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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part V

The thing about fairy tales: you needed to know which source you were dealing with.

Walt Disney? Cheery, light, sanitized … danger, hardship, the inevitable musical sing-along number, but you always knew it would come out right. Even if it was sweet enough to rot your teeth, the happy ending was pretty much built in.

Hans Christian Andersen? Not so cheery, and the ending could be downright depressing. Who would have expected Danes to be such a gloomy lot? Compare Disney’s little mermaid to Andersen’s, well, no question which one you’d rather be.

The Brothers Grimm? Aptly named. Those boys were twisted, no two ways about it, and in their stories magic was just another way to give the shaft to shepherd boys and twin princesses and unlucky stepchildren. You might come out okay, you might not, but you were guaranteed a really unpleasant ride.

Yep, if you found yourself in a fairy tale, you definitely needed to know its author. Just in case you had a chance to kill the son of a bitch.

Better yet: make sure you wrote your own endings.

*               *               *

As Tucker had said, the worst part was that none of them had been ready for battle; they had assembled, as per Cordelia’s instructions, but still not knowing the purpose and, though they had begun basic preparations, they had no idea what they were preparing for. More than that, they also had been off-guard. Vampires had penetrated the school during daylight before, but it was very uncommon — generally lone scavengers, too ignorant or too stupid to range clear of the Slayer’s home ground — and it had been months since any such intrusion. No one could track all the places where the city’s maintenance tunnels fed into the SHS basement facilities; the invaders had apparently come up through those, and their attack was a devastating surprise.

If that hadn’t been bad enough, Spike had been the one leading the raiding party.

Tucker and Nancy had been in the “rare books” cage when the vampires burst into the library. Nancy had yanked the door shut, locking them in, then she and Tucker had done their best to provide crossbow fire from their position of safety. Oz and Owen had gone up the stairs and fought from the second level, side by side and sometimes back-to-back, holding their ground with axe and mace and holy water and desperation. Giles had snatched up a broadsword, but fought only when directly pressed; instead, he bawled incantations at the top of his lungs, and his undead adversaries found themselves assailed from all directions by stakes, loose crossbow bolts, holy water vials, all coming at them from empty air …

Cordelia, listening, heard an almost imperceptible check in Marcie’s voice, and knew what it meant. As many times practiced, Marcie had used Giles’ sham spellcasting as cover to attack the invaders without revealing her presence, and an illogical part of her felt guilty for hiding the truth — to protect herself — while her friends fought for their lives. Giles had repeatedly stressed, however: Never let anyone know you exist. You are a priceless asset to us, but knowledge that you are among us would remove much of that advantage. So long as your existence is unknown, you remain a ‘secret weapon’.

To be sure, Angel had known about Marcie, and carried that knowledge with him when he returned to the dark side. She had begun to help them actively only within the last few months, however, and even then had done most of her work with Nancy and Giles. Besides that, she was easy to forget, the Hellmouth magic that rendered her invisible also keeping her less-than-solid in most people’s memories, and so the Slay Friends had done all they could to keep from reminding the re-unsouled vampire that they had unseen aid. It was dumb for her to be ashamed — Marcie had accomplished more, even in that one fight, precisely because no one knew she was there — but Cordelia could understand it. So she just nodded and said, “Yeah, I get it, keep going,” and Marcie continued her account.

Makeshift and haphazard though they were, the spur-of-the-moment tactics had been effective. Spike had come in with eight others; in barely over a minute, four of them were dust, and the survivors were beginning to hesitate and eye the doors. Then Spike had run out of patience with giving orders, and thrown a filing cabinet at Giles, smashing him backward into his office; when Owen moved as if to help Giles, one of his foes caught his arm and hurled him back into a row of bookshelves, which collapsed around him, and the same vampire landed a spinning kick on Oz that sent him crashing through the stair railing. As Oz hit the ground floor, a snarling trio had leaped in, ready to tear him apart … but Nancy, running out from the cage, had staked two from behind before the third one had wheeled on her and snapped her neck. A second later he was shrieking in agony, Tucker had flung their entire remaining supply of holy water on him and begun beating him with an empty crossbow, screaming and swinging until the broken bow-stave had pierced his enemy’s heart.

In seconds, everything had tumbled into disaster. Marcie was the only one still on her feet (except Tucker, but he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds against an unsurprised foe), and Spike still had one cohort beside him. He could have finished them easily … but instead had thrown his head back, an expression of horror on his face, and howled, “Drusilla!” before dashing from the wrecked library, followed by the bewildered underling.

