"The Power and the Other Thing," part 2
Written for the willowficathon, which I failed to link to last time. Other headers in part 1.
*
When she got home-- back to Lilah's, but it was hard to deny the home-ness that the place had developed-- she opened up the file on Glorificus. There were pictures of an undeniably hot blonde; Wolfram & Hart were pretty sure that was her current form. She had demon minions, which the firm's army of darkness was systematically massacring. The rest was mostly speculation: Glorificus seemed to be invincibly powerful in this dimension, but her power seemed to fluctuate, to feed off of something. The rash of insanity? The firm's experts had considered the possibility, but nobody had seen it happen.
If Glorificus had a weakness, it was that she seemed to be bound to this dimension. But that was also a liability: attempts to banish her back to her home dimension had failed.
"Invincibly powerful," Willow said. "Damn it." She was going to die again, and it wasn't going to be long until she did.
What do you do if you don't have long to live? You call the girl who gave you her phone number, get her to invite you to her weird student apartment that smells like patchouli and cat. The cat belonged to Tara's roommate, she said, but the patchouli was hers. Tara had a few spells marked in the book she'd been reading: "I didn't think-- didn't think you'd call, but I, um, I was optimistic anyway."
She wanted to make a contained flame. It was easy to make fire but hard to control it, to make it burn the magic and not the furniture. "Should be easier if one of us works on the fire and the other one makes the bubble to hold it in," Willow said.
So they drew a chalk circle on the hardwood floor and joined hands around it. Tara made a tiny greenish flame, and Willow made invisible glass to surround it. The flame leaped in its prison, changed colors, threw sparks that went out violently when they hit the glass. As the fire grew angrier, it got harder to hold it in: not so hard that Willow was straining, but she felt like the last quarter of a gym-class mile, when the endorphins kicked in.
"I can't put it out," Tara said.
Willow squeezed Tara's hand and filled the glass box with water. The fire fizzled. She turned the glass a pale, striated purple, and the water flowed gently within the box as it settled on the floor. "Keep it," Willow said.
"It's beautiful," Tara said.
"So're you," Willow decided to say. And kissed her, because if she died tomorrow, she wanted to have kissed someone the day before. "Call me if you want to do another spell," she said before she left.
"If you want to contain a fire," she said to herself as she drove home, "put it in a box so it can't escape. If you want to put it out, fill the box with water." She chewed the words, rolled them around with her kiss-filled tongue, sang them along with the radio.
*
"I've got a question for you," Willow said to her physics tutor that Monday. Willow's physics tutor was a grad student from USC, stick-thin and mousy, with a Texas accent that could have peeled drywall. She looked about fourteen years old and hid behind strands of her hair like someone even younger. She was also probably the only one of Willow's tutors that was actually smarter than Willow, if only about the one thing.
"What do you know about Many Worlds Theory?" Willow said.
"That's... I think there's a paragraph or two on it in one of the chapters we haven't gotten to yet," Fred said. "Do you want to skip to that?"
"I read what's in the book," Willow said. "I want to know what *you* know."
"It's-- it's not really my field of research," Fred said.
"But I've been trying to build a universe in the basement," Willow said, painting her voice with the sweetness she'd used to lure victims with. Information was like a victim now. "I've been trying for a while, and I can't figure out why it won't work."
Fred laughed, and Willow laughed at the fact that Fred thought she was joking. Fred said, "Controversial theory, says that for every event with more than one possible outcome, every outcome occurs. Except that since contradictory outcomes can't occur simultaneously, they kind of... make different universes for themselves so they can both happen. So there's all these new universes being made all the time. It's all pretty Star Trek."
"But plausible," Willow said.
"It solves some problems," Fred said, "and raises others. What if I'd gone to that party, or asked that guy out? What if Hitler won? What if I'd kept driving instead of helping that lady with her flat tire, and not gotten fired from my job for being late? What if the coin I flipped came up tails instead of heads? What if there weren't any shrimp? It's every single event with multiple possible outcomes," Fred said. "Except that, um, some theorists think that, like a lot of phenomena, a given offshoot universe's properties don't fully manifest themselves until that universe is observed. And you can't-- you can't observe a universe you're not in. I mean, there's been some stuff with photon paths, but not after that moment."
