Chapter Ten

None of this is real.

Five words. They appeared on the first page of every journal that she kept. Sometimes they repeated, over and over, in her neat handwriting. He remembered her saying it under her breath in a litany, a long time ago. He had found her smacking her forehead against a wall once, and it had become a blurred together sound, “Notrealnotrealnotrealnotreal.”

It was something you might say when everything became too much. When you were at the end of your rope. He had come to think of it as a kind of alarm bell. When she started with the chanting, she was losing it, and it was time to back off. And then every once in a while she would do something, like walking out in front of a carriage, and he’d wonder if she was testing the idea. It was like her. She’d think of something, or read something, and then she would want to test it.

Her journals weren’t what you’d expect. There was a bit of ‘this is what I did today’ to them, and then they would go off the rails in odd directions. She wrote summaries of books she read. Sometimes she would go off on a tear about a novel, and practically re-write the entire thing from start to finish, filling journal after journal with it until she was onto some new thing. She wrote about her magic studies. She made lists. She wrote about him, and it wasn’t all hearts and flowers either, not that he expected it to be.

She knew he read her journals. She hid them, he found them. It was a game, or she didn’t care, he was never quite sure of which was the case. The first few volumes had been largely dedicated to Jane, her ‘friend’ from the alley where he had found her. That she ever considered that pox-ridden bitch her friend was beyond pathetic. Meal ticket, more like. Jane, if that’s what her name really was, was a whore beyond her prime earning years, pimping a younger and more attractive girl that, from what he had gleaned from Willow, she had latched onto in the workhouse.

She wrote little stories to herself about Jane. They were what you would expect of a girl in her teens, variations on a theme of redemption. Jane always ended up doing something virtuous or respectable, and some of it was fairly imaginative too. Far fetched, but entertaining.

He had gotten angry at her about something, and had told her exactly what her precious Jane had been about, and that, since she was confused on this point, Jane was dead. He had killed her.

She’d pushed herself up on her elbows, looking him right in the eye—and this was long before Angelus had given up on the downcast gaze bit—green eyes wet with tears, glittering like gems, full of contempt, and she spat out, “Duh!”

It wasn’t a word, just a sound, pregnant with meaning, and he had broken three of her ribs without thinking much about it, though he really wasn’t as mad as he knew he ought to be. That stare had been not unlike the experience of drinking her, a moment of recognition. A moment when he saw something in her that he . . . wanted.

William found the journal he was paging through now by the light of a lantern under a pillow cushion in the small room behind the library. It was full of observations about Prague, as if she were writing a guide book, and considering that she knew he’d find her journal, he decided that it was possible that she was. There were street maps sketched out, and odd little notes, like reminders that she had hastily scribbled, prefaced by the initials NTS.

Note To Self. She sometimes muttered the phrase under her breath.

Her syntax in writing was different. She wrote in great torrents, the lines becoming fat when she was in too great a hurry to be bothered with sharpening her pencil. Peculiar sounds expressed as words littered her writing. Oooky, grrrr, eeeew, ick, and so on. There was a rhythm to it too, a verbal integrity that was peculiar, but unforced. This was the way her mind spoke to her. This is what she sounded like in her own head, he concluded.

They had gotten a taste of it tonight. She had been unusually animated, even bold, and he had never seen her speak so long, and with so little discipline in front of Darla or Angelus. With Dru, she could rattle on for hours. They had tea party conversations that were hilarious because Dru couldn’t stay on topic, and Willow didn’t need to in order to entertain her. Usually with Angelus and Darla she was on her very best behavior, alert, speaking when spoken to, providing answers that were direct.

His gaze wandered up the wall blankly, wondering if having no one but her journal to talk to for two months had played a part in the small changes he had noticed in her.

He took a deep breath, through his nose. The book, leather bound, was saturated with her scent from frequent handling. He could smell her on his skin as well. He sucked on his lower lip, eyes narrowing as he sought the taste of her there, under the whiskey and tobacco. They’d spent nearly the entire day shagging, eating, and sleeping. Dressing for the impromptu family gathering—Angelus couldn’t wait a single fucking day to grill her—had turned into a tender coupling in Dru’s room.

