Title: Love is a Mystery
Author: Kat, a.k.a. KallieRose
E-mail: [email protected]
Rating: R
Pairing: Willow/Spike, Angel/Fred, Anya/Xander
Disclaimer: I acknowledge Joss Whedon as god of gods. All the characters in this story are his creation, along with Fox, the rest of the Mutant Enemy Crew, and whomever else wants to lay claim to them. I'm merely killing time by putting them in totally unrealistic situations :-)
Summary: The Scoobies and Angel and Fred are stuck on a mysterious island.  Don't want to give any more than that away.
Spoilers: Starts  somewhere after  the end of Buffy's season 5, I suppose, and then goes seriously AU after that.  Spike was *so* not in love with Buffy, and Willow and Tara never met and fell in love.

Love is a Mystery (cont.)

Chapter 11

It was a little past noon before Willow climbed sleepily out of bed.  The noise that had awakened her belonged to Buffy.  She could hear her friend using the hairdryer, and the whir of that device had brought her out of a delicious dream involving Spike, whipped cream, and a pair of velvet-lined handcuffs.

'Spike,' she thought, the word echoing through her mind.  She thought back to the previous evening, still not believing that she had had the nerve to confess her feelings to him.  Even more surprising to her was the fact that he had admitted that he felt something for her.  Her mind quickly drifted towards panic mode, thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong with the relationship, but she steered it back towards the land of reality.  She was working really hard to focus on the real and not allow herself to dwell on the 'what-ifs'.  It was just harder to do that some days than others.

Willow knew that she needed to talk to Buffy about her budding relationship with Spike.  Sure, he was a vampire, and Buffy was a slayer, and the two were about as opposite as day and night, but she was hoping that she could convince Buffy that this relationship was important to her, and that her friend would at least accept it, if not support her in her choice.  No, she considered, perhaps support was too much to ask for, at least right now.  But acceptance, that was not too much to ask, she hoped

The noise of the hairdryer had stopped, and Willow decided to make her move.  "Buffy," she called softly as she knocked on the door. 

The door opened, and Willow looked cheerfully into her friend's sleepy eyes.  Buffy had never been much of a morning person, and last night she had twisted and turned most of the night, trying desperately to think of some solution to the 'train wreck just waiting to happen', which was how she thought of the new relationship between Willow and Spike.

"Morning, Willow," she mumbled drowsily, trying to muster up some enthusiasm for the coming day.  Usually a shower and some quality time in front of the mirror would allow her to dredge up some energy and face the others as her usual chipper self.  But today that just didn't seem to be working.

"Afternoon," the redhead corrected with a smile.  She knew that Buffy was never at her most lucid shortly after waking, and she thought that maybe that would be a good thing.  They could have this discussion before Buffy had a chance to put her defenses up.

"So, about last night," she began.  "I hope you can be happy for me and for Spike.  We really do care about each other—"

"Sorry, Willow, but that bleach blond menace cares about nothing except where his next meal comes from," Buffy said harshly, brushing her hair with long, angry strokes. 

Okay, Willow thought bitterly, maybe defenseless-Buffy also equals tactless and judgmental-Buffy.  No, no, that's not fair, she told herself.  She's still going through a lot of stuff, remember?  She needs my support and my understanding.  Maybe I shouldn't have brought all this up right now.  The timing just wasn't right.

On the other hand, she couldn't let Buffy's accusation go unchallenged.  "That may have been true at one time, I admit it, but it's not true now and you know it.  He's helped us, and he hasn't had to.  He could have gotten that chip out, but he chose not to.  He could have left, but he chose not to do that either.  Maybe he doesn't have a soul, but he's got a heart, and he feels things and he loves and–"

"Sorry, Willow, but I'm not going to stand here and listen to you sing his praises.  He's a killer.  He'll always be a killer.  Just because he's not killing right this minute doesn't mean that he won't in the future.  What if that chip breaks or malfunctions?  And it will, sooner or later.  I promise you, the minute it does, he'll be killing left and right without a care for your feelings at all. "

"Sorry Buffy, but you're wrong on this one." Willow sighed.  Perhaps it was just too soon to talk to her about this.  They both needed time, she realized.  "Um, I guess I'll wait for you to be done in here.  Let me know when you're finished, okay?"

