The Weirding Way, Prologue - Ch. 3

I'm not going share my novel, as it's still in its early stages, but here's some fan fiction that seems to be quite well received:

Prologue:

This disclaimer is for the entirety of this story, however long it may be: I lay no claim to Dune or BTVS, nor am I profiting from the use of their universes or characters. Don't sue me, because you're never getting my computer/tablet, and that's the only thing I have of value.

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"There is, at the same time, both someone and no one behind the curtain. And yet the truth of the magic changes."

-from the Teachings of the Mahdi

Chaos.

His first thought was that he was dead. He had just put little Leto down before lying beside his beloved Chani. He'd closed his eyes for no more than a moment when he heard the screams. Before he could even open his eyes, his prescience told him that he was no longer on Arrakis, that he had somehow been transported to another time and another place, in such a way that not even the Guild could have accomplished. Even so, the crisp freshness of the air was a jolt to his heightened senses, the sharp taste of spice melange being noticeably absent.

After only a fraction of a second, Duke Paul Atreides, Lisan al-Gaib to the Fremen of Arrakis, Kwisatz Haderach to the Bene Gesserit Order, Usul to his sietch, and Muad'dib to his friends, was afraid. The immense energies expended to accomplish such a feat as this--it was more than even he could accomplish at his current stage of evolution. Maybe it would be possible after a decade of a diet of spice and the Water of Life only, but that was the path that he dared not travel.

The sights and sounds that invaded his senses were so out of the realm of his experience that they were beyond alien to him, though the flow of time was similar in this place, giving human understanding that would have otherwise taken him years to gain. The moisture in the air was almost erotic to him as he pushed back his hood and plucked out his nose plugs, taking a long, sensual breath as he checked his Krisknife.

Ignoring all else around him, Paul stalked off down the street, searching for a certain building.

And when he found the proprietor of this building, he was going to spill his water.

This was the most complicated spellwork that Ethan Rayne had ever done. Oh, he had practiced for months, making sure that he had everything down to a science, so to speak. It was just that the final spellform, the one that specified the duration of the spell, took him some time to complete. Twenty-one minutes, to be exact. However, as the chaos mage was drawing the final connecting line of the huge, flowing expanse of curves and vertices, the door to the front of his shop exploded open, chunks of the torn frame flying across the almost empty expanse of clothing racks and retail shelves.

Startled, Ethan stopped mid-stroke, getting up and carefully stepping around the bust of Janus. What he saw when he peeked through the curtain in the doorway made his knees weak, and his throat go dry. Striding purposefully into his shop was a young man with dark hair and blue on blue eyes, wearing a costume he distinctly remembered selling as a set to another young man, the day before. The aura of power emanating off of this intruder was staggering.

The young man seemed to know where he was going, striding with purpose directly towards the door that Ethan was behind. As he drew closer, he drew a milk white knife that chilled Ethan to the bone. He knew what was intended here: it was written all over the man's face. Moving over to the table that held the bust of Janus, he grabbed the athame and check its edge. He knew that any second now that young man would storm for the door and try to kill him, and he likewise knew he had only one chance to survive the encounter. He had seen the film Dune, after all.

He darted to the side of the door and waited the two seconds that it took for Paul to push the curtain aside. He was still too slow. The boy moved like liquid lightning, and all Ethan was able to accomplish was a rather insignificant slice on the young man's forearm. Several drops spattered the floor in the brief struggle that ensued, which ended much as Ethan Rayne had predicted: with the knife slipped between his ribs.

As he lay there dying--his head lolled to the side as darkness drew in upon him--he noted in the detached way that the dying do that a foot had scuffed the floor, raggedly connecting the last two parts of the spell form with the blood that had fallen there.

Chapter 1: Stranded

"You stand at the precipice of a path that you cannot see. This Golden Path is lined with the truths of the universe, but you cannot hear them. The Divine is within reach, you cannot touch it. The path is fraught with the ambrosia of understanding to sustain you, but you cannot taste it. All of these gifts you deny yourself, because you cling to the old ways. Free yourself of your fears and doubts, and follow me, for I will show you the way."

-from the Teachings of The Mahdi

Duke Paul Atreides of Arrakis, imminent Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, died on November 11th, 1997 in the Sunnydale Memorial Hospital at 3:22 AM on a Tuesday. His death went unnoticed by all but the night duty nurse, who made a notation on her clipboard to check back in a couple of hours to see if he was still there.

He wasn't.