"Maybe there's a spell for that," Willow said. "There's spells for seeing across space, and through barriers, so--"
"Like in a story?" Fred said, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. "Because that would be a good story, using some kind of magic to demonstrate scientific theories."
"No, as in using actual magic to-- You really don't have any idea what you're here for, do you? Who you work for."
"I was-- I thought-- all they said was, they needed someone to teach physics," Fred said. "My stipend's kind of low, and--"
"I don't care what they said," Willow said. "This is what's going on." It took a few minutes and a floating pencil for Fred to start believing that this wasn't a fairy tale or a nightmare, but after that, she was asking all the right questions.
*
Willow had planned to wait until Tara called her, but Tara didn't call for almost a week. Willow's mind kept going back to the fragility of her lips when they'd kissed, and the power in her hands when they'd made the fire. If she didn't call, the maybe-relationship was going to die of shyness. It was too soon for another spell, though. Too much intensity. She invited Tara to meet her at the coffee shop instead.
She bought Tara coffee and sat reaching across the table, letting Tara play with her fingers. "You should have little streaks of pink in your hair," Willow said.
"It'd-- it'd be too much," Tara said.
"It's how I see you when I close my eyes," Willow said.
"Then maybe-- maybe I will," said Tara, and Ben was standing over them with that missionary grin on his face.
"Hi," he said.
Tara said hi back, but Willow just stared at the spot on his forehead where his third eye would be if he'd had one.
"Sorry," he said. "If I'd known you guys were an item, I would have--"
"You should probably go away now," Willow said.
Sweat beaded in his third-eye place, and he whispered, "No. Not now." He dashed out of the coffee shop like he was in the thrall of something.
Willow hadn't felt the magic well up warm inside her: had it become so easy that she could control people without feeling it? She was so lost in her panic that she didn't notice Charles until Tara mentioned that there was a guy standing over her. "This is my-- my friend, Charles," she said hurriedly. "Charles, this is my, um, friend. Tara."
"Can I talk to you outside for a minute?" Charles said.
He took her to the alley behind the coffee shop, and for a minute she thought he was going to turn vamp-face and bite her. Instead, he said, "What does Glorificus look like?"
"I've never actually seen her," Willow said, "but from the pictures, um, little and blonde, kind of weird eyes. Do you think you saw her somewhere?"
"I think I just saw your amateur stalker turn *into* her," he said.
"What do you mean, turned into?"
"I mean," Charles said, "he sat down behind that dumpster, and when he got up, he was the girl from those pictures."
"So Ben *is* Glorificus?"
"Kind of," Charles said. "He smells completely human, which the girl... doesn't. He might not even know his body's a timeshare."
"So, wait. You saw Glorificus come out from behind the dumpster," Willow said. "Where was she before?"
"Ain't you listening?" he said. "Before, she was Ben. And then she *became* Glorificus."
"Ben is Glorificus?" she said.
"And Glorificus is Ben," he said.
She stopped to get her head around the idea, but the more she thought, the more she felt it slip away. "So Glorificus just... appeared out of nowhere?"
"Shit," Charles said, "she's got some kind of mind wipe going on." He furrowed his brow, and Willow had no idea what he was talking about. He said, "Do you have a pen?"
She pulled out the ballpoint she kept in her jacket pocket. "Here," she said. "Give it back when you're done."
"Give me your arm," he said. When she hesitated, he said, "Not gonna hurt you. There's something you have to not forget." She held her arm out. He pushed up the sleeve and started writing on the inside of her forearm. When he finished, he capped the pen and handed it back to her.
The inside of her wrist now said, "BEN IS GLORY AND GLORY IS BEN." Which was weird, but it made sense that Glorificus would be infesting a human body. Unable to escape it, maybe.
"I didn't know how to spell Glorificus," Charles said.
"I like Glory better," Willow said. "I think it fits her."
"Now," Charles said, "I need you to promise me two things. First, I need you to promise that you will make those words permanent: magic, tattoo, don't care as long as they stay there. Second, promise me that if you get confused, if things stop making sense, you will read your arm."