Buffy shrugged.  "You're welcome to it," she said calmly, leaving the bathroom and closing the door to her room behind her.

That *so* didn't go the way I wanted it to, Willow thought sadly. 

Her morning routine finished, Willow made her way to the kitchen and the comfort of a quick sandwich, before heading into the living room to see what everyone else was up to.  Buffy seemed to be watching a movie on the TV, her face a sullen mask which she turned briefly to Willow upon her entrance.  Angel and Fred were at the card table with Spike, and seemed involved in some sort of animated discussion about portals and demon dimensions. 

Xander and Anya had not yet made an appearance, apparently, which surprised the redhead slightly.  Anya tended to sleep in late whenever she could, but usually Xander was up fairly early, even with the strange hours that they all seemed to be keeping lately.

Suddenly a sharp scream pierced the air, and another.  It was Anya, she realized, as the screams seemed to blend together into one long hysterical tone.  As a group, they all headed for the stairway, following the ex-demon's voice to the source of her troubles.

Buffy was the first to reach her, and what she saw from the doorway of the couple's room made her blood run cold.  Because there, lying on the bed that Anya had so recently vacated, was the dull, lifeless body of Xander Harris. 

Anya had stopped screaming now, and had pulled the boy's unmoving form into her arms, cradling his head and whispering soft words to his dead ears.  Buffy attempted to come closer, but a growl and a flash of hostile eyes from Anya made her think better of it. 

"Anya," Fred whispered softly, coming in and *very* slowly edging closer to the bed, "What happened?"

Perhaps it was the tone of her voice, or the way that she moved, but Anya didn't seem as threatened by Fred as she had by Buffy.  She allowed the brunette to approach her, her eyes locked onto her face as if afraid to look away.  "I woke up," she said, choking on the words, "And he was d—de—gone."  Another sob wracked her body, and finally she allowed Fred to touch her and comfort her. 

The brunette drew Anya away from Xander's body until they were both standing in the middle of the room.  She wrapped her soft arms around the devastated woman and crooned softly to her, running a gentle hand over her hair and trying her best to calm the bereft woman.

"He was like this when you woke up?"

Anya simply nodded.  The usually loquacious woman no longer seemed capable of forming even the simplest of words.

"You didn't hear anything?" Angel asked, still standing with the others in the doorway.

"Of course she didn't," Fred remonstrated, thinking the question rather stupid.  "If she had, she would have done something, wouldn't you, Anya?"

The woman sniffled slightly, before turning tear-filled eyes to Angel and nodding. 

"Come on, Anya, let's get you out of here," Fred commanded in that still soft, still quiet voice of hers.  The two women made their way down the stairway and soon all the others could hear was the occasional murmured voice coming from the living room.

Angel, Spike, Buffy and Willow all moved slowly into the room, the two vampires looking over the body with curiosity.  The women, on the other hand, were stunned.  Willow was especially hard-hit.  She looked at the body of her lifelong friend, and all she could see was the boy that had given her a yellow crayon; her friend and her protector through school, and beyond.  He had given her her first dancing lesson; together they had learned how to ride bikes.  She was to have been his best man at his wedding to Anya.  But now that would never happen, she realized, shaking her head sadly. 

"Xander," she cried softly, as if the words and her tears would somehow make things right.

Spike was immediately at her side, and she threw herself into his arms, soaking his shirt with her tears and touching his long-dead heart with her cries.  "Let's get you somewhere quiet, luv," he said, attempting to pull her out of the room.  Her body moved with his, but her eyes stayed riveted on Xander's form until they had left the room, and a dark, solid wall made it impossible.

