“GOD! PLEASE!”

Buffy’s arms ached as she held Jack onto the bed. For one hour they’d been holding him down like this, unable to leave his side. For an hour Jack had been almost continuingly screaming, begging his invisible tormenters to stop their torture.

Torture… It was a word Buffy had hesitated in using before, but after so long there were no other words to describe the cuts and burns that were repeatedly appearing and disappearing.

He was being tortured.

“Please, Giles,” she whispered to herself. “Hurry.”

This was killing them… killing Jack. At times, it seemed like he was getting better. There were moments where he stopped struggling, a few times he seemed to fall asleep, but it never lasted long enough. Every time they thought the worst was over, he’d start screaming worse than ever. It was taking four of them to keep from hurting himself; Kit and Carlos were holding the left leg, Xander the right, and Buffy his shoulders.

Twice already he had thrown himself off the bed, the second time cutting his head on the side of the bedside table. Not that he’d noticed. Jack didn’t notice anything except the pain he was in.

He couldn’t take this for much longer.

SHE couldn’t take this for much longer. None of them could. The last time Buffy had checked, Kit had been steadily crying, Carlos had been trying to look anywhere but at Jack, Xander’s pale and haunted expression had matched her own, and Dawn…

Well, at first glance it seemed like Dawn was holding up better than all of them. It was a façade, of course. Inside, Buffy could see the toll this was taking on her. Yet, her younger sister refused to lose it. Every time Jack screamed Dawn was there, holding his hand, gently brushing his hair away from his face and promising him it would be okay.

It brought tears to her eyes watching them.

Buffy had no idea how it would be okay. Giles and Willow were in England and, even though Xander had said Giles recognized the symptoms, they still had to get here to help. Or they had to call them and tell them how to put together an antidote. Which was going to be a little difficult, considering they couldn’t leave Jack alone long enough to even go to the bathroom.

She had considered, momentarily, tying Jack up but she decided against it. If he woke up tied to the bed… God knows how he’d react. It was a last resort she’d keep in mind for when Giles called back.

“I think he’s calming down again,” Dawn said shakily, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sheet.

“Thank God,” Kit exclaimed.

Buffy relaxed her grip on Jack slightly. “Is everyone okay?”

Stupid question.

“We’re fine, Buff,” Xander replied.

Good. That was good.

“How much longer do you think this will keep going?” Carlos wanted to know, speaking for the first time since it started.

That wasn’t the question he was asking and Buffy was pretty sure everyone in the room knew it. Carlos was asking how long could Jack keep going. “I don’t know,” she answered, hating how utterly useless she felt.

Being a Slayer sucked sometimes.

“Well, however long this can keep going, Jack can last longer.”

Buffy’s eyes closed momentarily in pain. Dawn’s voice shook as she spoke, but her tone silently dared anyone to argue with her.

“Damn right, he will,” Xander agreed. “Jack’s a tough kid.”

“Hopefully he won’t have to be for too much longer.”

Buffy almost wept with relief when she heard the voice. For a second, she thought she imagined it, but Dawn’s gasp told her otherwise.

He was here.

Finally.

“Giles!”

“You know, I can’t say this enough… Teleportation is only way to travel!” Xander exclaimed happily, letting go of Jack’s leg long enough to slap Carlos on the back.

The teenager grinned at him.

Giles was nothing if not timely. “Willow with you?” Xander wanted to know. If the two of them were here, then things were looking hopeful. Not that things wouldn’t be if it was just Giles, but after spending an hour hearing Jack being tortured… Having a powerful witch around would give him a little bit of reassurance.

Maybe she could go into his mind like she did with Buffy that –

“No, she’s still in England,” he said, his expression grim.

Xander’s hope faded right along with Carlos’ grin. The look on Giles face wasn’t exactly filling him with confidence.

“Did you find an antidote?” Dawn asked in a way that made Xander’s heart ache.

“Not yet, but I have something that will buy us a little time,” he told them, pulling a syringe from his pocket.

Buy them a little time? Not a cure?

Before Xander was able ask any questions, Jack screamed.

“What did you give him?” Buffy wanted to know, accepting the cup of tea gratefully.

She was still trying to get used to it, the silence. Jack had been quiet for a total of thirty-nine minutes. God, whoever said silence was golden wasn’t kidding. Not hearing Jack scream… It was the best sound in the world.