Tucker — and Owen, once they got him from under the toppled shelves — had helped Marcie carry everyone to the van. Marcie had taken the wheel to get them to the hospital; Owen, though able to move, was clearly dealing with yet another concussion, and Tucker had already begun to shift from shock to a dark rage.

They had brought Nancy, too. But, as they had known she would be, she was pronounced dead on arrival.

*               *               *

I didn’t even like her, Cordelia thought numbly. Truthfully, none of them had … except Tucker, and the girl had treated him with an offhand scorn that was no more than half-affectionate. All the same, Nancy Doyle had been a ferocious fighter, unskilled but unrelenting, and her courage — and even her caustic tongue — had won Cordelia’s respect. Totally unlike her in every other way, Nancy had been as great a misfit among the Slay Friends as Cordelia, and she was the only one of them who treated Cordelia no differently on her ascension to Slayerhood: she despised her as thoroughly as before, and never hid it.

Now Nancy was gone, and her loss was an ache Cordelia couldn’t have anticipated, hitting harder than she ever would have believed. And she couldn’t show it; that would be weakness, and she didn’t do weakness.

“Stick around,” she told Marcie. “We’ll see how the others are doing, and then —”

“Bite me, prom queen.” Marcie’s voice, characteristically low, was nonetheless perfectly clear. “I told you, you’re nobody’s boss now. You want something, ask for it … and ask nice.”

Oh. Right. Marcie had liked Nancy, at least more than she liked anyone else, courtesy of all those one-sided conversations in the clock tower before she’d been forced to abandon her isolation. “Do whatever you want,” Cordelia shot back. “But, since you probably want to stick around, what’s the point of digging in your heels? If we’re going to kill each other, there’s always time. Right now, I’d rather check on my friends.”

That said, she went seeking answers. Whether or not Marcie followed, Cordelia didn’t know and didn’t care. For the moment, she had more urgent things on her mind.

The two-phased arrival at the ER had necessitated a mini-triage; Cordelia found Oz waiting his turn, and stopped to speak with him. He was actually in worse shape than Owen — broken arm, broken ribs, dislocated shoulder — but Owen’s concussion was more potentially serious, so Oz had willingly let Owen be moved in ahead of him. “Marcie just gave me the quick report,” Cordelia told him. “How’s everybody doing now?”

Oz looked to her, eyes glazed (whether from pain or painkillers, she didn’t know), and said, “Nancy’s dead.”

“I know,” she answered impatiently. “Like I said, Marcie told me. What about Giles? And Buffy, is there any news about Buffy?”

Oz blinked. “Buffy? She … she wasn’t at the library …”

This was getting her nowhere. She found some ER staff and advised them that Oz, too, might better be checked for concussion, then went to the admissions desk and demanded information on the other new arrivals.

The woman at the desk was one of those by-the-book types. “Are you a family member?” she asked, tone forbidding.

“We’re all friends,” Cordelia told her, keeping her own voice assured and commanding. “I’m the one who brought in the second carload.” (Nope, Dragon Lady wasn’t buying it.) “And Giles is my uncle, my family got him the job at the library.”

“You’re hurt, too,” the woman said, eyeing the bloody patch at Cordelia’s shoulder where Drusilla had stabbed her. “Were you in the same …” She peered at the paperwork in front of her. “… gang fight, was it?”

“It’s not my blood,” Cordelia said. “She bled on me when I carried her to the car. Look, I’m okay, I just want to know how Giles and Buffy are.”

“ ‘Buffy Summers’,” the woman read, then glanced back up at Cordelia. “Are you part of her family?”

Do not kill the tinpot tyrant with the clipboard, Cordelia ordered herself sternly. “We’re stepsisters. She kept her father’s name, I kept mine, but we’re really close. Like I said, I’m the one who brought her in. I know about the leg wound, I know she’s lost a lot of blood, I just don’t know if she’s still alive, and I am really ready to do a total freak here —!”

Dragon Lady relented, her desire to avoid a scene overriding her natural officiousness. “They’re still working on her,” she told Cordelia. “We don’t know anything yet. But they’re very good here with blood-loss cases.”

Cordelia wasn’t reassured; Buffy had lost a lot of blood, and in the last minutes of the wild ride, Xander had been too busy to keep track of her pulse. “How about G– … Uncle Giles?”

“They think he has a broken back,” the woman reported, “along with some internal injuries. They don’t know yet if there’s been any spinal cord damage.”

Spinal —? Cordelia felt her face stiffening. “Will he be paralyzed?”