Angel looked at Buffy speculatively. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked warily.

"I'm thinking that his neck's been broken," she snapped back, wishing that she had someone to hold her like Willow did.  Not that she felt that way about Angel anymore, but still, it would have been nice if he had even offered, she thought.

Angel nodded, thinking about how to phrase the next sentence.  But Buffy beat him to it.  "Makes me wonder now if Giles' death wasn't quite so accidental," she remarked casually, but the dark vampire could see the quickly hidden pain that lurked behind her eyes.  She wasn't quite as tough as she'd like everyone to think, he knew.

Xander was gone.  Xander was gone.  Xander was gone.  The words ran through her head at breakneck speed, and each time they tore her heart just a little bit more.  Images of her life-long friend flowed behind Willow's closed eyes, as she and Anya held each other's sobbing bodies.  First there was 'broken yellow crayon' Xander.  Then there was 'shot down by Cordelia' Xander.  Followed quickly by 'broom-closet Xander.'  Then there was that brief, unfortunate incident with the fluking and Cordelia and Oz catching them.  Okay, maybe that memory wasn't such a happy one.  She quickly replaced it with Xander and the look of excitement on his face as he told them he had proposed to Anya.

They had had their entire adult life ahead of them, and now it was over.  Willow tried to reign in her out-of-control emotions, pulling away to look at the other woman.  "I'm so sorry, Anya," she whispered, taking in the look of absolute anguish on her friend's face.  "If there was anything, *anything* I could do to bring him back, I would."

Anya sniffled slightly, staring back at the redhead with red-rimmed eyes.  "I know, Willow.  I know.  You loved him almost as much as I did," she acknowledged sadly.

The ex-demon stopped for a moment, wiping a stray tear from her eye before she continued.  "We talked about this yesterday, you know," she admitted.  Willow looked at her in puzzlement, and Anya elaborated.  "About Giles, and how his death might not have been an accident."

Willow looked even more confused, so Anya spelled it out to her in harsh words, wondering how anyone could be that naïve.  "We all assumed that because nobody else was on the island, Giles' death must have been an accident.  We ignored the fact that there was another possibility."  The last sentence came out in a rushed whisper:  "It could have been one of us."

Looking into Anya's eyes, Willow realized that the woman was serious.  "B—but it couldn't have been.  I mean, none of us would do that.  Anya," she said insistently, then shook her head. "No, I can't believe it.  I *won't* believe it."  Her movements became more agitated as she considered the possibility briefly, before rejecting it again.  "No," she simply said.

Anya shook her head sadly at her friend's display.  The poor thing really *was* that naïve, she realized.  "I've been around a lot longer than you have, Willow.  I've seen friends do things to each other that would make you sick with disgust.  Heck, more often than not, I've been the one that they've called on to wreak their vengeance," she added, a small sliver of pride creeping into her voice. 

She sighed again.  "Even if you won't believe me, just be careful, okay?"

Willow nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on Anya's face.  She still didn't believe what Anya had told her, but telling her that she would be careful would cost her nothing, and might make the other woman feel better.

"I have a feeling that this is far from over…"

End of Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Their service for Xander was a somber affair.  They buried him in beside Giles later that evening, the two vampires once again doing the work while the women looked on in saddened silence.  Buffy took turns between holding a sobbing Anya, and shooting glares at Willow and Spike, both of whom she seemed to hold responsible for, well, something.  She also seemed to shy away from Angel and Fred, who stood together, the tragedy seeming to somehow bring closer as well.

Later, after the final words were said, they all gathered in the living room.  Spike thought back to a couple of days before, when he and Xander had happily engaged in a spot of computer-animated violence.  Who could have guessed that things would go so badly, so quickly?  This group had killed thousands of vampires, and stopped countless apocalypses, but now the group was being dismantled, one by one, and he would give just about anything to figure out how and why. 