Paul had roamed this strange world for hours, watching those who had been changed by the powerful magic placed upon their costumes. He could see that the possible futures that bombarded his prescient mind were too numerous for even him to decipher, the waveforms of so many powerful destinies like so many thumpers pounding upon his ears. He could only know a few things for certain, and one of them was this: There was a woman--a girl, really--who, though dead, would only be so for a short time. She would endeavor, and succeed, in stopping this madness. The other thing he knew for certain was that once she did, he would still be here. In this place. Stranded here for the rest of his life. He didn't need to be prescient to know that he would die here as well, and soon.

Soon enough, the small beasts that had given him a wide berth in their rampaging and destruction had morphed into children, no longer sure why they were gnawing on the leg bone of those unfortunate enough to open the door to them. He'd seen their eyes glaze as they sat back on their haunches, slack-jawed expressions turning into smiles and giggles as they repressed any and all memories of their mindless savagery, turning it into a game as they tried and succeeded at keeping their sanity in the face of such unadulterated evil that they half-remembered committing. It was sickening. . .

Paul, knowing these things without having the darkness of their deeds brush his mind, could only wish these small, fragile children a warm and happy future, but he knew, like he knew all else, that most of them would not survive a full decade, either because of the real beasts lurking in the darkness, or because their subconscious would push at the edge of their hearts and minds until they could no longer live with what they had done here this night. It broke his heart to know these things, and yet he could not help but see the truth in them.

The night passed and an unfamiliar, wan sun came up, bringing with it a brilliant, beautiful horizon unlike anything he'd ever seen. The warm hues of orange and red, giving way to mottle purple and then a satisfying shade of blue was a wonder he never thought he'd see again. He'd had something like this on Caladan, though not in such fantastic colors. This was Earth, birthplace for all of mankind, and it was wonderful.

The pain started not long after that. He had known for some time now that his body was addicted to the Spice of Arrakis, and that to leave was die from its indelible hold upon his body. There was no Spice on this planet.

The pain had wracked his body, slowly becoming worse and worse as the days went by. He was no stranger to pain, and so he pressed on, the knowledge of his impending death causing him to look to the life that he had replaced, coming to know this Oz from the personal effects he found in the boy's room at his grandmother's house, and from the friends in his musical group. His love for stringed instruments helped him here, and though the pain never subsided, he was able to forget it for a time, immersed in the strange, hypnotic sound that was "rock and roll." Oz's friends accepted his eye color as an expression of his music. He lived this boy's odd life for a time, and found himself reluctant to leave it. But this, he had no control over.

The cold sweats came upon him at a time when he would have not thought possible: during a meal in a pleasantly sweltering place called a sauna, where he'd brought a tasty treat he'd discovered called hummus, with a bread made from some type of vegetation and was made flat. It was delicious. He'd also brought with him a flask of water, which was a treat he couldn't help but to indulge in. And then it had hit him.

He'd fallen on his side, his body stiff and unresponsive to his commands. He wasn't sure how long he'd lain there, because he'd blacked out not long after. The next thing he knew, he had awakened to the sound of machines beeping and whirring, and voices muffled as they talked about calling his parents. He wanted to tell them that his father was dead, and his mother was back on Arrakis, and therefore they needn't bother themselves, but he couldn't seem to get the words out.

He'd awoken only once during his stay at the facility, but when he did he was questioned by policing authorities of some sort about an addiction to PCP, and whether he was a part of a gang. He only half understood what the men were asking him, but they left looking smugly satisfied. Afterward he found out that he was in the Alcohol & Drug Inpatient Treatment Unit of Sunnydale Memorial Hospital, and that he was being treated for withdrawal, though they couldn't tell what it was that his body was addicted to. He didn't tell them, though they pressed him for information. He knew they wouldn't believe him.

The in the small hours of the night, he passed from this world into the next.

Daniel "Oz" Osbourne awoke with a gasp, sucking in air as though he hadn't taken a breath in several minutes. His chest hurt and his brain was too foggy to form a coherent thought. This didn't last long, however.

His brain started working about the time that his chest stopped feeling like someone was stabbing him there, and he finally got around to taking in his surroundings. He appeared to be in a hospital. Why was he--?

In a sudden rush, the memories flooded back to him. He saw himself fighting a man to the death. He saw himself having conversations with his friends he'd never had, and playing new songs he'd never heard. He saw himself. . .

Oh. . . Damn.

Chapter 2: Getting Ready

Oz’s head hurt.

And it was just from the whole “dying” thing, either. No, this was from something else entirely: information overload.