Giles placed a cup in front of Xander, then his own down on the coffee table, before taking a seat on the lounge across from her and Xander. “The mystical equivalent of a sedative,” he replied, after taking a sip. “It’s design to incapacitate a person’s consciousness.”

“Excuse me?” She didn’t like the sound of that.

“It’s only temporary,” he assured her. “But what the potion essentially does is shut a person’s mind down completely.”

She still didn’t like the sound of it, but Jack wasn’t screaming so… “How long will it last?”

He shrugged. “It differs for every person, but I estimate the dosage should last for about six hours. At the very most.”

At the very most? “And the very least?” She so didn’t like the expression on his face.

“An hour.”

An hour? That was all they might have? All Jack might have? “Will that be long enough?”

“I’m hoping so,” Giles replied. “Willow is working with the coven to find a cure as we speak. She’ll teleport here as soon as she can.”

While his words were optimistic, his tone was anything but. “You know what the poison is.”

Giles didn’t even try to deny it. “Yes.”

“And?” Xander prompted.

“And it’s bad,” Buffy said. “Isn’t it?” Why else would Giles be avoiding their eyes?

Xander put down his cup. “Jack’s going to live through this, right?”

Buffy’s heart leapt up into her throat when Giles didn’t reply. “Giles?”

“Willow and the coven are doing everything they can to ensure that he does.”

That response wasn’t the response she wanted. Thank God Kit, Carlos, and Dawn were still upstairs with Jack. This was something they didn’t need to hear. “Tell me everything you know.” It wasn’t a request.

Giles removed his glasses and began cleaning them.

Buffy crossed her arms over her chest. “Giles, tell me everything you know.”

With a sigh, he began, “In the eighteen hundreds, a Slayer and her watcher –”

“I meant tell me everything you know about the poison. Not everything you know.”

Giles fixed her with a unimpressed look. “This relates to the poison.”

Oh. She knew that.

“As I was saying, in the eighteen hundreds, a Slayer and her watcher came up against a particularly powerful being. To this day, we’re not entirely sure what it was,” he told them, his expression indecipherable. “According to the Watchers Council’s records, the being had been planning for centuries to bring forth the hell on Earth. It was believed he wanted to turn it into a hell which he could rule on his own.”

Xander snorted. “Nice.”

“Obviously when the time came the Slayer in question was able to prevent it from happening,” Giles continued. “But, unfortunately, during her confrontation with the being, she wasn’t able to kill him. All she had been able to do was banish him.”

“Okay, so where does the poison comes in?”

“When the being returned to his own dimension he had been less than happy, obviously. So it wasn’t really surprising that a year later he sent High Priests into our dimension to seek revenge against the Slayer who defeated him. While they didn’t have the power to take over Earth, they did have the power to punish those who defeated their master.”

“It’s always an ego thing,” Xander remarked.

“Well, yes, they don’t take failure very lightly.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “So the priests used the poison on her.”

“No,” Giles told her. “They went after those she loved.”

Buffy felt the blood drain from her face. “Her watcher…Her family.”

“Precisely. They abducted her watcher and immediate family, lured her to them… and then forced her to watch them die.” A far away look crossed his face. “One of the High Priests, under his master’s instruction, took great pleasure in telling her everything that was happening to them. Which is why we know so much about the poison. The being didn’t just want them to die; he wanted them to suffer before they died.”

A chill went over her.

“Don’t they all?” Xander commented, his expression grim.

Giles shook his head. “What this being did was something akin to what Angelus would have done in his day. The being’s hatred for the Slayer and Watcher was so strong that he took time to plan his revenge. He spent the year searching for the perfect weapon to use: the poison. He tested it in his hell dimension… It became his most feared torture technique.”

Oh God!

“After he found the poison,” Giles went on. “He and the High Priests went about making sure that the poison could work just as well here as it did in his hell dimension. It’s not always effective.”

“It’s not?” Buffy asked, her hopes rising.

“The poison isn’t your run-of-the-mill poison. It has two main functions, but primarily it is used in this way: the poison targets the mind, a person’s memories, and uses them to torture the victim.”

Xander leaned forward, confused. “I don’t get it.”