“As I said, they don’t know yet.” The woman’s expression softened at Cordelia’s obvious distress. “Your family and friends are in good hands. You got them here alive; in this town, that’s most of the battle.”

We didn’t get them all here alive, Cordelia thought bitterly. But there was nothing to be gained by saying it, so she settled herself to wait for news.

*               *               *

Oz didn’t have a concussion. Both Owen and Xander did, which left Xander still well ahead in the running tally, though Owen had passed Giles some months back. By the time Oz was treated, the police had arrived, wanting to know about the ‘gang fight’ that had killed one and hospitalized so many others … but their interest visibly drained when Willow spoke the magic words: “There was something wrong with their faces. All twisty, like movie monsters.”

Giles was in recovery, his condition stable but guarded; they’d done quick surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, but were more concerned by the severe bruising on his spinal cord. Cordelia penetrated far enough to get a quick look at him — an obscene number of things were attached to him, though she supposed most were monitors of one type or another — but he was still unconscious from post-op medication, so she had an excuse not to linger.

About Buffy, she could learn nothing, except that the girl was still alive. The stepsister fiction had been abandoned as soon as Joyce Summers arrived; Cordelia couldn’t bring herself to face the distraught woman, so she had hurriedly withdrawn. Oz had his shoulder put back into joint, his broken arm set, and the cracked ribs taped and then wrapped with an Ace bandage around his torso, but he declined further treatment. Willow helped him get to the room where Xander and Owen were being kept for observation, and Cordelia went with them for want of anything better to do.

Owen was quiet, not from his injuries but by his nature. Xander, also naturally, was anything but. He, too, had his ribs taped, and there was a cast around his wrist, not to mention stitches and steri-strips in far too many places … but his eyes were lit by manic fire, and his first words when they entered the room were, “How’s Buffy? Is there any news yet? They won’t tell me anything here —”

“They still don’t know,” Willow said. “They’ve got her stabilized, for awhile they were afraid she might lose the leg but that’s okay now …” She made a little helpless motion with her hand. “Her blood volume is back up, her vitals are steady, right now they’re waiting to see. Just like with Giles.”

Xander nodded; yes, he’d been told about Giles’ possible prognosis. “When do they think she’ll wake up?”

“Sh-she … they’re letting her rest right now, she’s —” Willow bit her lip, flushing under Xander’s gaze. She had no talent for lying … and, Cordelia knew, had never been able to hide anything from Xander. “They’re still watching her,” she finished lamely. “Maybe we’ll know something tomorrow.”

“Don’t even try, Wil.” Xander’s mouth was set in a hard line. “You know something, you’ve got it printed on your face in MT Extra Bold. What aren’t you telling me?”

“We all want to know,” Cordelia said as Willow looked around for relief or escape. “This day isn’t getting any better, so we might as well hear it now and deal with it.”

“I just … I don’t …” Willow shook her head. “I know it’s dumb, but it’s like I’m afraid that saying it out loud will make it come true.”

“Make what come true?” Xander demanded. “Come on, tell me!”

“I was with Joyce,” Willow said. “And one of the doctors came to talk with her, and I wasn’t eavesdropping except yes I was, he said that Buffy had gone into heart failure by the time we got her here, that v-fib thing where it’s just kind of quivering and not really pumping blood. They shocked her and got it going right again, but they don’t know how long she was like that and she’d lost so much blood …” Willow looked to them again, this time with fear and anguish. “He said there’s a strong possibility of brain damage. He said … she may never regain consciousness.”

Silence. Three seconds, four, five. Then Xander’s eyes turned to Cordelia, and he said flatly, “This is your fault.”

Well, duh! But that didn’t mean she liked hearing him say it. “Yeah? How?”

“I wanted to do CPR. I was begging you. But no, Queen C knows all the answers, she has to be the one running the show —”

“Oh, get real!” She was past the verbal paralysis that had gripped her at the factory, and she didn’t try to hide her scorn. “You’re talking to the one who brought her back the last time, remember? CPR wouldn’t have done any good, with that gash in her leg we’d have squeezed her out like a sponge if we’d tried. We got her here and we did it fast, and right then that was the best thing we could do for her.”

“It’s true.” Willow moved to Xander’s bedside, laid a hand on his arm. “You can remember how it was: she ran all the lights, she held Buffy’s leg to slow the bleeding, she got you to do mouth-to-mouth — not chest compressions, she was right about that, you never do those while there’s still a pulse — she even had me call ahead so they were ready for her.” She took Xander’s hand, holding it in both of her own. “If we’d stayed at the factory, Buffy would have died at the factory. You may not want to admit it, Xander, but Cordelia did all the right things.”

