Title: Judgment
Author: Medea
Email: medealives@hotmail.com
Pairing: Willow/Angel friendship, Buffy/Spike
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Willow's joyride in 'Wrecked' was only the beginning of her downward spiral.
Spoilers: Through BtVS "Smashed" and "Wrecked"; and AtS "Lullaby"
Archive: Please do.
Disclaimer: Joss created. I am not Joss. Therefore, not mine, never will be. Pity, that.
Note: A response to Kendra A's challenge to "fix" Wrecked, although I don't really feel that the ep needed fixing. There's nothing wrong with taking a character through the moral gray zone. I kinda thought it gave Willow some interesting nuances.
Note 2: This is not part of the Masters and Minions universe -- Willow is human. For Willow/Angel fans -- it comes later in the story, but it *will* come.
Feedback: Much appreciated: medealives@hotmail.com

~Part: 20~


Orange and white darted in random, fluid paths beneath the water's surface. Willow watched, mesmerized, as the carp swam easily around their pond, oblivious to the comings and goings of the land creatures who stared down at them. She'd been trying to wrap her brain around impossible twists and turns in multiple dimensions for days now, yet somehow it felt soothing to watch the unpredictable twists and turns of the fish. It didn't really make sense. Maybe it was because all she had to concentrate on were the fish, their random wanderings, and she could just let go and follow wherever they led.

"Imagine what would happen if we let fish design the freeways," Tara mused beside her, tilting her head thoughtfully.

Willow grinned and squeezed Tara's hand. "Actually, I think traffic might be better if we did," she countered, wrinkling her brow as she followed the dizzying, repetitive loops made by a few carp on the fringes. Her gaze wandered toward Tara's hand clasped in hers. A surge of warmth washed over her at the sight of their entwined fingers, although the feeling was clouded by her ever-present guilt. Slowly, she raised her eyes to meet Tara's and said, "Thanks for showing me this. It's so pretty here."

Tara nodded in agreement as the two of them admired the peaceful, secluded Japanese garden Tara had discovered a few days earlier. A slight frown tugged at her mouth. "Just about anything would have to be pretty after being cooped up in a hotel room for so long," Tara surmised.

"Yeah," Willow agreed.

Boy did she ever agree. She'd forgotten how much she needed the feel of a breeze fanning across her skin or the scent of green, living things.

A honeyed ray of sunshine bathed her face and Willow gave herself over to the delicious, breathtaking feel of life around her. The warm air was so thick with it that she almost swooned. Bees and blue dragonflies darted about and if Willow concentrated on them, she could block out the street noises in the distance. The buzzing and hum of gossamer wings was softened by the occasional rustling of leaves when the wind stirred them.

Sultry was the only word for it.

Los Angeles had its fair share of smog and sun and haze, but this was sultry. In the late afternoon heat, the air was moist and heavy with the scent of lotus and azalea. Without realizing it, Willow slowly grew attuned to the web of life surrounding her. Her skin literally tingled with it. The heady sensation soon drew her mind upwards and outwards. Here, the brief fragrance of cherry blossoms that had bloomed in the garden many weeks earlier. There, the cool salt spray of the ocean, miles from any coastline, where only they great whales ventured. Still further, the rich musk and damp-wool scent of wildlife on a high mountain ridge.

Layer upon layer melted away...sensations blended into one another...

Then Willow noticed something, not wrong exactly, but *off*. A musty, smoky, faintly herbal smell tickled her senses - one she associated with dusk and quiet companionship, with that satisfying, restful moment when the day's work was done. But it didn't belong here. Frowning, Willow realized where she remembered it from.

Garat's pipe.

"Yours is a beautiful world."

Willow's eyes snapped open and her heart nearly leaped into her throat.

There before her stood Garat.

In. Her. World.

"This can't be real," Willow breathed, astonished. She closed her eyes, steadied herself, then re-opened them.

Garat was still there. He blinked at her in silent bemusement, the quills on his chin twitching as they had so many times when Poydras had done something foolhardy or impulsive.