“Essentially, when the poison is used like this its main purpose is to inflict pain and torture,” Giles explained. “Once in bloodstream of a human it acts as an entity and accesses all the memories of its victim. It sifts through them and selects the most physically and mentally horrific memory and forces the victim to relive it. From what the being’s priest told the Slayer, the poison works in such a way that the victim believes that he or she is actually experiencing one of the worst moments of his life over and over and over again.”

Buffy frowned. “What if you didn’t have the memories needed to make the poison work? Does it make them up?” That would explain what was happening to Jack.

“No, which is one of the reasons why the poison isn’t frequently used. Your target has to be precise. It has to be someone who has endured a situation the poison can manipulate.”

Wait! That would mean…

“If it helps you understand it better… The High Priests, prior to administering the poison, orchestrated the torture of the Slayer’s Watcher and her family to guarantee its success,” Giles told them. “Apparently it works best with is a combination of physical and emotional torture. The blue substance you spoke of reacts with the skin in such a way that it allows the physical wounds to manifest. It’s a combination of all this that makes the victim believe that this is real.”

Xander paled.

Her heart pounded. “Giles, are you sure you’ve got the right poison?”

“Absolutely.”

She didn’t want that answer. “So… So you’re saying that it only really works on people who have suffered in some way?” She knew he had just said that, but she had to be sure.

His face answered the question for her. “It would work on everyone it touched,” he clarified. “But the effectiveness varies. On a small child it would be useless, on a Slayer, it would not.”

“Giles, think… please. Is there any other poisons like this one?” Desperation fueled the question. Her mind couldn’t accept that what Giles was saying was true. Because if it did, that meant the agony Jack had been going through upstairs had… had actually happened.

The word that Buffy had been reluctant to use upstairs was coming back to haunt her.

“Maybe… Maybe the Slayer got it wrong,” Xander asked, his tone matching hers.

He didn’t want to believe it either.

“There is no mistake,” Giles told them gently. “The priest told the Slayer everything he knew about the poison to torment her. She watched her watcher and four members of her family die.”

No. She couldn’t accept this.

“What happened to the Slayer and Watcher is legend at the Council. The Council has been studying the poison for centuries and we’ve yet to come up with an antidote.”

She didn’t want to know that. She didn’t want to know any of them. Buffy hated being a Slayer sometimes. “You heard Jack screaming, Giles,” her voice was eerily calm as she spoke. “You saw the wounds on him. Are you telling me that… that it really happened? That he was t-tortured?”

Her watcher’s eyes were sympathetic. “I’m afraid so.”

Xander covered his face with his hands.

Carlos froze at the top of the stairs, the need to get something to drink suddenly forgotten. His first instinct was to go get Dawn, so she could hear this instead of him, but he knew she wouldn’t leave Jack’s side.

Man, he so didn’t want to hear this. God, he didn’t even want to know it.

Carlos cursed Kit for being thirsty.

“Jack was tortured,” Buffy repeated more to herself for anyone else’s benefit. Anger began to slowly replace the shock.

Who would torture a sixteen year old boy? The thought filed her with cold rage. What… What if he had been tortured at a younger age?

Someone was going to die for this.

“We have to find a cure,” she stated firmly. “How long do you think it’ll be before Will comes up with something?”

“I have no idea,” Giles replied, a thoughtful expression crossing his face. “But… there is some hope.”

Hope? That was a word Buffy so very much wanted to hear.

“Jack’s response to the poison is different from the cases in the Council records.”

“How so?”

“One of the reasons the poison works so well with physical torture is that it guarantees the death of the victim. The wounds continue to grow until they die from either blood loss or infection…”

Hang on… “Jack’s wounds aren’t growing. Well, they do grow, but they heal.”

“I don’t know why it’s happening. It could be a variation to the poison, I’m not sure. It does, however, give us time we wouldn’t otherwise have. Jack’s wounds won’t kill him.”

“The wounds won’t kill him, but they’ll drive him insane,” Buffy countered. “We need to find a cure. Now.”

Her watcher removed his glasses. “I’m hopeful Willow and the coven will find a cure. We just need to give them time.”