She promised, already forgetting why she was doing it. By the time she got back to the table where Tara was waiting, she couldn't remember what was written on her arm or why it was important, only that she needed Tara to seal the ink into her skin before it washed away. "Can we... sit in my car for a minute, or something?" Willow said.
"Don't you want-- want to finish your coffee?" Tara said.
"This is important," Willow said. "More important than that."
Tara looked afraid all the way to Willow's car, afraid as she sat down in the passenger seat. Willow remembered seeing that fear in a hundred girls' eyes, right before she'd killed them. It made her shiver, the thought that she could still be capable of that. "I'm sorry," she started.
"It's-- it's fine," Tara said.
"Do you know a spell for making things permanent?" Willow said. "Like a tattoo."
"There's... one I think would-- would work for that."
Willow showed Tara her arm, and Tara jerked back.
"Wh-- why would you want to tattoo that?" Tara said.
"Because I keep forgetting," Willow said. "We *all* keep forgetting." Tara still looked stricken. Willow read the words again. "And that looks pretty freakish, if you don't know the context. So, okay, context."
It seemed like a ruthless act of defiance, telling all these people about something so secret that Wolfram & Hart had waited months to tell *her*, but she couldn't convince herself that she was wrong to do it. Alone, she was a weak little human girl. She needed backup. From Fred, with the scary-quick brain, and from Charles, with the vampire strength. And from Tara, who knew restraint.
"So there are-- there are real demons?" Tara said. "Because-- because I thought they were all made up. To scare people. To keep them from doing stuff."
"It's real," Willow said. "All of it. I think. Maybe not leprechauns."
"But-- but I'm not," Tara said. "I'm not a demon."
"I think you'd know," Willow said. "The slime and the horns and stuff."
"It's why I left-- why I went to L. A.," Tara said. "B-because I thought-- but I'm not. I'm just a girl."
"Not just," Willow said and gave her the kind of kiss she'd used to dream about in French class: their lips just touching, the energy running between them.
"Do you... still want me to do that spell?" Tara said.
"Probably should," Willow said.
Tara put three fingers on Willow's arm, where the words were, and incanted softly in a language that Willow didn't know yet. Willow's skin glowed and burned, a soft yellow light, a heat like seeing how close she could get her hand to the eighth night of Chanukah candles. The letters got thicker, changed shape but said the same thing.
"It's in my handwriting now," was the first thing Tara said when the glow subsided.
Willow didn't know how to thank her, so she decided to learn all about making out in cars. Tara's lips were warm with magic words, and Willow was going to save the world.
*
"Interesting tattoo," was the first thing Willow's History of Magic tutor said when she put her books down. "Discovered something so important you have to wear it wherever you go, then?"
Mr. Wyndam-Pryce had a cold Vincent Price accent that made everything sound like a warning of impending doom, and he always smelled at least faintly of stale Scotch. This made him the least annoying of her magic teachers: Spell Casting was really into weird tea and finding Willow's chakra; Potions made bad puns and always had a bra strap showing; and Languages overwhelmed her with the desire to nap. She could at least count on Mr. Wyndam-Pryce to show her old woodcuts of ooky demons that weren't part of the curriculum, or get really excited about a narrowly-thwarted eighth-century apocalypse. He knew a lot of things, and he enjoyed knowing them, and he seemed to get a thrill from her appreciation of this that was only slightly inappropriate.
"Is Glory short for Glorificus?" he said. "Because it's more than a little disturbing that you've given your adversary a pet name."
"They told you?" she said.
"Told me what?" he said.
"About how I'm supposed to destroy Glorificus," she said. "Apparently that's some kind of very special secret."
"*Told* me?" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Dear girl, I'm the one who discovered the prophecy that said you would." He took off his glasses and fixed his unblinking eyes to hers. "And you will."
"Yeah," she said. "I heard."
"The tattoo," he said, "is part of your plan, then?" He put his glasses back on. "You *do* have a plan, don't you?"
She had a plan, right? The thing she had, with the universe and the trapping Ben in it, it counted as a plan. "Yeah."
"Well, I can't imagine you'd need my help, but--"
She considered the fact that when she'd asked her Spell Casting tutor about making universes, she'd spent the remaining hour doing breathing exercises, and said, "You know, I might."