Perplexed and mildly disoriented, Willow took a step back. "Oh, God," she gulped. Her stomach churned and she half expected the ground to fall out beneath her as a prelude to the leap into another dimension. Panic rose at the thought that everything was destabilizing again, so soon after she'd adjusted to being back. How was this possible? She gaped at the diminutive yet commanding trainer she'd grown to know so well during her stay in Poydras's dimension. "How did you get here?"

"Willow? Are you all right?" Tara asked warily, following Willow's wild-eyed gaze to empty air near a bamboo grove.

Startled, Willow spared a dumbfounded glance for her companion, then looked back to Garat. Couldn't Tara see him?

Garat smiled cryptically and explained, "You brought me here."

A nondescript, navy blue cargo van rolled to a stop before a warehouse near the Santa Monica freeway. Four men, lean but muscular, climbed out. They entered the warehouse silently, without the easy banter or joking of comrades. Everything about their demeanor suggested a team of professionals.

Inside, another man sat before a laptop that was perched on a folding card table. The wall nearby was lined with surveillance cameras and electronic communications devices of every kind. Not raising his eyes from the keyboard, the seated man observed brusquely, "You're late. Travers expects an update within the hour."

Without flinching, one of the newly arrived men replied, "It's confirmed. The Slayer and her Watcher are holed up at a hotel in the city with two vampires and a number of humans."

"Threat assessment?" the seated man asked.

"The vampires are old, fairly powerful. The Slayer herself has survived beyond expectations; she's stronger than most, and battle-hardened. The Watcher knows our organization; he's probably anticipating an attack, so we can't count on the element of surprise. As for the others, not enough information yet. They have their weaknesses, though. There's an infant, and one of the humans seems to be an invalid, maybe even crazy. She nearly took a leap out of a window," a second man from the van reported.

A third man from the team pulled a carton of leftover Thai noodles from a small refrigerator, shoveled a large clump onto his fork and mumbled around the mouthful, "So what now?"

"Now we wait for final authorization to eliminate. This job's the big one. This time, we do things strictly by the book," the man at the laptop answered.

The others nodded indifferently, settling down for a quick meal or a cigarette while they waited.

The long, dark silence was punctuated every now and then by hollow, echoing drips of water. Otherwise, the vast network of sewer tunnels was tomb-like in its silence.

In that silence, Angel wandered alone, jaw clenched with grief and pain as he waited for sunset so he could escape into the night. The heartache had been so bad, he'd crept away from the hotel, unnoticed.

It had been pure torment.

Not for the first time in his long existence, Angel cursed his vampire senses. He'd tried to block it all out. He'd retreated to the basement, as far from Buffy and Spike as he could go, and if it had been any other couple, he would have been able to tune them out. Vampires weren't quite the slaves to their senses that so many humans imagined them to be. Indeed, in order to maintain control, they *had* to develop discipline over their heightened awareness of scents and sounds, lest the dizzying array of stimuli around them drive them mad. But once he'd realized what Buffy and Spike were doing, once the image of his first love writhing in ecstasy with someone who had betrayed him and caused him so much pain had been burned into his mind, he couldn't block out the scents and sounds, even as faint as they were across such a long distance.

Onward he trod through dank passages, everywhere the surfaces slick with moisture. Dark, glistening walls; pipes sweating with condensation; his face damp with tears.

Desperately, he sought the numbing cold he'd felt just over a year ago. Anything, anything to make the hurt go away.

Still, the water drops fell from pipes into shallow puddles pooled below, each drip like the ticking of a clock, marking the painfully slow passage of seconds, minutes, hours until he would be free to venture out into a darkened city.

Angel walked on.

Somehow, even after all the supernatural beings and freakish monsters he'd faced, Xander still managed to find this particular situation bizarre. Maybe because it almost verged on being kind of...normal?

Anya was sitting nearby on one of the overstuffed lounges in the lobby, leafing through a copy of Modern Bride that was thick enough to rival the Los Angeles yellow pages. Giles, Wesley, and Angel's friend, Fred, were gathered together at the counter to the office, poring over a sea of papers, all covered with scary Fred scribblings - the kind of incomprehensible, trans-dimensional calculations that Xander was glad *he* didn't have to try to figure out.

Instead, stripped down to jeans and a tee shirt, he leaned into powerful strokes as he sanded the side of a cradle.