“Every second Jack is awake is a second he is tortured. Time is something we don’t have anymore.” Jack surviving this wasn’t enough. Buffy wanted the pain to stop. Now. “Okay, so if Willow and the coven can’t find a cure, then maybe I can.” She stood up. “I say I go find the Creeps and beat the cure out of them.” Then, once Jack was cured, she was going to find out what happened to him.

God, if Dawn knew Jack had been tortured… She was going to kill her.

“And what are you going to do when they freeze you again?” Xander wanted to know.

Buffy glared at him. “Now that I know what they can do, they won’t get close enough to me to get the chance.” They weren’t fast, at least not Slayer fast. They wouldn’t catch her.

Giles shook his head. “I don’t think that’s such a wise idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t know who is behind this attack,” Giles pointed out. “And there is another thing I haven’t –”

“We don’t know why, either,” Xander added, cutting Giles off. “Those Creeps were after Dawn, Buffy. Jack was injured by accident.”

“I’m beginning to think maybe Jack was the target.” As she said the words, everything began to fall into place. “Jack’s torture… This poison… It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Giles cleared his throat. “Actually, Buffy, there is something else I need to – ”

She ignored him. “Xander, Dawn told me that Jack’s in some sort of trouble. She didn’t know what kind of trouble it was, but she said that he was sent here for me to protect.”

Xander sat up straight. “He was? Are you sure?”

She nodded. “She implied that what he was in danger from wasn’t supernatural, but… Maybe he was too scared to tell her the truth. Or maybe he thought she wouldn’t believe him. Dawn said he didn’t know I was the Slayer, so maybe… Maybe this isn’t about Dawn.”

Xander shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would the Creeps follow us to the restaurant if they were after Jack?”

“I’m the Slayer, they probably didn’t want me to – ”

“This isn’t about Jack.”

She and Xander both looked to Giles.

“If Dawn’s friend is in trouble, it may simply be a coincidence,” Giles said. “And, considering everything Xander told me, I think that’s all it is. A coincidence.”

“You don’t think this is about Jack?” He sounded too certain for Buffy to argue.

He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. This is one thing, two things actually, I haven’t told you.”

Buffy raised her eyebrows. “What things?” The threat in her voice wasn’t accidental.

Giles sighed. “The being who started all of this, obviously he was from a demon dimension.”

“Yeah.”

“It may be a coincidence… But what I neglected to tell you is that this being was the joint ruler of that dimension.”

Okay.

“With two other beings.”

All the blood drained from Buffy’s face. “Dawn said he needed me the way she did…” Suddenly those words had new meaning. “Giles…” Her heart was pounding rapidly. “This ‘being’, he didn’t happen to rule a dimension with, like, say, a goddess named Glorificus?”

“It’s entirely possible.”

Her heart stopped.

“Entirely possible?” Xander exclaimed. “And you’re just telling us this NOW!”

“I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. It could be a coincidence. There are millions of demon and hell dimensions but… it’s possible.” He sighed. “This isn’t about Jack.”

“What is it about?” She didn’t want to know.

“On the way to the coven, Willow and I came up with two theories. The first, and the least likely, is that the hell gods from Glory’s dimension heard that you were successful in defeating her and have come back to seek vengeance.”

“But why would they do that? They’re the ones who banished her in the first place?” Xander demanded, pale.

“I agree, which is why both Willow and I think that’s the more unlikely of the two theories. For one, the being would have to be from that dimension and secondly… It would have to care about Glory’s fate. More than likely, they would be glad Glory is out of their hair.”

Good. “What’s your second theory?”

He hesitated. “The priest described every aspect of the poison to the Slayer. It can be used in more than one way,” he explained. “I think in this instance, the poison wasn’t supposed to be used in the way I previously described.”

Buffy slowly sat back down. “How else is it used?”

Giles looked away.

“Giles?” He looked worse now than he did before. “You’re scaring me. How else is it used?” Surely it couldn’t be worse than what he’d already told them.

“The priest told the Slayer that if the High Priests administer the poison using a certain spell… It can revert a supernatural entity, or energy, back into its natural form.”

Everything seemed to stop.

“W-what?”

“When Xander was talking to me on the phone, he asked Carlos if their attacker had done anything strange when they were trying to kill Dawn. Carlos said they were chanting something in a language he couldn’t identify…”

No!

“I believe they were trying to use it to revert Dawn back to her natural form.”

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