Not that he cared too much what happened to the slayer, really.  Actually, he didn’t give a damn what happened to the bitch.  And he could envision a world without Anya or Fred with a slight twinge of regret, but nothing more.  But his Willow was at risk too, and that frightened him.  Very little frightened him these days, but that did.  Their relationship, if you could call something so new and tenuous a relationship, had such promise for the future.  For eternity.  But if she died now, so did any chance of their happiness.

He shook such deep thoughts from his head, and concentrated on the young woman sitting beside him.  She had been quiet and withdrawn all day, seeking him physically and touching him as often as she could.  She seemed to derive comfort from the casual contact, almost as if she needed to reassure herself that he was still there.  That was fine with Spike.  The feel of her warm hand on his arm, or the press of her soft thighs next to his, all these things made him happy, and seemed to make her misery easier to bear.  If he could provide solace for her, he was more than willing to do that.

Angel stood, walking slowly to stand before the assembled group.  "We need to talk," he told them solemnly.  Looking around, he saw that all eyes were on him.  Even Buffy seemed to have stopped shooting glares at Spike, and was giving him her full attention.

He began speaking quietly, trying to be considerate of the pain that the others were feeling.  He had never been all that fond of Xander, probably because the boy had always been so jealous of his relationship with Buffy.  Well, and the Angelus incident certainly hadn't helped to cement a bond of friendship between them.

"As you probably know by now, Xander had a broken neck," he began.  Anya seemed to shrink in upon herself, her eyes turning down.  Buffy held Anya's hands and shared some of her strength with the ex-demon.  After a moment, Anya nodded her thanks to Buffy, and looked up again at Angel.

The dark vampire swept the room with his eyes, watching as Willow turned and buried her head in Spike's chest, as the younger man ran a gentle hand through her hair and whispered quiet words of comfort.  Finally her tear-streaked face turned towards him once again. 

"I'm sorry, Angel," she said softly, "Please continue.  I promise, I'll be strong."

He stood uncertainly, not sure how to say what he needed to say next.  He didn't want to cause them any further pain, but something dangerous was going on here, and they needed to understand that.

"I know it's hard, but we need to figure out who's responsible for Xander's death, and for Giles' death as well.  Something, or someone, lured us out here, and one by one, they're killing us."  Several eyes looked back at him with understanding.  They had already figured out the danger they were facing, and although his bald statement of it was frightening, it wasn't a surprise.

"Are we—are we sure that there's nobody else here?" Fred asked quietly.  She didn't know these people well, but something inside told her that none of them was capable of doing anything like this.  Sure, maybe they were physically capable, but she didn't see the darkness of soul that would be needed to kill someone the way that these two men had been killed.

"Nope, nobody is here but us," Buffy insisted.  "We searched thoroughly."  She stopped for a moment, shooting Spike a slightly hostile look before continuing.  "Besides, wouldn't you demon-types have heard an extra heartbeat or smelled someone else, if there was anyone else to see or smell?"  She looked back and forth at the two vampires, who hesitated a moment before nodding their heads in confirmation.

"Nobody here but us chickens," Spike said softly.  "Or sitting ducks," he added uneasily. 

"So which one of you is doing this?" Buffy asked harshly, standing up and looking at Angel and Spike accusingly.  "Because if I have to, I'll stake you both."

"Buffy—" Angel began, stunned and stung by her allegation.  He held his hand out in an attempt to placate her.

Buffy stepped away from him quickly, fear and distrust in her eyes.  "Get away from me!  I don't know you anymore."

Angel took a step back, hurt and shocked by her reaction.  "Buffy," he said softly, trying to make eye contact in an effort to convince her of his sincerity.  "I would never hurt you.  You know that.  You're upset right now, but when you calm down, you'll realize that."