He listened to her with an expression of deep concentration under his uneven five o'clock shadow, and then he took her to the Wolfram & Hart library. "I'm certain it's been done before," he said. "In the thirteenth century: I think it was the way they finally vanquished Eleanor of Aquitaine. At the time, they didn't have your physics behind it, but..." He selected a book from the shelf, and its pages were blank for a moment before he said a title, and they filled with text. In Latin. Not so useful. He skimmed, muttering, until she was almost ready to wander off, see if one of those books would give her Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. And if she'd still love it, a couple of deaths since she'd last re-read it.
"Aha!" Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said, and he scurried away with the book. She was 25 pages into The Rats of NIMH when he came back, handing her a photocopy with a block of highlighted words. "There are quite a lot of release forms involved in copying ancient texts," he said.
They went back to the office Lindsey had set aside for her lessons, and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce coached her in Latin pronunciation until she got restless. "Why do you work here?" she said. She didn't know why she needed so badly to bait him.
"I had nowhere else to go," he said. "With Sunnydale as-- as you saw, and-- I was fired from the Watcher's Council, for failing to prevent the unpreventable. Wolfram & Hart thought my skills would be of use to them."
She didn't know quite what he was talking about, but she got the idea: some powerful group of people, like Wolfram & Hart, and they'd kicked him out. "But it's killing you," she said.
"Working for a multidimensional organization designed to perpetuate evil?" he said. "Yes, I suppose it is."
"Evil?" she said. All the power, the money, the vampire employees-- she should have guessed. And what she was fighting: a god, not a demon.
"Well," he said. "Of course. You wouldn't have known."
"So I shouldn't fight her," Willow said. "I should-- I should-- get out of town, or something. If I'm going to be good. Is that right?"
"No," Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said. "Glorificus is beyond-- if she succeeds, she will destroy not only this entire dimension, but many others, possibly all of them. That level of destruction goes beyond our concepts of good and evil."
"It's been a long time since I've been good, anyway," she said.
"You will be," he said. "That's how it's written."
Continued in part 3.
*
When she got home-- back to Lilah's, but it was hard to deny the home-ness that the place had developed-- she opened up the file on Glorificus. There were pictures of an undeniably hot blonde; Wolfram & Hart were pretty sure that was her current form. She had demon minions, which the firm's army of darkness was systematically massacring. The rest was mostly speculation: Glorificus seemed to be invincibly powerful in this dimension, but her power seemed to fluctuate, to feed off of something. The rash of insanity? The firm's experts had considered the possibility, but nobody had seen it happen.
If Glorificus had a weakness, it was that she seemed to be bound to this dimension. But that was also a liability: attempts to banish her back to her home dimension had failed.
"Invincibly powerful," Willow said. "Damn it." She was going to die again, and it wasn't going to be long until she did.
What do you do if you don't have long to live? You call the girl who gave you her phone number, get her to invite you to her weird student apartment that smells like patchouli and cat. The cat belonged to Tara's roommate, she said, but the patchouli was hers. Tara had a few spells marked in the book she'd been reading: "I didn't think-- didn't think you'd call, but I, um, I was optimistic anyway."
She wanted to make a contained flame. It was easy to make fire but hard to control it, to make it burn the magic and not the furniture. "Should be easier if one of us works on the fire and the other one makes the bubble to hold it in," Willow said.
So they drew a chalk circle on the hardwood floor and joined hands around it. Tara made a tiny greenish flame, and Willow made invisible glass to surround it. The flame leaped in its prison, changed colors, threw sparks that went out violently when they hit the glass. As the fire grew angrier, it got harder to hold it in: not so hard that Willow was straining, but she felt like the last quarter of a gym-class mile, when the endorphins kicked in.
"I can't put it out," Tara said.
Willow squeezed Tara's hand and filled the glass box with water. The fire fizzled. She turned the glass a pale, striated purple, and the water flowed gently within the box as it settled on the floor. "Keep it," Willow said.
"It's beautiful," Tara said.
