“Wait just one second, Spike,” Giles commanded, regaining his senses. He pulled his glasses off his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re in the middle of yet another impending apocalyptic disaster. Do you think you could quite possibly be of some help to us by *not* obliterating any of the other help we can get?” he sighed impatiently.

Spike vamped out at Xander, who was looking sheepish, but not worried. “The bloody bastard stole what’s mine!”

“Spike, could you clue us in?” Buffy asked, rolling her eyes. “We know that Xander doesn’t want your Vamps R Us catalogue subscription or your blood bank special-offers card. So what could he have stolen from you?”

“Drusilla,” Spike sneered, baring his fangs at Xander. Although Spike couldn’t follow through on his threat, it still hung in the air, and they all knew that if Spike were to ever get the chip from his head, Xander was a dead man walking.

“Drusilla?” Buffy and Willow parroted, their faces turning white. Giles merely raised his eyebrows. He knew that if he just kept quiet he’d get the full story eventually, as opposed to resorting to the histrionic tactics employed by his Slayer.

“Drusilla,” Spike repeated, continuing to glare at Xander. “Peaches here knew Dru was back in town, how I don’t know, and corrupted her mind!”

“She doesn’t have a mind to corrupt,” Buffy pointed out dryly, and Spike whirled on her, raising his arm, intending to strike. Buffy watched in amusement when his face crumpled like he’d just gotten an ice-cream headache, and he wilted.

“Spike, I can explain,” Xander piped up, opening his mouth for the first time since the enraged vampire had whirled in like a hurricane.

Willow spoke up before Spike could open his mouth. “*How* can you explain, Xander?” she asked quietly. Her eyes filled with tears as she shakily stood up. “Now you’re messing around with a loony-tunes vampire. It was bad enough that you had to screw a messed-up Slayer, but a vampire? At least now I know why you never wanted me,” she added bitterly. “I’m not a brunette. I mean, look at your history. Cordelia, Faith, now Drusilla. Hell, even Buffy would be a brunette if she could keep her hands off the blonde dye!” Willow turned and ran out of Giles’ house, but not before Xander and everyone else saw the tears streaming down her face.

“You really screwed up, Xander,” Buffy snapped, standing up and preparing to chase her friend down. “Why can’t you just stop breaking her heart while there’s still pieces of it left to break?” She too turned and left Giles’.

Spike, who had recovered from the blinding pain of his attempted violence, glared at Xander. “You better watch your bloody back,” he threatened. “I’m going to find someone who can remove my chip. And when it happens, your blood will run like a river in the street.” Xander paled as Spike became the third person to stalk away from the house in less than five minutes.

“Uhh, Giles, I think I’m getting a headache,” Xander mumbled as he got up and wandered dazedly through the door.

Giles pinched the bridge of his nose again, sighing as he closed his eyes. “Right, right. What’s an apocalypse without some melodrama thrown in?”

Xander walked around in confusion. Who knew that his feelings for Drusilla would ever cause so much trouble? *You did, dip-shit,* his brain reminded him. Xander sighed. Yeah, he did. He knew. How could he not? He’d given Buffy so much crap for being in love with Angel. He’d done nothing to disguise his disgust and hatred for all vampires, souled, de-fanged, or not. And now, he’d gone and fallen in love with one.

He closed his eyes and leaned against a tree. Not the brightest thing he could do, walking alone in the park at midnight, but at this point he didn’t much care if a vampire *did* find him. What it would do, would be nothing compared to what Spike, Willow, and probably Buffy, would do to him eventually.

“Kitten, what are you doing out all alone?” a dreamy voice whispered in his ear.

Xander smiled and turned around, looking into Drusilla’s beautiful, if somewhat vacant, eyes. “Dru.”

“Precious.” Drusilla smiled and opened her arms to him, and he came to her, as if in a trance. “Mummy worried about her Kitten. You shouldn’t be out alone at night, Precious. It’s not safe. Mummy’s friends would hurt you.”

“Then why are they your friends?” Xander asked. He wrapped his arms around Drusilla, cradling her seemingly fragile body to him. She nestled her head against his chest, listening to the sound of his heart, the rush of his blood in his veins.

“Because they are Mummy’s kind,” Drusilla replied softly. She pulled back, looking up into Xander’s eyes. “Mummy can’t help what she is, Precious. She didn’t have a choice. Just as she can’t help how she loves her new Kitten, even though her Kitten hates what she is.”

Xander sighed and closed his eyes. He was so damn confused. He sometimes felt like Dru had cast a spell over him, it was the only way he could explain his chaotic thoughts and feelings about her. He knew it was wrong, knew he should hate her because she was a vampire, but the part of him that craved being the protector cried out for him to save her from herself, and those who wanted to kill her. Like Buffy.

“Dru, I don’t hate you,” he whispered, holding her close. “But they don’t understand. They’re going to make it difficult for us to be together.”

Dru studied him, displaying some real clarity for the first time in a long time. “They will. We have to give them time. But they will come to realize that you and I are fated. Just as my return, and our union, will bring others to realization about what they need, who they want.”

Xander looked at her. “You have another premonition?” he asked softly.

Dru nodded. “I came back here for a reason. You are part of it. What my return brings is the other.”

“Damn it, I can’t believe he did this to me!” Willow wailed, stomping furiously along the sidewalk, making Buffy run to catch up with her. “I can’t believe he went off and forgot about me *again*!”

Buffy finally caught up with Willow, putting an arm around her shoulder and trying to get her to slow down. “Well, Wills, to be fair, *you’re* the one who blew him off after you two made with the smoochies.”

Willow stopped and glared at her friend. “Comfort, Buff. That’s what you’re supposed to be giving me now.”

Buffy grinned and mock-saluted. “Yes, Wills. Comfort. He’s a bad, bad, evil person for forgetting you and making with the smoochies with a crazy evil vampire chick.”

Willow nodded. “Evil. Horrible. Bad.”

“All great adjectives,” Buffy inserted. She smiled sympathetically. “But Wills…”

Willow sighed. “*I* rejected *him*.”

Buffy nodded. “Yeah. Can you fault him for trying to move on with his life?”

“But he was supposed to wait for me,” Willow whispered, her lower lip trembling as the tears threatened to fall. “We were supposed to be together. After Oz left, I really thought…” She trailed off as she realized that she was sounding selfish. “I mean, I know that I shouldn’t have treated Xander so horribly after the fluke. But darn it, Buffy, what gave him the right to come in and mess up my life, and ruin my relationship with Oz? Nothing. He couldn’t fault me for trying to hang on to that.”

“But did you really expect Xander to wait for you to get bored with Oz and decide that he was good enough for you?” Buffy asked pragmatically.

“He was supposed to realize that he loved me, and know that he deserved to wait for me to break up with Oz, because he had made me wait so many years,” Willow admitted sheepishly.

Buffy shook her head, understanding Willow’s reasoning, but not liking it. “It wasn’t fair to play the head games with him, Will. You should have told him outright instead of expecting him to play a game he didn’t know the rules to.”

“I just thought he would wait,” Willow reiterated with a sigh.

Buffy hugged Willow, not knowing what else to say, when a glimmer of white caught her attention. Using her Slayer senses she discerned two dark heads beside a tree in the park. “Looks like you expected too much, Will. And now it looks like you’re going to lose out because of it.”