Title: The End
Author: Paradox761
Email: Paradox761@mail.com

Website: members.tripod.com/~Paradox761
Disclaimer: Joss and co. own all things Buffy, no copyright infringement is intended. So please don’t sue, I don’t have any money anyway.
Summary: Post “Wrecked”, alt ending for season 6, and the series. B/W/X-friendship, Slight B/X and Ay/X.
Spoilers: “Wrecked”, and most of season 6.
Author’s note: For the purposes of characterization, in this story Spike did not attempt to rape Buffy. I am NOT a Spike fan, and this is NOT a fix-it fic. But I started this story before that happened, and I find it hard to write Spike as a sympathetic character after that scene. So to continue with the story as planned, that scene didn’t happen. Also, this story takes place before the Angel episode “Sleep Tight”. Also, I started this story after “Wrecked”, as I was starting to become unhappy with the way season six was turning out. I must say though, I couldn’t be happier with the way it ended. I could never top “Grave”, nor would I try. So I’ve gone in a different direction with this. But I did paraphrase some lines from Xander’s speech.
Dedication: To Jordan and Jessica, my angels. May they rest in peace.
Special thanks to: Wayne, Rob Clark, Ghostrider, Ozmandayus, Maggie C., Furious George, Bill, Calen, Chorlton, John, Wicked Raygun, DaBear, Cobra, Jeconais, Nathan Postmark, David, Drake Roberts, Angelus, Queen Boadicea, Scott, Malaskor, and The Crowe for the feedback and the encouragement with this story. I really appreciate it.

(11/12)

Willow stood at the window in her bedroom with her back to the door, looking deceptively harmless and oblivious to the world around her.  In reality she saw everything that happened around her.  Mostly everything anyway.  She could see in her mind’s eye, the attack on the demon forces in the front.  She watched as one by one her allies fell to the slayer’s forces.  And she watched as Xander, who had been the most important person in her life since she could remember, took a human life in her name.  And she smiled.  She could feel his anger, his hatred as it burned inside him.  He had given into his dark impulses, and Willow knew that she had already won.  No matter what happened next, she had already done more damage than any vampire, or demon/human cyborg, or hell goddess ever could.  And the darkness inside her took great pleasure in that.

She didn’t have to turn around to know that Buffy and Wesley had just walked into the room.  “Impressive,” she said, not turning around.  “I have to admit, I didn’t see it coming.  You calling in reinforcements.  And feeding the robot just enough information to keep us from figuring out what you really had planned.  Very clever.  I assume the plan was Xander’s.”  Finally she turned around to face the pair, giving them an unsettling smile.  “It still isn’t enough to stop me, I hope you know that.  None of you will leave here alive.”

“We don’t want to hurt you, Willow,” Buffy said.  “But we’ll do what we have to do.”

Willow’s smile just grew.  “You still think you have power over me,” she said, chuckling slightly.  “You have no idea what real power is.”

“And you have no idea what a slayer is capable of,” Buffy bit back.  She approached Willow carefully, like a hunter stalking it’s prey.  Willow’s smile never wavered.  Wesley just looked on, waiting for a chance to intervene while Willow was distracted.

“You want to dance?” Willow asked.  She reached up and touched her cheek, where there would have still been a bruise had it not been for her healing magic.  “I guess I do owe you one, don’t I?”

Buffy took a fighting stance.  “Come and get it.”

Willow leapt into the air with inhuman speed, and started coming down right on top of Buffy.  Buffy tried to dive out of the way but she wasn’t fast enough, and Willow’s fist caught her shoulder, sending her crashing to the ground.  Buffy tried to tumble backward, to gain some distance from her opponent, but Willow stayed with her the whole way.  She delivered blows with incredible speed, faster than anything Buffy had ever fought.  Buffy blocked as best she could, but a few of the punches landed.  The force behind them would have surprised Buffy, had she had time to be surprised.  The slayer concentrated on the fight, watching the flurry of movements from the witch until they seemed to slow down.  Of course in reality, Buffy had sped up.  She blocked every punch and kick, and got in a few of her own.  One kick to the midsection sent Willow flying across the room.

Buffy ran across the room after her.  Jumping into the air, she grabbed onto one of the posts of the canopy bed and swung herself around just as Willow was standing up, catching the witch in the side of the head with her foot.  She landed on top of her as she fell and got in two more punches to the face before Willow threw her off, sending her flying across the room and slamming into the wall.