He had to figure that, with the synapses he already had overlaid with the creation of new synapses with the memories he’d kept from the entire life of Paul Atreides, up until the night before he was to wed the Princess Irulan Corrino, and boy did his head hurt. Okay, so he knew that there were, technically, no pain receptors in the brain, and therefore he wouldn’t be able to feel it if something were happening on a cellular level, but something was going on up there to at least increase the blood pressure and. . .

He was doing it again. His bud Devon had told him what seemed like a thousand times (though it was probably in the ballpark of 127) that he thought about “stuff’ too much, to the point where he was missing the things going on around him. Sometimes, Devon was right. And now was definitely one of those times. Because, wow, his head was hurting for a totally different reason.

Like, say, the fact that he was lying face down on the floor in a pool of congealed blood. It was funny, though, because he couldn’t really remember why he was face-down on the linoleum of an unfamiliar room, his gaze turning up at the underside of what had to be a hospital bed. And what was he doing in a. . .?

Oh, right. There it was. All he had to do was the landmark association game. Like when he—

Oz blinked hard against the darkness swimming around the corners of his eyes as they, for a moment, crossed inwards. He needed to get up. He wasn’t thinking straight, and his thoughts were going off in tangents. If he stayed here on the floor, he ran the risk of a. . . a umm. . .

He obviously had hit his head either on the railing of the bed to his right or the floor as he’d passed out earlier. Earlier. . . How long ago had that been? He needed to get up. Nothing else mattered. He couldn’t remember why, but he knew instinctively that it was bad.

Bad. He knew something of bad. When he had been Vladimir Harkonnen, he had seen his beautiful Feyd-Rautha manipulate the audience and himself at his nephew’s arena gladiatorial debut. He’d had to kill the Slave Master after that, and had lost face to. . . to. . .

That didn’t matter now, because he had to get up! He moved his numb, sluggish arms into position by his head, ignoring the slippery stickiness that was the pool of blood he was lying in. He hesitated for a moment, mentally preparing himself as much as he could and pushed, his chest seeming like lead as he lifted first his torso, and then, gradually, his face from the cold linoleum tile. A part of his head, near the temple, he thought, was stuck to the floor pretty good, and it took an extra second of deep breathing to fortify himself against the pounding waves of nausea that crashed against his head with renewed vigor to pull his face painfully away from where it was plastered in place.

“Ow. . .” was all he could think to say, and so he said it. He found out in doing so that it didn’t make anything hurt any worse than it already did, but it did help him to focus when he spoke. So, he continued speaking to himself.

“Okay, now. The last thing I remember was. . .” Ow. The memories came flooding back to his rattled brain once again, but this time he held onto it. Halloween. He’d dressed as Muad’Dib, the protagonist of a fictional universe known as Dune. His friends Devon and Michael, the other guys in his band, had gone as a. . . A sandworm. Oh, crap! Had they turned back with everybody else when the spell had broken on Halloween, or had they somehow been linked to him, and were now out there somewhere, wreaking havoc on some unsuspecting town as a sandworm?

But no, he thought to himself. Remember! Paul had played with Devon and Mike a few days ago, so they couldn’t have stayed in their spelled form. Good. That was. . . Oh, he was getting dizzy again. He needed to sit down. . . No! He needed to leave—get out of here. They thought he was dead. If they came in here and saw that he was alive and kicking, that might cause all kinds of problems. Like that time when he was Deirda Metollus and her husband had died and the Bene Tleilax had sent a ghola in his place so as to keep the barony in play without her knowledge of it and. . .

He was losing it again, his grip on this reality. He obviously had some of the spice still in his system, because he was slipping into Abomination. . . He knew then, with a mental clarity that can only come from fear-fueled adrenaline that he had better find a way to clear his head, or he could lose himself forever to the Other-Mind of an entire fictional line of ancestors, all the way back to the dawn of time. . . He had to focus, or else all would be lost.

A couple hours later he was in his bed at Nana’s. He wanted so badly to go to sleep, but he knew that with a concussion, he could slip into a coma, and let’s face it: comas were never any fun. No, what he was doing was rereading every Dune book he owned, which happened to be all of them.

Up until Halloween night, Dune had been among his favorites: Frank Herbert’s vision of a dystopian future while exploring humanity as a social, religious, and ecological entity with a great messianic journey that resonated with Oz in a way he’d never felt before. He’d loved the religious aspect of the series—not because he was very spiritual or anything, mind you, but because it was such a new thing that hadn’t been explored very much in the hard science fiction genre, and the fact that it had such an obvious effect on not only the actions of the characters in the novels, but the technology as well, just showed the genius that is Herbert.