"Either that, or I'll be dead," she shot back, fear making her voice shake slightly.  She looked back at Anya, Fred and Willow, directing her next words at them.  "Souls disappear, and chips malfunction.  Remember that."  Then she whirled away from them, her hair flying out behind her as she ran from the room.  Shortly they heard her footsteps in the hall, and then the bang of the front door as she left the house.

"Over-react much?" Spike mocked her quietly to the silent room, and then shut his mouth quickly as four sets of eyes were turned in his direction. 

"Shut up," Angel growled.  "You're not making this any easier, childe."

"Didn't know that was my job, poof," the blond shot back, his eyes flashing yellow for just a moment.  Then he looked down and saw the sadness in Willow's eyes, and whispered "Sorry, luv," into her ear. 

Willow nodded her understanding.  She knew that the younger vampire tended to react quickly to a perceived attack, such as the one Buffy had launched at them, and then think later.  He might say something mean or snarky, but he didn't really mean it, and upon further thought, would probably regret it.  "It's okay," she mumbled into his chest, willing to forgive him almost anything as long as he would continue to hold her and make the rest of the world go away.

"I've never seen Buffy act like that," Anya said wonderingly.  "She was completely out of control."

"She doesn't always react well to a problem that she can't beat into submission," Angel agreed, sitting down and joining them.  The five of them sat quietly for a moment, each absorbed in their own deep thoughts. 

Finally, Anya broke their silence.  "I'm going to go upstairs and watch TV, okay?"  The unspoken words were the ones that they heard the loudest; the ones that told them that she needed to be alone with her thoughts, and the ghost of Xander.  They reminded her that they would be there for her, whenever she was ready.

The others moved back to the card table to talk, and after a bit Angel left to make some dinner.  Fred, deep in conversation with Willow, heard a series of loud bangs from within the other room, and decided that that was her cue to see what trouble Angel had gotten himself into.  She excused herself from the table, and with a slight bit of trepidation, snuck into the kitchen.

The sight that met her eyes there left her breathless.  But fortunately it wasn't the terrified, 'so scared you can't breathe' kind of breathless.  It was more the 'giggling so hard you can't breathe' kind of breathless.

In front of the oven stood Angel, master vampire, and one quarter of the Scourge of Europe.  And in his hair was an entire pot of cooked spaghetti, the long strings of pasta covering his hair and sliding down his face. 

"This isn't funny," he told her solemnly, as she erupted into peals of near-hysterical laughter. 

The serious look on his face as he stood there, covered in what was apparently an attempt at her dinner, was too much for the brunette.  She leaned back against the wall and slid down to the floor, sitting Indian-style, bent over as she tried in vain to bring her laughter under control.  Finally, when she had lapsed into the occasional giggle, she chanced a look back up at him.

He gazed back at her, his face impassive, but his eyes held a strange emotion that she couldn't quite define.  It reminded her that there was still so much she didn't know about the man before her, and the thought sobered her a bit. 

"So," she said, rising gracefully to her feet, and walking towards the vampire.  "Um, what happened here?  I mean, I know what happened, you obviously had a fight with one of those notoriously pesky spaghetti-demons," she added, unable to stop the grin that again broke the surface of her face.  "But, well…"

"I was making spaghetti, all right?" he answered, slightly miffed that she was still finding so much humor in his predicament.

She moved closer to him, close enough that the air around him was scented with her.  Unconsciously he sniffed the air, enjoying the scent of cinnamon and vanilla.  And pasta.  Damn.

Fred reached up and grabbed handfuls of wet noodles, tossing them carelessly towards the sink, where they stuck with a splat.  Soon Angel was no longer covered with pasta, but his hair had definitely seen better days.  "Go upstairs and take a shower," she ordered with a smile.  "I'll cover for you, tell them you're cooking them a special dinner or something.  Come back when you're done, and we can wow them all with your culinary prowess."

Angel gave the brunette a grateful look, before heading out the door that would take him into the foyer.

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