“I’m stronger and faster than you, slayer,” Willow said, rising to her feet.  “Give it up.”  Buffy’s answer was to charge her, catching her in the midsection with her shoulder and driving her against the far wall.  Willow shoved Buffy hard to the floor.  “This ends now,” she said, raising her hands toward the fallen slayer.

“Constrino!” Wesley called out.  Willow looked up and saw the purple energy from Wesley’s outstretched hands heading straight for her.  Willow just held up her hand and the energy stopped inches from it, hanging there in mid air.

“Borrowed power doesn’t impress me, Watcher,” she said.  “It can be so easily manipulated.”  And with that, she gave the energy a shove and sent it flying back toward Wesley.  Not having enough time to dodge it, the energy struck him straight in the chest and wrapped around his arms.  Wesley lost his balance and tumbled to the ground.

“Bloody hell!”

“Now, where was I?” Willow said, turning her attention back to Buffy.  “Oh yes, I remember now.”  She held up her hand and a bolt of red magic shot out, straight at Buffy.  But it struck an invisible barrier, inches from Buffy’s skin.  Willow pulled her hand back in surprise.  “A protection spell!” she growled.

Just then, Angel and Spike bound into the room.  Followed closely by Xander and Gunn.  They all just kind of froze for a moment, looking at the scene before them.  Willow backed away from Buffy.  She started looking around the room, like she was seeing it for the first time.  Angel headed for Buffy, to make sure she was all right.  Gunn checked on Wesley.  But Xander kept his eyes on Willow, who still showed no acknowledgement of anyone else in the room.

“I can’t believe I didn’t sense it sooner,” Willow said, looking back at Buffy.  “I can see it in your aura, his too,” she said, motioning towards Wesley.  Then her eyes locked onto Xander.  “And yours, but it’s not the same spell.  Very clever indeed.  Anya is the caster I’m assuming.  It feels like her magic, old and out of practice.”  She paused.  “But there’s something else, something more familiar.  She couldn’t have done it alone.”  Willow stopped at her bedroom window.  She turned to look out it, then back to Xander.  “It’s her,” she said with a small amount of surprise.  “She’s come back to me.”

Willow held her hands up in the air, and a swirl of light appeared in front of her.  It got bigger, and bigger, until finally it disappeared all together in a flash, leaving Anya and Tara sitting on the bedroom floor atop a patch of grass and dirt.  They both swooned as they materialized.  Anya looked like she was almost going pass out, but Tara shook it off fairly quickly.  She stood up and turned to find her former lover standing in front of her.

“My love,” Willow said, holding her arms open.  “You’ve come back to me.”

“I’ve come back to help stop you,” Tara said.

“That doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that you’re here.  You’ll understand soon enough, why I had to do what I’ve done.  I did it for us, baby.  I did it all for us.”

Tara flinched at that.  Xander took advantage of the distracted Willow to help Anya to her feet and take her to the other side of the room, where Gunn and Wesley still were.

“For me?  You darkened your soul with black magic for me?  All the people you’ve hurt, all the things you’ve done to your friends.  How can you possibly think that’s what I would want?”

“I’ve done what I’ve done to grow more powerful.  The only people I’ve hurt are those who stand in my way.  Can’t you see what I’ve become?  How wondrous the world can be for us now.  We can go anywhere we want, do anything we want, have anything we want.  Nobody will be able to tell us what to do.”

“I can see what you’ve become, Willow.  And it’s not the woman I fell in love with.  That woman was warm, and sweet, and loving.”

“She was a doormat!”  Willow shouted.  She reached out and grabbed Tara by the shoulders.  “People used her, they walked all over her.  I won’t let that happen again, I won’t!  If you can’t see how extraordinary I’ve become, I will make you see,” she said in a voice that made Tara shiver with fear.  Willow let go of her and turned to the others.  “Right after I take care of them.”

“Listen to yourself Willow!  Listen to what you’re saying!” Tara insisted.  “These are your friends.  These are the people you’ve shared your life with, the people you love.  Can’t you remember that?  Can’t you remember how that used to feel, before your soul became so dark?”

Willow smirked as she faced her friends.  “Darkness.  You all talk about it like you’re immune from it.  Like it doesn’t touch you.  You think that because you kill a few demons, you’re all righteous angels?  Darkness touches us all.  Ever since the first caveman clubbed the second caveman over the head to steal his food, it’s been a part of us.  To deny it, is to admit that you are powerless against it.  Burying all your dark impulses only gives them more power.  You think you’re so much better than me, because you haven’t given in.  But you have given in, all of you.  You just won’t admit it.”