A cradle he'd started building for Angel's son about four days ago.

Angel's. Son.

As in infant human child fathered by Deadboy.

It shouldn't be possible.

Yet Xander had seen the child, as real and solid as the wood beneath his hands. He could hear Lorne singing softly to him from the office, which summoned up all sorts of quivery-stomach thoughts about parenthood. Was he ready? Would he ever be ready, after everything he'd seen in his life on the Hellmouth? And more importantly, would their lives ever get to a point where things were quiet enough and safe enough for him even to consider bringing a child into the world? Shoot, maybe kids existed in some nice, happy dimension before being born here - some nice, happy dimension where they'd be better off staying, given what he'd seen in less than a quarter-century of living.

As it was, with Willow's most-recent setback, not to mention the likelihood that the Watchers Council would be sending a team of friendly assassins for a visit, it was beginning to seem like they'd never be able to go back to-

"Xander, don't you think the lobby of Angel's excessively opulent place of business would make a lovely site for our wedding reception?"

--huh?

Xander sighed and shook his head with amused chagrin. Trust Anya to have the right priorities. For Anya, that is. In a really crazy way, she was a source of sanity for him amid the never-ending crises. If Anya was still able to think about wedding receptions and frilly, godawful bridesmaids' gowns, the world couldn't be ending, could it?

"Ahn, somehow I don't think a vampire's lair is the kind of address you want to be putting on wedding invitations. There's something about white, papier-maché church bells and blood that just doesn't mix," Xander suggested patiently, not breaking the rhythm of his strokes.

"Oooh, a wedding? Here?" Fred piped up excitedly. She crossed from her place near the counter to drop beside Anya and peer over her shoulder at the bridal magazine.

"Well, it's not like we'll be able to return to Sunnydale any time soon. Not with the Watchers out to kill their own Slayer. After all, it's always the sidekicks who get caught in the crossfire," Anya observed blithely. She narrowed her eyes at the sight of Fred's attire: jeans, plain sneakers, and a red tee shirt with a picture of Marvin the Martian on the front. "You really shouldn't wear a shirt like that, especially around a warrior in the battle between good and evil. It marks you as expendable."

"Oh?" Fred stammered awkwardly, her nose wrinkling above a timid smile. "I guess I'd never thought about it. Actually, *not* being treated as expendable is still kind of a novelty for me. They don't really care too much for humans in Pylea."

Anya scowled in distaste. "You mean that dimension with the ridiculous dances and loud-mouthed demons in need of serious dental work? Ugh! I hope you weren't stuck there for long. I visited once about three hundred years ago, and I didn't like it at all..."

Xander shifted his position to sand the foot of the cradle, letting the soft scratch of the sandpaper soothe his mind and drown out the conversation. He was still preoccupied by what had happened to Wills this afternoon, and wasn't quite ready for Anya's chit-chat mode. True, their lives had slipped into an odd kind of normalcy during the past few days. He'd even found work at a local construction site. The money helped, but it wasn't really about that. He just cared about Willow and Buffy, and couldn't handle the endless waiting, day after day, not kowing if or when the Council would launch and attack, not being able to do a damned thing to help Willow fix the mess she'd made. He'd learned pretty early on that he wasn't Book Guy. He was more Hands-On Guy; he liked having something to do.

So he ran his fingers over the smooth grain of the wood, its surface lightly powdered from his repetitive sanding, and tried to think of what he *could* do for his friends instead of dwelling on all the things he couldn't do. And truthfully, he had to admit that he wasn't totally helpless. Xander was even pretty sure he knew what Willow needed most: a chance to laugh, to smile, to be Willow. He didn't need super powers or a Watcher's years of training to help with that.

It had been a long, long time since he'd felt insecure or inadequate about himself for being plain old Xander, Mr. Regular Guy, surrounded by friends who all seemed to have some supernatural goodness to offer. He'd had his moment of truth in a face-off over a ticking bomb in the basement of Sunnydale High. In one, breathtaking, life-altering heartbeat, with death literally staring him right in the eye, everything had resolved in crystal clarity, and from then on, he'd known. He didn't have to prove himself to anyone.

