you want to die.*

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

*Focus, Buffy. Don’t let her get to you. If you can stop her, you can make it so that none of this ever happened. *Focus*!*

Buffy struggled under the weight of her anguish, fighting to think of anything at all besides the horror of what had been done to Giles – and who had done it. She had just begun to feel that she could trust Spike, but now, the vision Willow had shown her had shattered that fledgling trust. After all, this world was the one Spike had seen in his visions – right? So, if not for those visions, it would have happened anyway.

*Or wouldn’t it?*

She wanted to ask Spike, but knew that Willow would not allow him to speak to her.

*And why is that, unless there’s something she’s afraid he’ll tell you? Something that she doesn’t want you to know?*

Buffy swallowed hard in a mostly vain attempt to dampen her dry, aching throat, closing her eyes as she tried to put aside the pain and concentrate, to work through the agony that was overwhelming her and figure out the truth.

Of course, it might have been quite a bit easier to put it aside, had she not been kneeling inches away from Giles’ broken, blood-soaked body.

“Too distracting,” she whispered dully, her eyes still wide and shocked, staring down at Giles. “Just such a…distraction…”

Something about that thought brought her a moment of sudden, jarring clarity, and Buffy looked up, blinking as she realized the reason for what she was seeing. Real or not, it accomplished nothing for Willow to show her this…nothing but to distract her, to keep her attention focused elsewhere while the witch…

What *was* Willow doing?

Buffy realized all at once that Willow was no longer at her side, whispering cruel taunts in her ear, as she had been doing since she had teleported them back to the mansion.

*Spike!*

She stood up abruptly, backing a few steps away from the illusion before her – because she knew now, whether or not it might have happened, in this world or any other, at this point in time it *was* nothing more than an illusion. She whirled around, her sharp gaze falling immediately on the witch and the vampire across the room, neither one of them particularly aware of her attention at the moment.

Spike was up against the wall, his arms pinned over his head by a swirling vortex of magical light, as Willow ran her hands slowly over his body, obviously working some kind of magic – magic that was causing Spike excruciating pain, judging from the way the vampire’s back arched and his body shook with agony, his mouthless face contorted in silent screams of anguish.

A surprisingly powerful surge of anger came over the Slayer at the sight, and she suppressed the urge to simply rush the girl and pull her away from Spike, knowing very well that Willow could easily stop her, and pulling Willow away from Spike would not necessarily end his pain.

No, it was going to take more than brute force to stop what Willow was doing.

“Nice trick, Wills.”

Buffy made the remark in a casual, almost bored voice, and she suppressed a gratified smile as the witch removed her hands from Spike’s body, spinning around in surprise to face her. The Slayer deliberately did not show her relief as Spike’s body slumped against its magical bonds, the pain clearly fading with the lack of contact with the witch.

Buffy crossed her arms over her chest in a challenge, a smirk rising to her face as she added, “But to be honest…I’m not all that impressed. How about the truth, Willow? What *really* happened here?”

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

Jenny stared intently at the computer screen, reading the description in front of her, and the instructions for how to break the spell it described. Her eyes widened with excitement, and she found herself rising to her feet, unable to sit still, though she leaned toward the monitor, not taking her eyes from the screen until she had finished reading the information there.

The globe in the picture looked just like the one in her hand – without, of course, the miniature replica of Sunnydale inside. The spell described on the website sounded just like the type of thing Willow might have used to entrap the original, real Sunnydale, and replace it with her own version of things.

“This is it,” she murmured in quiet exultation. “I’ve found it! I can break her spell!”
 
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