Willow turned to Buffy, who was still sitting on the floor, Angel kneeling behind her.  “You tried to kill Faith after she nearly killed Angel.  Stabbed her in the stomach with her own blade.  You think you did it just to save his life?  You did it because you hated her.  Because she hurt you, and you wanted her to die because of it.  And to stand here, and be judged by two vampires and a vengeance demon, who have killed more people than I ever could in ten lifetimes, is so ridiculous it’s almost laughable!”

Willow turned again and locked eyes with Xander.  She walked over to him slowly, both of them not taking their eyes of each other.  “And you, who gave into your dark impulses and killed a man not twenty minutes ago.”  Xander flinched a little at that.  Everyone else in the room except Gunn looked shocked.  Especially Buffy.

“You saw that?” Xander asked.

“I see everything.”

“I’ve never thought I was better than you Willow,” he said.  “Never.  I make mistakes.”

“Is that what it was, a mistake?  Can you honestly tell me that if you had it to do over, you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing?  Can you say that you didn’t enjoy it, watching the life drain out of him?  Hurting him, because he hurt you.  I saw you with Warren.  If he hadn’t let Spike in, you would have killed him too.  We both know that.  So what makes you so different from me?”  Xander didn’t answer.  Willow backed away.

“You’ll never understand that though, none of you.  You’ll always be the righteous, and I’ll always be the wicked.  You’ll always see the world as just black and white, good and evil.  Because to see it any way else, you’d have to admit to yourselves that you’re not perfect.  That darkness lurks within us all.

“But none of that matters anymore.  Because I’m ending this now, once and for all.”

Willow took a few more steps back, until everyone but Tara was in her sight.  Her glazed over black as she raised her hands at her sides.  No one moved, no one said a word.  Those few seconds seemed to stretch on for days.  Until Xander slowly started walking towards Willow.  He stopped only a few feet in front of her.  Then he reached into his shirt and took off the protection amulet, dropping it onto the floor.

“What are you doing?”  Xander didn’t answer.  “You can’t stop me.”

“Yeah, I get that.  But where else am I going to go?  You’ve been my best friend my whole life.  If I’m going to die, I want it to be with you.  I want the last thing I see to be you.”

“Is this your master plan?  You’re going to stop me by telling me that you love me?”

“Well, I was going to walk you off a cliff and hand you an anvil, but it seemed kind of cartoony.”

“Still making jokes.”

“I’m not joking.  I get what you’re saying.  None of us are perfect, we all have darkness inside us.  I get that now, you know I do.  It doesn’t mean that we have to give into it though.  It’s just one of those things that makes being human hard.  Maybe we did forget that.  I know we hurt you.  And I know that you’re about to do something incredibly evil and stupid and hey, this is still where I want to be.  You’re Willow.”

“Don’t call me th…”

“First day of kindergarten you cried, ‘cause you broke the yellow crayon and you were too afraid to tell anyone.  You’ve come pretty far, killing all your friends, not a terrific notion but the thing is, yeah.  I love you.  I love crayon-breaky Willow and I love scary dark-eyed Willow.  So if I’m going out, it’s here.  You want to kill us all, you start with me.  I’ve earned that.”

“You think I won’t?”

“It doesn’t matter, I still love you.”

“Shut up!” Willow screamed.  She slashed her hands through the air and Xander winced at the magical blow, his head bouncing down.  When he lifted it again there were three slash marks across his face.

“I love you.”  Willow slashed at the air again.  This time the gashes appeared across Xander’s chest, ripping his shirt.  “I love…”  She blasted him with a bolt of magic, sending him crashing to the floor.

“Shut up!” she shouts, her face growing angrier by the second. 

“Xander, stop!” Buffy called out.

“No, Buffy,” Angel said, as she tried to get up.  “He’s distracting her.  He’s giving us a chance.”

“A chance to do what?”

Angel glanced over to the other side of the room, and then back at Xander and Willow.  “To free Wesley.  To bind her.  Come on.”  Angel stood, helping Buffy to her feet.  The two moved across the room to where the others were, where Wesley still lay.  “Wes,” Angel said, trying to get the former watcher’s attention.  “Wes, how do we break this binding spell?”

“You can’t,” Wesley said, his voice sounding drained.  “Only the caster can remove the spell.”

“So remove it then,” Buffy said.

“I can’t, I’m bound,” Wesley said.  “I couldn’t levitate a pencil right now if I wanted to.”