"So're you," Willow decided to say. And kissed her, because if she died tomorrow, she wanted to have kissed someone the day before. "Call me if you want to do another spell," she said before she left.
"If you want to contain a fire," she said to herself as she drove home, "put it in a box so it can't escape. If you want to put it out, fill the box with water." She chewed the words, rolled them around with her kiss-filled tongue, sang them along with the radio.
*
"I've got a question for you," Willow said to her physics tutor that Monday. Willow's physics tutor was a grad student from USC, stick-thin and mousy, with a Texas accent that could have peeled drywall. She looked about fourteen years old and hid behind strands of her hair like someone even younger. She was also probably the only one of Willow's tutors that was actually smarter than Willow, if only about the one thing.
"What do you know about Many Worlds Theory?" Willow said.
"That's... I think there's a paragraph or two on it in one of the chapters we haven't gotten to yet," Fred said. "Do you want to skip to that?"
"I read what's in the book," Willow said. "I want to know what *you* know."
"It's-- it's not really my field of research," Fred said.
"But I've been trying to build a universe in the basement," Willow said, painting her voice with the sweetness she'd used to lure victims with. Information was like a victim now. "I've been trying for a while, and I can't figure out why it won't work."
Fred laughed, and Willow laughed at the fact that Fred thought she was joking. Fred said, "Controversial theory, says that for every event with more than one possible outcome, every outcome occurs. Except that since contradictory outcomes can't occur simultaneously, they kind of... make different universes for themselves so they can both happen. So there's all these new universes being made all the time. It's all pretty Star Trek."
"But plausible," Willow said.
"It solves some problems," Fred said, "and raises others. What if I'd gone to that party, or asked that guy out? What if Hitler won? What if I'd kept driving instead of helping that lady with her flat tire, and not gotten fired from my job for being late? What if the coin I flipped came up tails instead of heads? What if there weren't any shrimp? It's every single event with multiple possible outcomes," Fred said. "Except that, um, some theorists think that, like a lot of phenomena, a given offshoot universe's properties don't fully manifest themselves until that universe is observed. And you can't-- you can't observe a universe you're not in. I mean, there's been some stuff with photon paths, but not after that moment."
"Maybe there's a spell for that," Willow said. "There's spells for seeing across space, and through barriers, so--"
"Like in a story?" Fred said, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. "Because that would be a good story, using some kind of magic to demonstrate scientific theories."
"No, as in using actual magic to-- You really don't have any idea what you're here for, do you? Who you work for."
"I was-- I thought-- all they said was, they needed someone to teach physics," Fred said. "My stipend's kind of low, and--"
"I don't care what they said," Willow said. "This is what's going on." It took a few minutes and a floating pencil for Fred to start believing that this wasn't a fairy tale or a nightmare, but after that, she was asking all the right questions.
*
Willow had planned to wait until Tara called her, but Tara didn't call for almost a week. Willow's mind kept going back to the fragility of her lips when they'd kissed, and the power in her hands when they'd made the fire. If she didn't call, the maybe-relationship was going to die of shyness. It was too soon for another spell, though. Too much intensity. She invited Tara to meet her at the coffee shop instead.
She bought Tara coffee and sat reaching across the table, letting Tara play with her fingers. "You should have little streaks of pink in your hair," Willow said.
"It'd-- it'd be too much," Tara said.
"It's how I see you when I close my eyes," Willow said.
"Then maybe-- maybe I will," said Tara, and Ben was standing over them with that missionary grin on his face.
"Hi," he said.
Tara said hi back, but Willow just stared at the spot on his forehead where his third eye would be if he'd had one.
"Sorry," he said. "If I'd known you guys were an item, I would have--"
"You should probably go away now," Willow said.
Sweat beaded in his third-eye place, and he whispered, "No. Not now." He dashed out of the coffee shop like he was in the thrall of something.
Willow hadn't felt the magic well up warm inside her: had it become so easy that she could control people without feeling it? She was so lost in her panic that she didn't notice Charles until Tara mentioned that there was a guy standing over her. "This is my-- my friend, Charles," she said hurriedly. "Charles, this is my, um, friend. Tara."
"Can I talk to you outside for a minute?" Charles said.