He’d loved it, that is, until it had become all too real for him. Paul Atreides had been brought up in an environment that brooked no real commitment to any given religion, but had been schooled in the ways of the Bene Gesserit by his mother and as a Mentat by Thufir Hawat himself. Knowledge of these disciplines had yet been sifted through in his mind, though, because he wasn’t really in the best place to be examining the mysteries of the universe and Man’s psyche in relation to it. But he knew he would have to, sooner or later. He couldn’t not hold the memories back, even if he wanted to.

And he didn’t want to. It went against everything he believed in.

No, Paul hadn’t been raised as religious, and Oz wasn’t particularly spiritual himself, though he did find himself more or less aligned with one or two of the faiths from the Dune universe. Zen Hekiganshu was more his speed, though he guessed that was due to the fact that it most closely resembled the teachings of the Hekiganroku, which was basically the collated koans of the Chinese Chan, which was what mainstream society knew as Zen, which was what the Japanese called it. That was a lot of “whiches,” he thought to himself. Still a bit delirious, I guess.

His faculties were, however, strong enough to know for certain that his life would be forever changed by this development. However fictional these memories and experiences he had stored within his woozy brain, they were real enough. He wasn’t sure how—yet—but he was certain that the sciences and teachings that held up the fundamental principles of the Dune universe would hold true here as well. Whether it was simply because Frank Herbert had a grasp on the real potentialities of a future seen his way, or somehow the magic of Halloween night had changed something. . . He was leaning heavily towards Door Number Two, though he had an inkling that it was a little of both.

But that was as much heavy thought he was willing to put to any life-altering data while suffering from the effects of a decent-sized head wound. There was enough time for that later. Right now he needed to pore over the collection in front of him, and see if he was really and truly screwed as he knew he was. . .

Whack!

Breathe in. . .

Thud!

Breathe out. . .

Whack!

A slick sheen of sweat rimmed his brow as he set up again for a high/low kick, consciously shifting his feet through the pattern of the kata. He tucked his leg against his body and shifted his weight, ignoring the soreness in the socket of the other leg as he pivoted first in a slow form and then a faster repetition. Getting his body to accept these kata was going to take a long time, but he was determined to get himself there. He was going to teach his body what his mind already knew, and with any luck, it would become muscle memory.

The supplements he’d started taking were helping, too. They had taken some doing, though. The ingredients were available, though mainly to laboratories and the like, and he’d had to tweak some compounds in the science lab at school—which was extremely well stocked, given that it was at a High School. But, after a couple weeks he’d come away from it all with two drugs that would probably be on the market in a couple decades, unless he sold them himself. . . He’d have to think about that one sometime.

In the absence of mind-enhancing drugs like sapho juice in the Dune universe, as well as the augmentations that were available to boost one’s physical prowess, he had needed to find Earth analogs. These turned out to be fairly easy to make, though the ingredients weren’t easily obtained. Also, they weren’t, of course, as potent as those Paul Atreides had access to, but they did the job that was needed. Such as getting him in shape.

Whack!

He needed to be ready for what was to come.

Thud!

He’d had a dream. . .

Whack!

. . . that the world will burn.

Chapter 3: Chance Meetings

The wind drives the rain in the Valley of Despair,

Howling at the Moon and blowing your hair.

It twists and it rages down the Alley of the Ages,

And yet it is just made of empty air.

-from the Book of Collated Psalms in the Orange Catholic Bible

Oz absently fixed the positioning of his fingers before strumming the next chord, focused more on the puzzle before him than on the guitar resting on his leg. Do I like shrubs? Before Halloween he probably would have just colored in the bubble that would indicate that, yes, he did like shrubs. However, now the question came down to an existential search for his valuation on all life not deemed by modern society as essential or important. And yet, here he was with the memories of a man who had lived on a planet with a very severe climate and an even more fragile ecology, where the flimsy existence of even a single shrub could spell life or death for an entire sietch. Water, the most precious resource on that harshest of planets, had to be expended—some might even have said wasted—on such a luxury. And yet such a simple plant—a single shrub—had been the symbol of a paradise hoped for; a symbol of the paradise that the entire Fremen people worked to gain.