Dru had been dressed for the evening’s program, and she hated musing her clothes or her hair after she was all dressed up, but she had gotten that frenzied look in her eyes after she had done Willow’s hair and Miss Edith didn’t like it. For a stupid doll, Miss Edith had a good eye, William thought with a grin. He didn’t like Willow’s hair arranged in tight curls, like she was some kind of garden-variety debutante.

Dru needed a distraction, and Willow was there, so he whispered in her ear that what would really give her a nice glow was a good shag, and Dru had blown him a kiss and helped him undress her—though he would have been just as happy to have her with all that blue velvet spread out around her. Dru didn’t want her dress spoiled.

He could tell that she really, really did not want to do this. She had bathed, and she was already getting nervous about the command performance in the salon, and she was sore. He had seen the indignation flash in her eyes when Dru announced that Miss Edith didn’t like her hair. Her eyes had flown to the mirror, puzzled and a little hurt, because she did like it. She thought it looked swell.

It came down slowly, a little bit at a time, hairpins sliding out while he was sliding in. At some point in the middle of it, Dru consulted with Miss Edith, and the proper hair style was agreed upon, and Dru picked up her brush, starting at the ends of Willow’s hair, gently removing the pins, brushing her hair to shining while he slowly fucked her over the arm of a chair, her head in Dru’s lap. The scent of her cunt and her tears burrowed into the back of his brain.

Some day she would understand. Sometimes he made her cry just for the pleasure of licking the tears off her face.

The fledge on the floor started to stir, so he tucked the book inside his coat pocket and sat with his arms across the back of the chair he was straddling, waiting. This was the last of the lot to wake, and it was near dawn. There would be no time to hunt before he was awake, which meant a long, sorry day of misery for him. William’s philosophy to managing minions was predicated on one point. Can’t hunt, can’t feed. He wasn’t in the game to take care of minions. If they didn’t have the wit to feed themselves, then they weren’t worth keeping.

He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles one by one as the fledge turned to him at the first sound and then stared at him, unblinking as he worked his way through the remaining nine fingers.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

Of coarse you are, mate, William thought. He had never really forgotten the terrible hunger that had been the all-consuming awareness of his own awakening. A hunger so terrible that you’d claw yourself out of a coffin. Out of the ground.

“That’s too bad,” he said in a tone that suggested a distinct lack of sympathy. “It’s nearly dawn, and too late in the day for us to hunt, so you’ll go hungry. House rules. You feed yourself. I don’t feed you.”

He looked puzzled, and frustrated, and the panic was starting to seep in. They always panicked when they started to realize that there was something wrong.

He threw his head back, listening. Sniffing. Sampling the air, and then realizing that he didn’t need it to breath. Eventually he would try to get out of the room. The need to feed was too strong, and that’s when he would get to work, to plant another idea. The need to please him, as primal as the need to feed.

None of this is real.

She let her fingertips rest on a pane of glass, looking out onto the shadowy tangle that was the unkempt garden. Angelus had given her no instructions about a garden, and she had taken no action to have the garden below tended. It was dead and overgrown except for a small spot around by the kitchen where the Cook had potted herbs, and she had started growing common spell ingredients.

In a day or two she would start seeing vampires who wore the faces of people she had hired to work in this house. They would remember her. They would be told who she was. They wouldn’t be offended or angry, and if they wanted to survive another day, they wouldn’t be covetous either, because that would end badly for them.

They had no hope. They had no real chance at life before they came here, she reminded herself. They were like Jane, who thought she was a shark, but really was a guppy in the shark pool.

The desolation of the garden below was soothing. All dead, and it would stay that way, falling into rot, and then, perhaps, reseeded to create new life. And it would be new life, fed from death, with its own uniqueness and integrity.

“I could smash my head right though the glass. I could use the shards to cut my wrists. I could throw myself from the windowsill. A two and half story fall might do it,” she whispered to the glass, trying to find her eyes in her reflection to gauge her own resolve. “I can do these things,” she whispered.

“But you won’t.”

She spun around, tripping clumsily on her skirt and almost making good on it, but when her back hit the glass it only rattled, but did not break. Darla was standing in the open doorway of her bedroom, and Willow’s heart started beating faster as she wondered how long she had been there.

“At least, not tonight,” Darla said with a small smile. She gestured to one of the two chairs in front of the fireplace. “Sit,” she said.