He took her to the alley behind the coffee shop, and for a minute she thought he was going to turn vamp-face and bite her. Instead, he said, "What does Glorificus look like?"
"I've never actually seen her," Willow said, "but from the pictures, um, little and blonde, kind of weird eyes. Do you think you saw her somewhere?"
"I think I just saw your amateur stalker turn *into* her," he said.
"What do you mean, turned into?"
"I mean," Charles said, "he sat down behind that dumpster, and when he got up, he was the girl from those pictures."
"So Ben *is* Glorificus?"
"Kind of," Charles said. "He smells completely human, which the girl... doesn't. He might not even know his body's a timeshare."
"So, wait. You saw Glorificus come out from behind the dumpster," Willow said. "Where was she before?"
"Ain't you listening?" he said. "Before, she was Ben. And then she *became* Glorificus."
"Ben is Glorificus?" she said.
"And Glorificus is Ben," he said.
She stopped to get her head around the idea, but the more she thought, the more she felt it slip away. "So Glorificus just... appeared out of nowhere?"
"Shit," Charles said, "she's got some kind of mind wipe going on." He furrowed his brow, and Willow had no idea what he was talking about. He said, "Do you have a pen?"
She pulled out the ballpoint she kept in her jacket pocket. "Here," she said. "Give it back when you're done."
"Give me your arm," he said. When she hesitated, he said, "Not gonna hurt you. There's something you have to not forget." She held her arm out. He pushed up the sleeve and started writing on the inside of her forearm. When he finished, he capped the pen and handed it back to her.
The inside of her wrist now said, "BEN IS GLORY AND GLORY IS BEN." Which was weird, but it made sense that Glorificus would be infesting a human body. Unable to escape it, maybe.
"I didn't know how to spell Glorificus," Charles said.
"I like Glory better," Willow said. "I think it fits her."
"Now," Charles said, "I need you to promise me two things. First, I need you to promise that you will make those words permanent: magic, tattoo, don't care as long as they stay there. Second, promise me that if you get confused, if things stop making sense, you will read your arm."
She promised, already forgetting why she was doing it. By the time she got back to the table where Tara was waiting, she couldn't remember what was written on her arm or why it was important, only that she needed Tara to seal the ink into her skin before it washed away. "Can we... sit in my car for a minute, or something?" Willow said.
"Don't you want-- want to finish your coffee?" Tara said.
"This is important," Willow said. "More important than that."
Tara looked afraid all the way to Willow's car, afraid as she sat down in the passenger seat. Willow remembered seeing that fear in a hundred girls' eyes, right before she'd killed them. It made her shiver, the thought that she could still be capable of that. "I'm sorry," she started.
"It's-- it's fine," Tara said.
"Do you know a spell for making things permanent?" Willow said. "Like a tattoo."
"There's... one I think would-- would work for that."
Willow showed Tara her arm, and Tara jerked back.
"Wh-- why would you want to tattoo that?" Tara said.
"Because I keep forgetting," Willow said. "We *all* keep forgetting." Tara still looked stricken. Willow read the words again. "And that looks pretty freakish, if you don't know the context. So, okay, context."
It seemed like a ruthless act of defiance, telling all these people about something so secret that Wolfram & Hart had waited months to tell *her*, but she couldn't convince herself that she was wrong to do it. Alone, she was a weak little human girl. She needed backup. From Fred, with the scary-quick brain, and from Charles, with the vampire strength. And from Tara, who knew restraint.
"So there are-- there are real demons?" Tara said. "Because-- because I thought they were all made up. To scare people. To keep them from doing stuff."
"It's real," Willow said. "All of it. I think. Maybe not leprechauns."
"But-- but I'm not," Tara said. "I'm not a demon."
"I think you'd know," Willow said. "The slime and the horns and stuff."
"It's why I left-- why I went to L. A.," Tara said. "B-because I thought-- but I'm not. I'm just a girl."
"Not just," Willow said and gave her the kind of kiss she'd used to dream about in French class: their lips just touching, the energy running between them.
"Do you... still want me to do that spell?" Tara said.
"Probably should," Willow said.