“There has to be another way,” Gunn said.

“Willow could lift it, since she reflected the spell back at me.”  Wesley looked over to where Willow was still beating on Xander.  “But I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.”

Spike leaned down to join the conversation.  “What about Anya and Tara, could they bind her?”

Buffy looked up and saw Tara, trying to get around Willow without letting her notice.  She finally managed it and headed straight for the others.  She knelt down and checked on Anya first.

“Is she going to be okay?” Buffy asked.

Tara nodded.  “Teleportation can be a little rough if you’re not the caster.  She’ll be fine in a little while.”

“Xander, no,” Anya moaned.  That’s when Buffy noticed that she was crying.  “Xander, don’t.  I love you.  I love you, Xander…”

“Is she dreaming?” Gunn asked.

“No,” Buffy said, casting a glance at where Xander and Willow were still facing off.  “She knows what he’s doing.  Tara, can you do anything?”

Tara shook her head.  “I’m not powerful enough to bind her.”

“We should get out of here,” Gunn said.

“It wouldn’t do us any good,” Spike replied.  “She’d come after us when she was done with him.  We wouldn’t get far.”

“We have to do something,” Gunn insisted.

Spike just looked up at what was happening before them.  “Have faith in him,” he said.  “He knows what he’s doing.”

Buffy turned, confused.  Xander was just distracting her, to give them a chance to think of something.  Or maybe to get away.  There was no way he could… “Oh, God.”  That’s when Buffy realized what Spike meant, what Xander was going to do.  A single tear rolled down her cheek.  “Oh God, no.”

“Tell me now, Xander!” Willow screamed, giving him another slash across the face.  “Tell me now!”

His face and chest were covered in scratches and welts.  His shirt was shredded.  There was blood everywhere.  His left arm was now cradled in his midsection, probably broken, along with a few ribs.  His breathing was ragged.  He spit blood out onto the floor before he spoke.

“I…love you.”

The rage that had been boiling up in Willow finally hit its peak.  She wanted to him to say that he hated her, to curse her for what she was doing.  How could she justify killing him, even if only in her own mind, if his last words were to tell her that he loved her?  But finally she just snapped.

“SHUT UP!” she screamed, her voice dark and foreboding.  Her hands came together for a blast of energy, striking Xander in the chest.  Bigger than any blast she had ever created.  Every ounce of power she possessed went into this blast of bright red crackling energy.  Xander cried out in agony as the magical energy tore through his body.

Buffy screamed, tears streaming down her face.  Anya was crying so hard she wasn’t even making sounds anymore.  Buffy tried to run to him, but Angel held her back.  And when her strength became too much for him to hold, Spike grabbed hold of the other arm.  Tara held onto Anya.  Wesley cursed under his breath as he struggled against bonds that he knew he had no chance of breaking free from.  Gunn just looked on in awe.

When the blast finally stopped, Willow was so wiped she fell to one knee.  Xander wasn’t moving.  His eyes fluttered a little.  He was still breathing, but barely.  He was in death’s icy grip, but he wasn’t gone yet.

“Tell me now, Xander,” Willow said softly, out of breath.  She laughed.  “Tell me now.”

Xander spoke, barely a whisper.  It was so low in fact, no one could hear what he had said, not even Willow.  But he kept whispering, the same thing over and over again.  Willow moved toward him, crawling on her hands and knees.  She needed to hear it.  She needed to hear him damn her, curse her name.  She crept even closer, until she was on top of him, her ear inches from his mouth.  Until finally she could hear his labored words.

“Forgive…me.”

Buffy screamed again when she saw the green energy blade erupt from Willow’s back.  Tara’s back was turned when she heard the sound.  She knew what it was.  She pulled Anya into a hug and held her tightly, clenching her eyes shut to hold back the tears.  Buffy’s legs collapsed under her.  Angel and Spike just guided her to the floor, and held her while she cried.

Willow just stared at Xander in shock.  The blackness drained from her eyes, leaving them their normal green.  Xander was glad that the last thing he would see in this world were Willow’s eyes.  His Willow’s eyes.  The look on her face slowly changed from shock to sadness.  She tried to speak.

“I…I…”

“I know,” Xander whispered.  His thumb slid off the button on his light saber and the blade retracted, leaving Willow to collapse on top of him.  “Love you,” he said.  And for the first time in a long time, he saw peace in her eyes.  Acceptance.  She laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes.

They died the same way they had lived since they were five years old.  Together.