It was not an invitation. Willow went to the appointed chair and she sat. When Darla did not join her in the opposite chair, and instead wandered around the room, she wished that she could find a space in her head that would allow her to list prime numbers, or the periodic table of elements, or conjugate verbs in French. She wished that she could find a charm that would give her that distance and objectivity.

“You must have changed the sheets,” Darla said, running her hand over the neatly arranged counterpane.

She had changed the entire bed, cleaned the bathroom, and taken an extremely hot bath, attacking each item as it became available. Dru and William bathed. They retired from the bathroom to Dru’s room where Dru had tried on dress after dress before she sent William to get her, to dress her.

She had created an elaborate hair style for her on the first attempt, using rolls of cotton to form the shapes, holding it all together with hairpins, but Miss Edith disapproved and it had to be taken down. Dru got frustrated. Never a good thing when she was armed with a brush or sharp objects, so the dress was removed and hung up, and Miss Edith was placed on the bed, decorously arranged with her back to the room, and William and Dru indulged in a tried and true method to deal with Dru’s frustrations.

Her fingernails cut into her palms.

“There are things that you should know that the boys think that they should not tell you,” Darla said. “I disagree.”

No matter what Angelus liked to pretend, Darla was the real seat of power in the household.

“I think its time that we talk about your future,” she said.

It was an alien concept. The only future she wished to have was in her present past, or not present future. The fact that Darla was suggesting that she had a future had implications that made her feel lightheaded.

“My future?” she repeated, because it was becoming painfully obvious that she was expected to participate in this conversation.

Fear flooded her scent. That was to be expected. Darla knew she was frightening. She worked at it, and the girl wasn’t stupid. She walked over to her, her hard, cold fingernail lifting Willow’s chin until her head was tilted back at an uncomfortable angle.

“It is inevitable, you know,” her tone was conversational. “Vampires don’t keep humans for eight years to watch them grow old and die.”

The reek of fear gradually subsided, leaving only discomfort in its wake. Darla was impressed in spite of herself. Willow understood. She understood completely.

“Don’t think about it,” she advised. “When my time came, I was already dying. It was a choice between dying faster, with less pain and humiliation, or living. I chose living. Dying a little bit at a time, seeing everything stripped from you . . . it makes you appreciate the prospect of having power over life and death. Most of us don’t have that luxury. It wasn’t offered to Angelus, or Dru, or William, but I give it to you. There is still time. If your answer would be to die faster, with less pain and humiliation, there is time for you to make that choice.”

None of this is real.

It was the only explanation that Willow was able to accept. None of this is real.

If she thought about it too much, it threatened to become real. There was a spell and then there was falling and pain from where she had bruised her knees. The idea that something had gone horribly wrong did not immediately occur to her. She was more concerned that someone would find out that she had done something dangerous, even stupid. Which set her on the course of doing something even more dangerous and stupid than casting a spell that was based on an untested theory.

The spell took her to another place like the one she had seen when Anya tried to trick her into retrieving her amulet from a hellish version of Sunnydale Anya had created from a wish. It wasn't real. Not any more than the perky and evil vampire her had been real. A point that was proven when they poofed her back to the unreal hell world that was the wish created Sunnydale.

It wasn't real.

She had said it out loud, chanted it under her breath as a mantra after she tried every spell she half knew to reverse a spell while two men held her down and another raped her. She had tried to explain that they didn't want to do that.

That was her first night in the unreal world.

She was saying it the next morning when the watch was called by a passerby who found the spectacle of a filthy, half-naked woman huddled against a wall sufficiently annoying or alarming, to call in the civil authorities.

Television informed her perspective on what would happen next as she was roughly bundled into a dark, swaying vehicle. She would be seen by a doctor, and she knew, dimly that she needed to be seen by a doctor, and maybe a counselor, and then her parents, and then she would have to see her friends, who might know or guess what had been done to her. She hoped that someone would know or guess because she didn’t think she could ever talk about it.

But that wasn’t what happened. No one talked to her. She was taken from one workhouse to another while the constable grew impatient, unnerved by her mutterings, which were putting off the supervisors of Bristol’s workhouses. So, he shook her, and slapped her until she stopped with her mad little chant, which worked like a charm. She was quiet when they got to the Poor Clare's workhouse, and the sisters took her without demur.