Strumming the next chord of a song that he half remembered, he decided that yes, he did indeed come down on the side of liking shrubs. The small things all added up to big, important things, and he rather liked the entire package. All things, being separate, are also one. . . His grin turned into a full-blown smile as he leaned over and grabbed his Number 2 pencil, coloring in the appropriate bubble. Say what you want about the Bene Gesserit, but their teachings were pretty cool.

And already his experience with the whole Halloween incident was paying dividends: he’d had a dream the other night that his little cousin, Geordie, was gonna bite him and that this was a bad thing. So he’d brought up the fact that Geordie seemed different to his aunt Maureen, and she’d confessed to him that he’d been bitten by a werewolf a few months ago. Apparently it had eaten Sarah, Geordie’s babysitter, and he’d just managed to get away. Oz made sure he kept his hands and fingers well away from the little ’were the entire birthday party, though it got a little dicey in the bouncing castle. All in all, Oz had dodged a silver bullet on that one.

He kept having dreams, though. It was mostly the same dream, really: A red-headed girl is smiling at him, her face drifting toward him, and just as he’s about to kiss her, he wakes up. It was driving him crazy. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d seen her before, though he couldn’t place where. . .

Shaking his head at his drifting thoughts, Oz got back to the test at hand. “Choose between the following statements: A) Without order there is chaos, and B) Chaos is just order with opportunities for life.” Grinning, he quickly answered. This test was turning out to be fun. . .

He’d been at the Career Fair, just chillin’, when these guys in suits had approached him and asked him to follow them. His first thought was that they were some kind of Men in Black, but with a second look he’d ruled that possibility out: they didn’t wear sunglasses, and their shoes were scuffed. Any respectable Man in Black wouldn’t be caught dead like that. So he’d gone with them.

It turned out they were trying to recruit him for a software company that he was pretty sure he’d hacked a few months back. He hadn’t been looking for anything in particular—it was one of those scenarios where it was a Tuesday and there wasn’t any band practice, and he’d been super-bored, so he’d thought, “Hey, I wonder if I can hack (so-and-so).” Turned out he could. They must’ve found out, somehow, and wanted to offer him a job. He didn’t have the heart to tell them he wasn’t interested.

And so, there he was, sitting on this fairly comfortable couch, studying this tray of canapé, trying to figure out just exactly what canapé was, and she walked in.

He hadn’t noticed her at first, as absorbed in his thoughts as he was, just ignoring whoever it was that the recruiters had brought in. And he’d registered out of the corner of his eye that someone had sat down beside him, so he’d thought to be nice and acknowledge this person’s existence. You know, be sociable. When he looked over, his breath caught in his chest.

It was her. She was so beautiful, just like he’d dreamed. Her hair was the color of auburn leaves in the fall, and her lips looked like they would taste like bubblegum. Her skin was milky-white, and his second impulse (his first had been to kiss her) was to reach out and slide the blade of his finger just inside the nape of her neck, where she had the cutest. . .

He realized that he may have been staring, and opened his mouth, desperate to say something, anything. . . Nothing came out at first, so he looked around for a second and his eyes alighted on the tray in his hands. “Canapé?” he asked, proffering the dish to her.

She smiled sweetly at him, blushing ever so slightly as her bright, peach colored lips formed the most heavenly words he’d ever heard: “No thanks.”

It took him a moment to register just how strange his reaction was to her. It didn’t seem natural that she would have this kind of effect on him, and he could only think that it had something to do with Paul Atreides’ personality interacting with his own. Because, face it, this girl did look slightly Chani-ish. Especially that mouth. . . and those lips. . .

It was really weird for him, but he managed a conversation with the girl, who turned out to be named Willow. Such a cool name. And he didn’t even drool on her or anything.

He couldn’t believe he’d so totally spazzed out over Willow, but thankfully she either hadn’t noticed it or was nice enough not to let him know she had. He’d had a great time talking with her, there in the backroom lounge the Sqwerkle guys had set aside for them. They’d eventually had to endure the sales pitch from the very slimy recruiter guy, Mr. McCarthy, but after that they’d gotten to talk for another half hour before the teachers got to have their lounge back.

He hadn’t had such an intelligent conversation with a girl in. . . well, ever. Usually the groupies who came around backstage after a show were just into the image of his being a guitarist in a decent band, and the few who Oz had actually been with had been artsy type chicks who didn’t really understand the important questions of life, love, and the number 42—

His thoughts were cut off as he was suddenly slammed into a row of lockers, strong fingers closed about his throat as his gaze came away from the path he had been walking and into a pair of angry, scared green eyes.

Everybody in the hallway stopped in their tracks for a moment to take in the blonde girl throttling him before going about their business. Apparently this kind of thing happened a lot.