Deadboy might be able to teach Willow about meditation, and he'd probably cornered the market on dealing with mountains of guilt at leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. Giles, Wesley, and Fred might be Willow's best source of tech support on the whole trans-dimensional puzzle. Tara could definitely make Willow feel loved. But Xander had something crucial that Willow needed, something more powerful than magic or Slayer strength or all the volumes of Watcher learning ever compiled.

He had her past.

He *was* her past, her link to a time when life was innocence and wonder.

Xander had been there for her through everything, knew her from way back before their lives had grown so complicated. More than anyone, he could help Willow find her way back to herself. If it was at all possible, after her centuries of out-of-control dimension-hopping, Xander knew he had the best shot at it.

As he pondered what he'd do when Willow and Tara got back from their walk, a chance remark broke into his thoughts.

"...anyway, it should have been obvious to anyone who knows anything about dimensional manipulation that this would happen," Anya observed off-handedly, flipping a page in her mammoth bridal compendium. Her eyes lit up and she exclaimed, "Oooh, now there's a centerpiece for the reception! See, honey?" She leaned toward Xander and held the magazine out for him to admire. "An ice-sculpture swan. We could have one custom designed in a different shape, like a Nagork'n demon. That way, if anyone attacked during the wedding, we could snap off the spikes and use them as spears."

Xander grinned somewhat incredulously. He loved Anya, he really did. Her often baffling outlook on the world was a large part of that, although he didn't think he'd ever get used to her bizarre logic.

"Ahn, only you would think to include a tastefully subdued arsenal in our wedding decorations." He leaned up to give her a quick kiss. "Who says you can't mix romance and practicality?"

Anya beamed adoringly at him, accepting his wry remark as a compliment.

"Er, Anya, do you mean to say you'd anticipated Willow's latest setback?" Giles asked, a pained expression signaling his frustration.

"Oh, sure," Anya answered with a shrug. "Anyone knows that the human mind isn't equipped to handle all the variables involved in working with multiple dimensions. The human brain is finite. It doesn't have nearly the capacity it would take to maintain control over every contingency. Why else do you think there's a need for vengeance demons? Humans are restricted within a clear-cut set of boundaries and physical laws for a reason. If people could make their own wishes a reality, it would be total chaos. Any time you mess with the what ifs and might have beens of alternate realities or parallel dimensions, it has repercussions in this world. How do you think I managed to grant wishes for all those scorned women?"

Xander blinked at his fiancée, dumbfounded by her revelation.

The entire lobby was silent for several moments.

Giles was the first to find his voice again. Quietly, he asked, "Do you think you might have said something sooner?"

"Why?" Anya looked completely taken aback. "It's part of the test. If I'd said anything, it would have ruined it."

Xander dropped his forehead against his palm and closed his eyes. Once again, he was baffled by the mysteries of Anya-logic. Raising his head, he reached out, grasped Anya's hand in his, and prompted gently, "Ahn, sweetheart? How would you like to share with the rest of the class what you know about this test?"

Night fell at last, banishing the sun's deadly rays, and once again it was safe for a vampire to roam out in the open.

Footsteps echoed through a bright, sterile corridor at LAX. A solitary figure strode from the gate, having debarked from a private, chartered flight, to the Immigration checkpoint. Although the darkness outside caused the interior scenery of the corridor to reflect back off of the long window panels, the lone traveler's image could not be seen. To an independent observer staring at the window's reflections, only the clipped sound of purposeful steps would mark the mysterious, phantom passage.

The traveler arrived at the Immigration counter, manned by a bored, uniformed official who looked like he would rather be anywhere else. Reaching into the breast pocket of an impeccably tailored, black suit, the traveler withdrew his passport and slid it across the counter toward the Immigration officer.

The officer glanced down briefly at the photograph in the passport and compared it to the refined, dark-haired man who waited patiently before him. Satisfied as to the man's identity, the officer asked, "How long do you intend to stay in the country?"

"A few weeks, unless complications arise."

"And what is the purpose of your visit?"

"Business."

Following his usual routine, the Immigration officer stamped the passport and slid it back across the counter. "Welcome to the United States, Mr. Diaz."

The official greeting was met with a silent nod.

Ramon Diaz proceeded toward the exit, where a limousine awaited him.

And after that...to business.




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