Days passed. There was a routine to it that was almost comforting and the nuns weren’t unkind. They bathed her, a process in which she stood in a cold room, naked while one woman armed with a brush and an expression of piously grim determination scrubbed, while the other two, armed with buckets of cold water, rinsed until they were satisfied that she was clean and lice free. Then they cut off her hair.

She had a narrow cot to sleep on in a dormitory filled with women. When she woke up screaming the first night, the girl beside her wasn’t unsympathetic, but she was tired, and she told her that if she carried on like that every night someone would put a pillow over her head. She had seen it before.

Her name was Jane. That was what the nuns called her. The next morning when they were set to picking oakum and Willow muttered, “This isn’t real” under her breath, Jane gave an appreciative chuckle, showing teeth that were chipped and blackened.

Jane was her friend. Sort of. When the weather warmed up and Willow started showing, the nuns told her that she would have to leave, which confused her. She didn’t have anywhere to go, but Jane was leaving too, explaining that she only stayed in the workhouse through the worst of the winter months. It was maybe another day later when three things were born in on her. In the unreal world she was a prostitute—it explained the hours spent picking oakum while one of the sisters read from the bible, and from tracts about the sins of the flesh. It was just another example of the unrealness of where she was. She wasn’t even who she was in the where of wherever she was. She was pregnant. This was a finding that should have occurred to her before, but hadn’t. A fact that she should have been aware of, but wasn’t until Jane explained it to her. She didn’t feel pregnant. Lastly, she could not remain pregnant, which actually didn’t bother her so much when Jane explained it to her, because she didn’t feel pregnant, and she certainly didn’t want to be pregnant.

She couldn’t be pregnant. She was a college bound honor roll student and a member of the Computer Club, and she had read Changing Bodies, Changing Lives before she even got her period because her parents considered her a smart and sensible girl who would make good decisions about boys and sex. Not that it really mattered because she didn’t know any boys who were interested her, even remotely, in that way. Except, maybe, for Oz.

They had no money. This didn’t bother Jane in the least. She set off at a brisk walk for a neighborhood that Willow didn’t need to be told was bad. She had nowhere else to go, so she followed her, a little glassy eyed at all of the things inflicted on her senses. She told herself to pay more attention, because at some point she wanted to remember this, the walking through an unreality so complex.

She witnessed her first act of prostitution while standing awkwardly behind a wagon on the quayside clutching her small bundle of belongings that included a bible, what was described as small clothes, and a wooded cross strung on a piece of yarn. The cross was comfortingly familiar. She had the same feeling that she had when Marcy Walker had lit a cigarette behind the gym at school, defying the smoking ban on campus, and well, just, smoking, which in and of itself was something Willow couldn’t understand wanting to do.

She kept her gaze carefully averted, shifting from one foot to the other while she watched the man Jane had approached with a phrase that sounded like a song. A vulgar song that made her want to laugh in a shocked kind of way.

This performance was repeated three times, while Jane’s mood improved with the completion of each transaction. It wasn’t the sex that pleased her. That had been performed with mechanical efficiency, though the men she serviced seemed pleased enough and utterly unperturbed by Willow’s presence, which made Willow wonder if she was just seeing this and was herself unseen. It was the money. She had money, and she was proud of the fact that she had earned it so quickly.

Willow found herself standing in the filthy hallway of what appeared to be a tenement while Jane haggled with a woman who had a small child on her hip who eventually gave in to Jane’s argument and produced a key and a very large sack that the two of them hauled up three flights of stairs.

“You are new at this, aren’t you, ducks?” Jane said with a rough kind of pity as Willow stood in the middle of a very small room that seemed to be filled with discarded bottles, refuse, and a sour smell that made her stomach turn.

The pity began and ended there. Jane explained what she needed to do to survive, while Willow stared at her in stunned disbelief. “Look, forget all that twaddle the nuns stuffed you with. You’ve got no references. Hiring out as a maid is a dream. It won’t happen. No one with sense would hire out of the workhouse, and if they do, like as not you’ll find yourself in a box, hired out at all hours at a penny a poke, and you won’t see tuppence for it,” she said.

It was better to work the streets, preferably in pairs because it discouraged most of the worst of the lot, as Jane put it.

The sack was full of clothing and wigs and cosmetics, and Jane inventoried it carefully to make sure that it was all there exactly as she left it, then she got dressed. When she was done with that she turned her attention to Willow, who also got dressed. It reminded her of the last Halloween, when they had turned into her costumes, and she thought at one point that night that it had been a lucky thing that Buffy’s costume hadn’t belonged to Jane at one point.