Tara put three fingers on Willow's arm, where the words were, and incanted softly in a language that Willow didn't know yet. Willow's skin glowed and burned, a soft yellow light, a heat like seeing how close she could get her hand to the eighth night of Chanukah candles. The letters got thicker, changed shape but said the same thing.
"It's in my handwriting now," was the first thing Tara said when the glow subsided.
Willow didn't know how to thank her, so she decided to learn all about making out in cars. Tara's lips were warm with magic words, and Willow was going to save the world.
*
"Interesting tattoo," was the first thing Willow's History of Magic tutor said when she put her books down. "Discovered something so important you have to wear it wherever you go, then?"
Mr. Wyndam-Pryce had a cold Vincent Price accent that made everything sound like a warning of impending doom, and he always smelled at least faintly of stale Scotch. This made him the least annoying of her magic teachers: Spell Casting was really into weird tea and finding Willow's chakra; Potions made bad puns and always had a bra strap showing; and Languages overwhelmed her with the desire to nap. She could at least count on Mr. Wyndam-Pryce to show her old woodcuts of ooky demons that weren't part of the curriculum, or get really excited about a narrowly-thwarted eighth-century apocalypse. He knew a lot of things, and he enjoyed knowing them, and he seemed to get a thrill from her appreciation of this that was only slightly inappropriate.
"Is Glory short for Glorificus?" he said. "Because it's more than a little disturbing that you've given your adversary a pet name."
"They told you?" she said.
"Told me what?" he said.
"About how I'm supposed to destroy Glorificus," she said. "Apparently that's some kind of very special secret."
"*Told* me?" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Dear girl, I'm the one who discovered the prophecy that said you would." He took off his glasses and fixed his unblinking eyes to hers. "And you will."
"Yeah," she said. "I heard."
"The tattoo," he said, "is part of your plan, then?" He put his glasses back on. "You *do* have a plan, don't you?"
She had a plan, right? The thing she had, with the universe and the trapping Ben in it, it counted as a plan. "Yeah."
"Well, I can't imagine you'd need my help, but--"
She considered the fact that when she'd asked her Spell Casting tutor about making universes, she'd spent the remaining hour doing breathing exercises, and said, "You know, I might."
He listened to her with an expression of deep concentration under his uneven five o'clock shadow, and then he took her to the Wolfram & Hart library. "I'm certain it's been done before," he said. "In the thirteenth century: I think it was the way they finally vanquished Eleanor of Aquitaine. At the time, they didn't have your physics behind it, but..." He selected a book from the shelf, and its pages were blank for a moment before he said a title, and they filled with text. In Latin. Not so useful. He skimmed, muttering, until she was almost ready to wander off, see if one of those books would give her Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. And if she'd still love it, a couple of deaths since she'd last re-read it.
"Aha!" Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said, and he scurried away with the book. She was 25 pages into The Rats of NIMH when he came back, handing her a photocopy with a block of highlighted words. "There are quite a lot of release forms involved in copying ancient texts," he said.
They went back to the office Lindsey had set aside for her lessons, and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce coached her in Latin pronunciation until she got restless. "Why do you work here?" she said. She didn't know why she needed so badly to bait him.
"I had nowhere else to go," he said. "With Sunnydale as-- as you saw, and-- I was fired from the Watcher's Council, for failing to prevent the unpreventable. Wolfram & Hart thought my skills would be of use to them."
She didn't know quite what he was talking about, but she got the idea: some powerful group of people, like Wolfram & Hart, and they'd kicked him out. "But it's killing you," she said.
"Working for a multidimensional organization designed to perpetuate evil?" he said. "Yes, I suppose it is."
"Evil?" she said. All the power, the money, the vampire employees-- she should have guessed. And what she was fighting: a god, not a demon.
"Well," he said. "Of course. You wouldn't have known."
"So I shouldn't fight her," Willow said. "I should-- I should-- get out of town, or something. If I'm going to be good. Is that right?"
"No," Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said. "Glorificus is beyond-- if she succeeds, she will destroy not only this entire dimension, but many others, possibly all of them. That level of destruction goes beyond our concepts of good and evil."
"It's been a long time since I've been good, anyway," she said.
"You will be," he said. "That's how it's written."
Continued in part 3.