He turned his attention back on this strange girl as she growled at him, “Try it!” The fact that she had gotten the drop on him was proof of two facts: 1) he needed to train more in the methods of the Weirding Way, and 2) this girl was more than she seemed. She was fast, and she was strong.

Her eyes, though. . . He had seen eyes like those before—or at least Paul Atreides had. Her eyes were filled with a fear that gripped her heart. But this wasn’t the type of person who would be frozen by her fears—no, she would lash out in rage at them, at anything she perceived a threat, just as she had done now, with him. She was afraid, and hurt. Something about what he saw in her eyes resonated with him, and he finally recalled her name. Buffy. . . Buffy something.

“Buffy,” he replied, his voice calm and soothing. “Look at me. Look at my eyes.” He could see the confusion wash over her face as his tone released the tension set there. “Look into my eyes, Buffy. Be in my eyes. . . Stay in my eyes. . .” Her eyes glazed slightly as he put her in a light trance, his tones slipping into the Bene Gesserit Voice, drawing her will into him and replacing it with his.

He could see in her eyes that she was resisting his Voice, but he had enough control over it to squash her meager struggle and overwhelm her will with his own. “Seek the calm center within you, Buffy. Close out all else, and draw upon the light within you, the light in the darkness of your pain and fears. As long as you can touch this light, nothing can harm you, no one can hurt you.” His eyes searched hers to see if he was reaching her. “Are you with me, Buffy?”

“I, ah, um. . .” she mumbled, shifting her feet and loosening the grip on his throat a little. The death grip on his arm was still cutting off the circulation there, but he ignored that pain and pushed on.

“Listen to me, Buffy. My words are your words. We speak together.” Even as he began the litany, he could see her muttering along with him. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. . .” Tears had come to her eyes by then, her hands drifting down to her side. “Only I will remain.”

He reached up and resisted rubbing his sore throat, instead wiping away a tear as it traced a path down her flushed cheek. Instinctively, he pulled her into a hug, and let her cry there for a while. He noticed after a time that her body was no longer wracked with sobs, and that her breathing had evened out. They stood there, in the hallway, just holding each other, until she let go and pulled back, the look in her eyes telling him everything.

He gave her a slight smile and turned away, his heart both heavy and light at the same time as he walked home.

“You say he put the whammy on you? Like the Master did before he, you know, um, he uh, killed you for, like, a few minutes?” Willow asked awkwardly, trying her best not be insensitive to her best friend but not really knowing any other way of saying it. “Whammy like that, or whammy, with the uh, violence and the beatings and the, uh, puns?”

Buffy’s voice was lighter and more upbeat than she had sounded in a long, long time. Like, before her, um, dying for just a few teensy moments. “More like the Master, Will,” Buffy replied, and Willow imagined she could almost hear her friend smile over the phone. “But without the violence and bad puns. It was like he was trying to help me. It was weird, is the best way I can describe it. Only it was different, too, because it wasn’t like when the Master whammied me, with his Christopher Lee hypno-gaze. It was more like he was telling me what to do, and when I heard it, I just wanted to. Does that make any kind of sense?”

Willow thought about it for a moment before nodding, which she immediately mentally slapped herself over because she knew Buffy couldn’t hear her nod. “Uh, yeah, I think. What did he tell you to do?”

“I dunno, exactly. It was weird, because he wasn’t doing anything to hurt me, but it was like he was trying to heal me. And surprise, I do feel a whole lot better! Isn’t it weird?”

Willow had to agree with Buffy on this one. “But hey, at least it wasn’t an assassin,” she began before a thought occurred to her. “Or, unless, they were trying to kill you with love?”

Again, she could almost hear Buffy smile. It made her smile, too. “Could be, Wills, but I doubt it. Look, hey, I’m gonna go and try and find Angel, see what he’s come up with on the whole not-so-friendly assassin front.”

Willow was about to say okay and hang up before she had a thought. “Okay, but hey, one more thing!”

“Okay, shoot.”

“What did the guy say to you, the one with the whammy and all?”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line before Buffy hesitantly answered, “I think he said something about facing my fears and letting them pass through me, I think? Why?”

Buffy waited for what seemed like hours before asking, “Willow? You there?” It wasn’t the night air that chilled her when her best friend finally answered.

”Buffy?” Willow replied with a small, shaky gasp. ”I have to go talk to Giles now.”

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That's not all I have, so if you want more, let me know, and I'll post it.