It was the thought that made her cry, not the thing that she was doing with Jane muttering instructions at her.

Before she made enough money for the business of making herself no longer pregnant, an event that she had decided she simply couldn’t think about, she was climbing the stairs to the room when a fierce cramp shot through her and she collapsed on the stairs.

The landlady’s husband found her there, a weird mix of pity and disgust written on his pleasant face. He had red hair, like her. She still remembered that. Looking up at him and saying, “I have red hair, too.”

He helped her the rest of the way up the stairs, and she curled up on the pallet on the floor that was now her bed. That night, Jane helped her clean herself up and brought her into her narrow bed, curling around her. The added warmth was nice. She felt so cold.

That night she told Jane why it wasn’t real. It was a spell, and the real her, the real Willow was in Sunnydale with Xander, and Oz, and Buffy, and Mr. Giles and her parents were at a conference in Buffalo. They were staying in New York with some cousins and coming home in time for her birthday.

It became a ritual after that night. She knew that Jane thought she was crazy. Jane had told her as much on several occasions, warning her against crazy talk, but when they were alone, she would rest her chin on Willow’s shoulder, spooned up against her back, and ask for another story. And she would kiss her and pet her, like she was a child, or at least that’s what it seemed to Willow until the petting became something else, and in a way she didn’t mind. It didn’t hurt, and it seemed to make Jane happy.

And, above all, it wasn’t real. None of it was.

She stopped wearing her cross. She kept it in the pocket in the dress she wore when they were working. It wasn’t Jane’s favorite, but she said it suited Willow. It was pink, and the top of it looked like it was just slung over the tops of her arms to leave her shoulders bare. She wore it with a blond wig that made her head itch, which was a bonus really. The itchy wig demanded her attention when she most needed it to wander, reserving the internal litany of ‘it isn’t real’ to those moments when she most needed to believe that none of it was real. There was an end to the unreality.

She did not expect it to come at the hands of a vampire. There was a certain irony to that. Well, there was that, and the fact that she didn’t recognize him.

Jane did the talking. Jane always did the talking. It was their con. Willow would stand back, removed from the whole business while Jane would explain as how she was new at the trade and barely more than a child, and so on. Claims that were usually met with skepticism or outright scorn, or a laugh, before the real haggling began.

Willow had stopped looking at the men. She hardly registered this one as he pushed her skirts up and slammed into her. For a moment she cursed Jane with the most vulgar language she had picked up. He was huge and hard, and strong enough to make her feel like she was suffocating as the pain of his intrusion made her stomach clench. Jane was busy counting her coin, and watching the alley. She had a knife and swore that she knew how to use it. Occasionally she glanced over at Willow to give her a wink or a reassuring grin.

She was looking at Jane when he bit her. That felt real enough. She had been curious about what it was like to be bitten and drained. When your best friend is a Slayer, and your dead friend from childhood is made into a vampire, and you’ve met yourself from another dimension as a vampire, you think about things like that. And the answer was, not surprisingly, that it hurt. A lot. But it also seemed an oddly appropriate conclusion as she felt herself slipping away, her heart skipping as it occurred to her that maybe this was what was supposed to happen, and she would wake up in her bed, or maybe in her U.S. History class, with Xander sitting two rows over, covertly watching Cordelia.

But that wasn’t what happened at all.

There is a phenomena, about seeing people in unexpected places, where they become unrecognizable due to lack of context, Willow concluded after thinking about it later. She couldn’t understand how so much time could have passed before she realized who he was, and in a way that was a part of the unrealness of it because in any real life or death moment she was positive that she would have recognized the vampire known as Spike, formerly known as William the Bloody.

It wasn’t like they had chatted, or they actually knew each other. The sidekick and arch-villain didn’t know each other socially, but she knew who he was, what he was, and she had been more afraid of him than anyone until Angelus showed up.

In the real world? Spike was in Sunnydale. In the unreal world, there was William, and she was so long in the habit of thinking of them as different people that she really no longer knew what to think.

Long after Darla had left her alone, Willow stared in the middle distance. If none of this was real, she had no choice.

And if it was real . . . no choice was a choice.