Xander shook his head, but his resolve was visibly dwindling. “There … there had to be a way —”

“Excuse me,” Owen said softly. “I’m not looking to change the subject, but what were you all doing at the factory?”

“Spike and Drusilla were keeping me there,” Xander explained. “They yanked me right out of school, dragged me through the tunnels … or at least a couple of their flunkies did. And Buffy came in to get me … she said you guys would be coming to help us fight our way out …” Xander’s speech slowed, and he looked to Cordelia with perplexity. “Why did you send her in ahead? It should have been you … I thought she was you, at first, she was wearing a wig and she’d done something with make-up …” He shook his head again. “I don’t understand, it hurts to think. It just doesn’t make any sense …”

“It was a double-snatch,” Cordelia said, both to Xander and to the others. “They had Willow, too, except Angel was holding her at this old mansion. The idea was we’d hit both places at once, then the rest of the crew would go in to pull them out of the factory —”

“We were?” Owen frowned (gently, everything about him was gentle) and looked around for enlightenment. “News to me. Did anybody else know that?”

“Everything got scrambled,” Cordelia admitted. “I thought it was Willow at the factory, Xander at the mansion, and I didn’t know about the bunch that was going to attack the library until it was too late, they must have hit before you could get our message —”

“Wait a minute,” Oz interrupted. “They had Willow? And you knew it? And you didn’t tell us?”

Suddenly everyone was looking at Cordelia; even Willow’s eyes widened in dawning realization. “Nobody knew?” she whispered. “They didn’t know, about Xander or … or me, or any of it? Why? Why did you keep that a secret?”

I had reasons, Cordelia wanted to say, but she could frame no explanation that didn’t sound clumsy and feeble. Buffy agreed with me, we did this together because we both thought it was the best way … No, that wouldn’t fly, either. Xander’s expression was darkening, Willow’s beginning to sag in horror; Cordelia saw no condemnation from Owen, but no support, either, he just looked confused.

Oz didn’t. Oz, who had always fielded her barbs with dry equanimity but no rancor, who had shown only interest and quirky humor at her most over-the-top behavior … Oz, the Oz-est of all people, was regarding her with slate-flat eyes, and a silent, unmoving deadliness she had never before seen in him.

They wouldn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she herself did. And, with no ready defense against the accusation growing in that half-circle of battered faces, the current and reigning Slayer responded in the only way she could think of:

She fled.

*               *               *

The next several days were hard. Hard on Cordelia — alone at the school, all her friends either in the hospital or standing vigil there, so that she was the sole target for the rumors swirling about the attack on the library — and harder on the vampires she caught on her all-night patrols, those few who weren’t deep in hiding. (There were rumors there, as well: that Spike had gone on a rampage among his followers, wreaking savage retribution on all who had allowed his beloved Drusilla to die.) She bore up; she had never been one to show weakness, and could least afford to do so now.

Xander and Owen had been pronounced fit, and released, but had stayed to keep watch with Oz and Willow: two with Giles, two with Buffy, taking turns to go home and shower and change clothes and return. Giles, too, was out of danger now, but he couldn’t move his legs. There was still hope that he might regain function, that the nerve pathways had been blocked by bruising, rather than severed, but that hope was being expressed in increasingly guarded terms. He was awake, alert, in good condition (aside from the lower paralysis) … but grieving over Nancy’s death, and even more stricken by the word about Buffy. The former Slayer was still comatose, unresponsive to stimuli, and any change for the better was now considered a very distant possibility.

Ironically, it was from Marcie that Cordelia got her hospital updates. Maybe the invisible girl liked seeing Cordelia demoted to outcast status, or maybe she just understood how that felt; she didn’t show any sympathy, however (which was good, Cordelia couldn’t have tolerated it right now), she merely called every afternoon from the hospital to pass along the news, or lack of it.

It was a holding pattern, and they both knew it. When it broke, Marcie again was the messenger. “You need to come down here,” she told Cordelia. “They want to see you.”

Cordelia’s heart lurched, and she herself couldn’t have said if it was from hope or dread. “Is it Buffy?” she asked. “Has she —?”

“No, it’s not that,” Marcie said. “No change there. We’re just ready to hash some things out … and Giles isn’t getting around so well right now, thanks to you, so we’re all meeting in his room.” She paused, and then added evenly, “You might want to have some explanations ready.”

Right, Cordelia thought. ’Cause it’s not like I’ll have any problems with that.
 

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